This chapter focuses on the companion volumes Mystic Trees and Poems of Adoration to explore the ways Michael Field’s poetry changed following Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s 1907 conversion to Roman Catholicism. This chapter reviews prior scholarship on Field’s devotional poetry, which has often emphasised the continuity between Field’s pre- and post- conversion work. The chapter builds on this scholarship by arguing that Field’s devotional poetry, informed by their newfound faith, explores new ways of thinking about time, suffering, and the purpose of art. Furthermore, this chapter explores the significance of studying Victorian devotional and religious verse, and the ways women and queer people were able to use the genre to engage with and build upon theological concepts, outside the bounds of ecclesiastical authority.

Chapter 5 examines how George Herbert confronts the profound limits on human capacities to create worldly security. The security dilemmas Hebert addresses derive from a tension built into the basic organizing metaphor of his theological vision, an understanding of God as a king. On the one hand, Herbert understands faithful devotion to require a perpetual payment of praise. Herbert offers his poems as a kind of fiscal payment, a mode of praise and devotion that he wishes, in turn, to correspond with divine protective care. On the other hand, Herbert’s fiscal theology must accommodate a God whose care frequently manifests as affliction and who understands worldly security as antithetical to faith. This chapter focuses on how Herbert confronts the disconnect between these distinct definitions of security and strives to reconcile God’s sovereign concern for his subjects’ eternal salvation and the need for protection and care in this world.

Seventeenth-century English poetry is renowned for its religious lyric, especially that of Herbert, Donne, Crashaw, Vaughan and Traherne. In Chapters 2 and 3 we saw how the interest in metrical and formal variety, which is such a marked feature of Herbert’s 'Temple' (1633), can be traced back to the Latin poetic experiments and innovations of the latter sixteenth century, and specifically to the technical and tonal variety of the most influential of the psalm paraphrase collections. This chapter deals in large part with another of the influences upon Herbert’s distinctive style – namely the largely (though not exclusively) Jesuit poetics of Latin devotional verse, which combined with the tradition of formal variety, scriptural paraphrase and religious epigram to revolutionary effect in seventeenth-century England. It traces the development of religious verse in England from the mid-sixteenth through to the early eighteenth century, and describes how the new kind of devotional lyric was read and written alongside older types of religious verse, especially scriptural and devotional epigram and paraphrase.