A Note on Herbert's "Coloss. 3.3"

Abstract

It seems obligatory to see George Herbert's famous "Coloss. 3.3" as a deliberate experiment, one that may or may not fully succeed: the ten-line poem contains an italicized, capitalized statement running obliquely or diagonally through the text. The poem is made up of three statements; the italicized line adds a fourth statement. I suspect that the typical reader reads the italicized statement both before and after he