"Redemption" begins by setting up what sounds like an ordinary 17th-century anecdote. The speaker, a tenant farmer, hasn't been doing so well: the land he's been trying to work isn't "thriving." He decides that he's going to go to the "rich lord" he rents from and ask him to "cancel" his old contract in exchange for "a new small-rented lease" instead—that is, a fresh, humble, affordable plot of land.
So far, so businesslike. But notice how the language here characterizes the speaker and his situation. He doesn't just speak of renting from a landlord, but from a "rich lord," a notably wealthy and powerful guy. Such a person, the poem suggests, isn't someone you can just casually ask a favor from: the speaker has to "resolv[e] to be bold," working up his courage before he can go make his request.
In other words, there's already a question of power here. The tenant relies on the landlord and his goodwill for his livelihood; the landlord makes the decisions. And the tenant seems rather nervous about what's going to happen when he makes his "suit" (that is, his formal request).
Even in this prosaic beginning, readers might smell a metaphor. There's a big hint that this poem is about more than a literal tenant-landlord situation in the poem's punning title, "Redemption":
- On one level, the redemption in question is just the business transaction these lines describe: the speaker wants to "redeem" his old land for new, the way one might speak of redeeming a coupon.
- Readers might, however, be more familiar with the word from its Christian context. "Redemption," in Christianity, means being forgiven for one's sins—and, more specifically, being forgiven for one's sins through Christ's death on the cross.
- Christ's sacrifice, the Christian story goes, pays for all humanity's sins, giving everyone the opportunity for a fresh start—a "new lease" on life, one might say.
- In this poem's conceit, then, God is the landlord, and the tenant a kind of Christian everyman, an ordinary guy seeking divine forgiveness.
This poem will thus tell the story of Christian redemption through a story of earthly redemption. Of course, the Christian story is an earthly one, too. Christ's death and resurrection, this poem will argue, didn't just take place on earth: they're also woven right into the fabric of everyone's daily life.
In many ways, this is a characteristic poem for George Herbert, a passionate and brilliant clergyman whose poetry explored his faith. In other ways, it's a little surprising. Many of the poems in Herbert's lone posthumous book, The Temple, experiment with form in innovative ways—but this poem, at first glance, looks like a plain old sonnet:
- It's written in 14 lines of iambic pentameter—that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, like this: "Not thri- | ving, I | resol- | vèd to | be bold." (Note that the accent over the "e" in "resolvèd" means that the word should be pronounced with three syllables: re-SOL-ved.)
- And it uses a set rhyme scheme that moves from three rhyming four-line quatrains (in the first stanza, for instance, lord / bold / afford / old) into one emphatic closing couplet.
But Herbert doesn't use this conventional form so conventionally! Toward the end, the speaker will break from the expected alternating rhyme scheme to do something surprising; keep an eye out for the moment when the rhymes change.