فهیمه ناصری

George Herbert is a 17th English Metaphysical poet whose works are primarily religious. While the majority of the concepts represented in his poetry are the reflections of his Christian faith, there are poems in which one finds familiar voices and ideas expressed in Islamic mysticism. One of the poems is "The Pilgrimage" in which the nature of experience involved in the speaker's pilgrimage is similar to the stages that a wayfarer goes through in his journey towards union with the Divine. In this paper, it is attempted to look into these similarities and discuss the underlying reasons for that. In order to do that, an introduction about Christian and Islamic mysticism would be followed by a close reading of the poem and comparing it to certain poems by Hafiz and Rumi. It will be seen that the similarities involved in the experience presented by these totally different poets indicate that love for the Divine is an archetype in man's collective unconscious.