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Chapter 1

“The Bodie and the Letters Both”: Textual Immanence in The Temple

In order to understand the ways in which George Herbert’s elaborate experiments in poetic form are informed by the incarnational investments of sacramental worship, we must first consider the theological landscape in which Herbert produced The Temple. Though Herbert’s era had not fully resolved the controversies of the preceding century, Herbert himself remains irenically reticent on the mechanics of eucharistic presence. Indeed, of the poets whose work is examined in the present study, Herbert is perhaps the least openly engaged in doctrinal and spiritual controversies. Owing to this doctrinal restraint, the good rector of Bemerton has come to be seen as an exemplar of the early seventeenth-century via media, a moderated position that conflated English national identity with the English church’s ecclesiastical distinction both from Rome and from the fraught doctrinal wranglings of continental Protestantism. Accordingly, in the decades concluding the twentieth century, as historical and literary studies have attempted to define the theology of the Stuart church, Herbert studies have registered these skirmishes as conflict over Herbert’s confessional allegiance.¹ The English church’s position on the precise mode of Christ’s presence in the sacramental elements had evaded consistent definition since Thomas Cranmer moved to revise the Book of Common Prayer during the short reign of Edward VI. To appreciate the degree to which such efforts to define the mysterious operation of the Eucharist had caused divisions among English divines, we need only review Richard Hooker’s handling of the question: “Let it therefore be sufficient for me presenting my selfe at the Lords Table to know what there I receiue from him, without searching or inquiring of the maner how Christ performeth his promise; let disputes and questions[,] enemies to pietie, abatements of true deuotion, and hitherto in this cause but ouer patiently heard let them take their rest; let curious and sharpe witted men beate their heades about what questions themselues will … what these elements are in themselues it skilleth not, it is enough that to me which take them they are the body & bloud of Christ.”² Though Hooker’s call for a shift from disputation over “the maner how” to affirmation that the sacrament does in truth perform Christ’s promise to offer his body and blood seems to provide a reasoned response to controversy, it is nevertheless a bit disingenuous because the question of whether the elements “are the body & bloud of Christ” is deeply entwined with the manner in which that mystery occurs. And while Herbert seems never to have explicitly entered into the theological debates surrounding “the maner how” that flourished as suspicions of crypto-popery ran rampant during the 1620s and beyond, he does not scruple to wrestle with “the maner how” in a number of poems that consider the Eucharist directly. On the contrary, Herbert’s concern with the relationship between the material species of bread and wine and the spiritual operation of Holy Communion is evident throughout The Temple as well as in his other writings, both poetry and prose. For Herbert, the sacrament asserts itself in both spiritual and material registers, and their very inextricability both repeats the incarnational model of the Word made flesh and influences the representational strategies of Herbert’s poetic practice.

Herbert’s literary canon would seem to offer a rich field for investigating the ways in which the Eucharist informed and inspired seventeenth-century devotional poetry. The sacrament provides the imaginative center for his lyric collection, governing its organization as well as its subject matter. Whether we consider his stable of images, with its reliance on familiar sacramental topoi like grapes, winepresses, vines, veins, and so forth, or regard The Temple’s overarching narrative of sacramental preparation culminating in the feast of “Love (III),” or examine the poems that explicitly dramatize participation in Communion, C. A. Patrides’s conclusion that “The Eucharist is the marrow of Herbert’s sensibility” feels entirely justified.³ Perhaps the most obvious place to begin a study of Herbert’s engagement with eucharistic theology is the pair of poems each given the title “The H. Communion,” in which Herbert addresses directly the ritual and its operation. In the version of “The H. Communion” that Herbert did not include in The Temple, the poet begins with a survey of theological claims about the mode of christic presence in the sacramental elements:

O gratious Lord how shall I know

Whether in these gifts thou bee so

As thou art evry-where;

Or rather so, as thou alone

Tak’st all y^e Lodging, leaving none

ffor thy poore creature there.⁴

In its first stanza, the poem presents two competing versions of eucharistic operation: Lutheran ubiquitarianism, which holds that Christ is substantially present in all things and by extension also in the bread and wine, and Roman transubstantiation, in which Christ’s substance replaces that of the bread. But after considering these options, the poem adopts a tone of gentle mockery: “ffirst I am sure, whether bread stay / Or whether Bread doe fly away / Concerneth bread not mee” (7–9). Here, Herbert waves off the controversial question of the mode of Christ’s presence, and the poem would seem to continue as if it pursued a poetic version of Hooker’s counsel, letting disputations rest in the face of mystery: “But y^t both thou and all thy traine / Bee there, to thy truth, & my gaine / Concerneth mee & Thee” (10–12). The only matter worth addressing, suggests Herbert as if channeling Hooker, is not “the maner how” but that “Christ performeth his promise.”

But Herbert’s confidence about that performance seems to waver in the middle stanzas of the poem:

That fflesh is there, mine eyes deny:

And what shold flesh but flesh discry,

The noblest sence of five.

If glorious bodies pass the sight

Shall they be food & strength, & might

Euen there, where they deceiue? (31–36)

Herbert here identifies explicitly the fundamental interpretive problem of a ritual that proposes to make the divine present to man by means of a set of physical signs: “mine eyes deny.” Herbert’s inability to descry Christ’s presence in the species of Communion leads him to question both the efficacy of the sacramental elements and the credibility of Christ, whose most glorious body remains most imperceptible in the sacrament that represents it. Michael C. Schoenfeldt reads this uncomfortable questioning as Herbert’s discovery of “the wall that divides matter and spirit,” and sees Herbert pursuing the consequences of that discovery into the assertions of his next stanza:⁵

Into my soule this cannot pass;

fflesh (though exalted) keeps his grass

And cannot turn to soule.

Bodyes & Minds are different Spheres,

Nor can they change their bounds & meres,

But keep a constant Pole. (37–42)

Despite the poem’s professions of its own uninterest in “the maner how” Christ might be present in the sacramental elements, it spends twelve lines worrying about precisely that question: how can Christ be present to the soul in the Lord’s Supper, especially in light of the fact that he is completely absent to the senses? Herbert’s insistence that “Bodyes and Minds are different Spheres” may address the problem of Christ’s sensory imperceptibility, but it also forecloses the possibility that God might be transmitted to the incorporeal soul by means of this corporeal ritual.

Herbert returns to the relationship between these “different Spheres” in his later poem also called “The H. Communion,” which was included in The Temple. This poem opens by rejecting the idea that God employs material finery to communicate himself to man. “Not in rich furniture, or fine aray, / Nor in a wedge of gold” (1–2), Herbert insists, and although the imagery he refuses seems to invoke the ceremonial richness of the Mass, the poem’s objection to such stuff has less to do with its confessional extravagance than with the fact that its materiality remains unassimilable: “For so thou should’st without me still have been” (5). The phrase “without me,” in its conflation of physical separation and lack of possession, is attuned to the difficulty of apprehending God (in both physical and non-physical senses of that verb) through a material medium. Though Schoenfeldt concludes that “The H. Communion” resolves this difficulty by defining divine presence not as if it might be located in any external trappings but as an internal, spiritualized process, the poem nevertheless exhibits a continued preoccupation with the relationship between physical signs and their immaterial referents:

But by the way of nourishment and strength

Thou creep’st into my breast;

Making thy way my rest,

And thy small quantities my length;

Which spread their forces into every part,

Meeting sinnes force and art.

Yet can these not get over to my soul,

Leaping the wall that parts

Our souls and fleshly hearts;

But as th’ outworks, they may control

My rebel-flesh, and carrying thy name,

Affright both sinne and shame. (7–18)

After the poem’s opening repudiation of luxurious trappings as a conduit for Christ, the second stanza prefers a view of sacramental contact in which the divine presence creeps in by “nourishment and strength,” which Schoenfeldt glosses as “the medium of food.”⁶ Herbert’s echo of Cranmer’s sacramental formulation rings loudly enough here: Holy Communion, explains Cranmer, is a “visyble sacrament of spirituall nourishment in bread and wyne.” Still, as Cranmer, and later Hooker, must acknowledge, a conception that the spirit is nourished by means of the sacramental elements makes this process of spiritual sustenance discomfitingly inextricable from the processes of the body. Cranmer goes on in the same passage to say that the spiritual nourishment of the bread and wine is “to the intent, that as muche as is possible for man, we may see Christe with our eies, smell hym at our nose, taste hym with our mouthes, grope hym with oure handes, and perceaue him with al our senses. For as the word of god preached putteth Christe into our eares, so lykewise these elementes of water, breade and wyne, ioyned to Goddes woorde, doo after a sacramentall maner, put Christe into our eies, mouthes, handes, and all our senses.”⁷ What Cranmer describes is a sacrament of dual significance, body and spirit alike invigorated by the encounter with the elements of bread and wine. He advocates that the communicant fuse the spiritual to the sensual, which Herbert’s poem accomplishes in the slippage of its language between corporeal and noncorporeal registers. Just as in Herbert’s phrase “nourishment and strength,” the terminology of the poem’s second stanza activates physical and spiritual associations as it charts the progress of the sacramental experience: Christ “creep’st into my breast,” the poem reflects, suggesting both the abstracted seat of emotions and the vault of the body that encases those emotions. And when divine power manages to fill the speaker’s “length” and to “spread … forces into every part,” the physical suggestiveness of both “length” and “part” is supplemented by the way that this divine occupation develops at the stanza’s end, for what it meets is not bodily substance but “sinnes force and art,” a figurative army whose spiritual encampment cannot be pinpointed in fleshly coordinates. As Cranmer yokes the mouth, hands, and eyes to the spiritual apprehension of Christ in his rhapsody on sacramental contact, Herbert joins the physiological to the spiritual, such that the two modes of sacramental experience cannot be distinguished from one another.

In his attentive study The Poetry of Immanence, Robert Whalen steps away from the confessional squabbling of much twentieth-century criticism on Herbert in order to recognize (appropriately irenically) the poet’s synthesis of sensual ceremonialism and internal spirituality; accordingly, Whalen acknowledges Herbert’s investment in a Eucharist that maintains both spiritual and material significance. For Herbert, writes Whalen, it was important “to realize in the sacramental sign an effectual, objective communication of grace and not merely the outward symbol of a process with which it has no material connection.” Though Whalen glances at the resemblance between the dual signification of Herbert’s Eucharist and the Incarnation’s mysterious joining of divine spirit to carnal flesh, Word to body, he seems not to appreciate the implications of that conjunction for Herbert’s view of language generally, and of poetry in particular. Whalen rightly declares that “it is through the insistent fleshly status of the eucharistic species that the paradox of the Word become flesh is stubbornly proclaimed,” but he does not mark the ways in which his own insight bears upon Herbert’s poetics.⁸ For both Communion and the Incarnation provide for Herbert a literary model in which the divine Logos gains significance by its material expression, a model that Herbert imitates in his own poetic texts. Whalen acknowledges that the material aspects of eucharistic presence “go to the very heart of [Herbert’s] sacramental poetic,”⁹ and his close readings are specific and sensitive to Herbert’s eucharistic preoccupations, but he does not pursue his insights to discuss the way that Herbert’s verse makes use of representational strategies that emphasize his poems as material artifacts—that is, the way they repeat the incarnational model of Communion. Or, to put this problem in the terms with which this book began, Whalen is admirably exhaustive in cataloguing what Herbert’s poems say about the Eucharist but gives scant attention to how they say it.

The distinction I am making between even a careful review of the content of poems and an assessment of their poetic function is particularly germane to a reading of Herbert. I argue that Herbert’s sense of the affinity between text and sacrament is recorded in the very representational architecture of The Temple. Herbert himself provides in the later version of “The H. Communion” a virtual pronouncement of the way that texts, like sacraments, can operate with an incarnational, instrumental force born simultaneously of the substance of their signifieds and the accidents of their material expression. What usually gets overlooked in critical treatments of the climactic stanza of “The H. Communion” is that “Leaping the wall” is accomplished neither by the material substance of the bread and wine nor by the force of spiritual nourishment. Instead, Herbert concludes,

Onely thy grace, which with these elements comes,

Knoweth the ready way,

And hath the privie key,

Op’ning the souls most subtile roomes;

While those to spirits refin’d, at doore attend

Dispatches from their friend. (19–24)

Disputations about whether Herbert privileges in these lines a Catholic or a Reformed view of the progress of grace obscure the fact that grace finally manages, in Herbert’s explanation, to link body and soul as “Dispatches”—as a message that arrives in expressly written form. As with the communication contained within a packet of letters, grace inheres in the message of the text, a message inseparable from and dependent for its transmission on the material artifact of the page. For Herbert, sacramental efficacy is achieved by the simultaneity of material and spiritual, a correspondence whose ideal, in “The H. Communion,” takes the form of a piece of writing.

In putting a sacramental focus here on writing, on the efficacy of the word, my aim is not to revisit the position held by critics like Daniel Doerksen and Gene Veith, claiming for Herbert a conforming Calvinist piety centered on the word, and on the way that the authority of Christ as the Word made Flesh gets refracted into the words of scripture and of preaching.¹⁰ Herbert’s term “Dispatches” rather collapses the distinction between sign and signified promoted in the Institutes, where Calvin affirms Augustine’s definition of the sacrament as “rei sacrae visibile signum” [a visible sign of a sacred thing]:¹¹

Sacramenta igitur exercitia sunt quae certiorem verbi Dei fidem nobis faciunt: et quia carnales sumus, sub rebus carnalibus exhibentur: ut ita pro tarditatis nostrae captu nos erudiant, et perinde ac pueros paedagogi manu ducant. Hac ratione Augustinus sacramentum verbum visibile nuncupat: quod Dei promissiones velut in tabula depictas repraesentet, et sub aspectum graphice atque είϰονιϰώς expressas statuat.

[Sacraments, therefore, are exercises that make more secure our faith in the word of God: and because we are fleshly, they are exhibited under fleshly things: so that they may instruct us in our sluggish capacities, and lead us by the hand like the young students of a schoolmaster. For this reason Augustine calls a sacrament a visible word: because it represents the promises of God just as if they were depicted in a picture, and places beneath our gazes an icon, a verisimilitude masterfully expressed.]¹²

Calvin writes that those who participate in the Eucharist must maintain an understanding of the ontological distinction between the sacramental signs and the spiritual realities they represent. The visible word of the sacrament stands as an accommodation to, and a marker of, the human region of unlikeness from divine things. This formulation, which can be traced from Calvin back through Augustine to Aristotle, imagines the sacrament as an outward seal or sign for the invisible, internal, and finally immaterial operation of grace.¹³ But Herbert’s engagement with the issue of sacramental representation in the published version of “The H. Communion” is not consistent with the ontological binary that Calvin promotes. Rather, Herbert focuses on “Leaping the wall” between fleshly and spiritual, using the word itself as an instrument for producing indistinguishability between ontological realms. Herbert, after all, is the country parson who praised the Lord of the Altar as “not only the feast, but the way to it.”¹⁴ That phrase begins to suggest Herbert’s peculiar willingness to collapse sacramental and representational means into ends—that is, to preserve the significance of the sign in itself, in addition to honoring the significance of the principle to which the sign refers.

For Herbert, Communion presents a model for this kind of ontological indistinguishability, offering a text whose spiritual valences endure even as its objectively perceptible substance refuses to be (to use Charles Bernstein’s useful terms) “sublimated / away.”¹⁵ As “The H. Communion” makes clear, the sacrament is for Herbert both spiritually and materially significant, and it is striking that his model for eucharistic reception in that poem is figured through the written communiqué of “Dispatches.” In Herbert’s formulation of the sacrament, Christ graces both the end and the means, the feast and the way to it, in direct echo of the Incarnation’s simultaneous valorization of the divine Word and the flesh in which it was made present to man; this principle of holy and meaningful presence effected by the hypostatic union of sign and signified ramifies into Herbert’s perception of texts.¹⁶ Over the course of The Temple, Herbert consistently and explicitly evokes the function of Christ as Logos in a way that foregrounds the textuality of that designation, as when in “Sepulchre” he imagines the crucified Christ as an inscription:

And as of old the Law by heav’nly art

Was writ in stone; so thou, which also art

The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart

To hold thee. (16–19)

The comparison to the material ground of the engraved Decalogue gestures toward Christ’s allegorical associations with rock,¹⁷ and also calls up an uneasy awareness of the engraving of Christ’s flesh by the spears and nails during the crucifixion (a concept that Christian readings of Isaiah 49.16, “Behold, I haue grauen thee vpon the palmes of my hands: thy walles are continually before mee,” made familiar).¹⁸ The meaning of the “letter” here follows from its having been inscribed in the flesh, and Christ’s flesh signifies spiritually because it has been marked materially. Christ is both transparent gospel text and harrowingly, transformatively, unsublimable object.

The consistency with which Herbert foregrounds the sign as a site of substantiality and consequence is a key feature of his poetics. In Herbert’s work, this emphasis arises in part out of his extravagant formal experimentation, a set of antiabsorptive strategies that, to return again to the terms of Bernstein’s analysis, lends to the poetic text a “thickness” that continues to “obtrude impermeably into the world.”¹⁹ Herbert’s work is, I argue, radically invested in promoting its own surface, asserting the sign as such as an object rather than treating the text as a transparent conduit to content. Herbert’s incarnationalist poetics bespeak a fundamental faith in the meaningfulness of the material in general and of the material valences of text in particular. When, in “The H. Scriptures I,” Herbert says of the Bible that “heav’n lies flat in thee” (14), he affirms that the physical dimensions of the page parameter heaven itself, and he reacts accordingly with a desire to “Suck ev’ry letter” (2) of that page. Herbert’s attention to the topography of text, with all its surface contour and formal architecture, is at bottom a confirmation of the text’s objecthood. In this project, Herbert shows himself to be in sympathy with the textual experiments at Little Gidding, the religious community established by Herbert’s acquaintance Nicholas Ferrar. The Ferrar household pursued a rigorous devotional life that included communal worship and biblical study; part of this practice involved the construction of Gospel concordances or “harmonies,” in which passages from the four gospels were cut and glued into new arrangements in order to harmonize their narratives. “One of these books,” reports Ferrar’s brother John, “was sent to Mr. Herbert which, he said, he prized most highly as a rich jewel.”²⁰ The book arts projects of Little Gidding, with their endlessly mobile word packets in a variety of fonts, emphasize the physical manipulability of text as well as its hefty substantiality, and argue implicitly that content is contingent on the material. Their emphasis on the physical artifact as an instrument that expresses holy worship claims for words and phrases a meaningfulness that inheres in their very objecthood.

Throughout The Temple, Herbert performs a poetics that likewise claims for language a meaningful objecthood, a poetics in which the material of text tenaciously obtrudes into the transparency of semantic projection. The antiabsorptive qualities of Herbert’s verse are evident, to be sure, in the extraordinary formal innovation that characterizes The Temple, where among other experiments, as Joseph Summers has noted, “Herbert used twenty-nine different patterns with the simple a b a b rhyme scheme.”²¹ Such formal ingenuity should not be regarded as mere ornamentation or even a reinforcement of the “real meaning” of the poem as expressed in its content. Rather, an emphasis on form, on surface, as opaque in Herbert’s poetry demands that we confront form qua form, that we register the presence of the poem as a material artifact. I mean to echo and refine Whalen’s point when I say that to recognize Herbert’s stake in the relationship between the objecthood of poems and the incarnational poetics of the sacrament is to go to the heart of Herbert’s project.

Herbert treats the signifying capacity of sacramental form itself most conspicuously, of course, in “The Altar,” in which the shape of the poem on the page approximates the site of the encounter for which it yearns.²² Summers identified this poem many years ago as an example of the importance to Herbert’s poetry of the hieroglyph, which Summers defines as a figure that “presented its often manifold meanings in terms of symbolic relationships rather than through realistic representation.”²³ Summers sees the structure of “The Altar” as “Herbert’s attempt to use the shape of a classical altar as a hieroglyph of his beliefs concerning the relationships between the heart, the work of art, and the praise of God,”²⁴ and though these relationships are undoubtedly interrogated in Herbert’s poem, Summers’s influential view repeats the distinction between representational means and ends that Calvin articulates in his exegesis on the species of Communion. Such an account fixes the form of “The Altar” as representationally transparent, pointing ever beyond itself to a set of ideas; for Summers, as for many other readers of Herbert, those ideas encompass both the offering of the broken heart in worship and the offering of the poem as an emblem both of praise and of the surrender of the will.²⁵ While I do not mean to suggest that the shape of “The Altar” does not relate symbolically to the content of the poem, to view the poem’s presence on the page as if it merely served a referential function, as if it were simply a vehicle by which we understand the “real meaning” of the poem, is to undercut the poem’s powerful emphasis on textual embodiment. Even prior to the drama of the poem’s content, the structure of “The Altar” asserts its ontological sufficiency such that Stanley Fish, who turns immediately to the work of discrediting the poem’s strident constructedness as “one path Herbert chose not to follow,” nevertheless initiates that argument by remarking that “The most notable and noticeable feature of the poem is, of course, its shape…. In fact, one might say that the first thing the poem does, even before we take in any of its words, is call attention to itself as something quite carefully made.”²⁶

In practical terms, the form of “The Altar” interacts puzzlingly with the content of the poem. The physical presence of the poem on the page, rather than reinforcing or supplementing the sense of its words, seems disorientingly resistant to the argument of the language it contains:

A broken A L T A R , Lord, thy servant reares,

Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:

Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;

No workmans tool hath touch’d the same.

A H E A R T alone

Is such a stone,

As nothing but

Thy pow’r doth cut.

Wherefore each part

Of my hard heart

Meets in this frame,

To praise thy Name;

That, if I chance to hold my peace,

These stones to praise thee may not cease.

O let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine,

And sanctifie this A L T A R to be thine.

Even as this poem argues for the replacement of the material altar with the spiritual offering of the heart, of the will, of the potentially idolatrous work of art, of all three together,²⁷ this repudiation of the physical altar is contradicted by the presence on the page of a perfectly symmetrical and self-consciously constructed arrangement of text, whose structure is made most complete when the last line renounces artistic ownership over the altar of the poem/altar of the self to God. But the inevitable identification of the shape of the poem with an altar introduces a dimension of referentiality to which the poem’s textual material is yet prior. Thus, to adapt Fish’s claim, the first thing this poem does is advertise its own objecthood, its presence on the page as a physical shape. We need only to consult a handful of critical opinions on the poem’s shape to grant that the referential ends of the poem’s shape remain uncertain: does it depict a Communion table? A classical altar? A deuteronomic altar of unhewn stones? A pillar? The letter I? Each of these referents has been defended by readers eager to establish how the ostentatious form of the poem contributes to its semantic content.²⁸ But the very referential uncertainty of the shape indicates the ways in which it resists stable representation even as it projects its own ineffaceable presence as an object. Moreover, the language of “The Altar” explicitly reflects upon the poem’s textuality as a site of immanence, for each piece of the broken heart “Meets in this frame / To praise thy name” (emphasis added). In self-reflexively implicating the “frame” of the poem, as well as the larger frame of The Temple, these lines point toward the architecture of the texts in which they are embedded and locate conservative efficacy in their materiality.²⁹ For the frame of the poem—its graphic presence on the page—and the artifact of the book each embody the cries of the heart, making them both permanent and materially apprehensible. By foregrounding its own textuality both in its form and in its semantic selfreflexiveness, the poem invites an encounter in which the textual is material, an association recapitulated in the capitalization and expanded spacing of “A L T A R,” “H E A R T,” and “S A C R I F I C E,” which dramatize brokenness in form. Through such formally assertive poetic strategies, the poem insists on itself as a sensible (or perhaps rather sense-able) object, and the poem’s language hints at the presence that inheres in its formal frame.³⁰ Poetic form, in “The Altar,” means—which is to say, presence as such means.

The notion that presence means is, to be sure, particularly relevant to the long debate about the mode of divine presence in the eucharistic species. But Herbert’s treatment of presence intriguingly avoids engaging the terms of theological disputation, displacing any argument about the operation of signs into his poetics, which exhibits considerable reluctance to divest the corporeal of significance. Herbert’s conjunction of corporeality and textuality may well invite comparisons to a kind of via media between the word-based pieties of Calvinism and the purportedly sensualist ceremonialism of the Roman church, but I am far more interested here in the way that Herbert collapses the two approaches into one another, regarding text as a kind of presence machine. This emphasis on textual immanence recurs in “IESU,” in which the word for the Word, the name IESU, is broken into pieces. The poem’s conceit asks us again to imagine, as in “The Altar,” that the heart is a quasilinguistic “little frame” (3), upon which a variant of the name of Jesus is “deeply carved” (2). When the speaker’s heart breaks in pieces, the name likewise breaks into its constituent parts, the poem literalizing the “parceling” of “thy glorious name” discussed in “Love I” (3). As Martin Elsky explains, “Broken into I, ES, U, Christ’s name is divided into components of sound” in which “the speaker deciphers lexical units, words, which in turn make up a syntactical unit, ‘I ease you’ (9).”³¹ And yet, even as this narrative of meaning-making plays out in the poem, the word IESU, or rather the letters that constitute that word, remain separable into units, materially manipulable—like children’s wooden blocks with the alphabet painted on them. The “heart” of line one dissolves irrevocably, and especially in its breaking, into the realm of the metaphoric, but the breakage of word into letter happens not at some conceptual remove but before our eyes, on the page. The signifier IESU, far from allowing transparent access to the identity of Christ, disintegrates into graphic units, signs that announce themselves as signs, parts that no longer function referentially. The term IESU is repositioned thus from signifier at the poem’s beginning to opaque sign through its narrative of fragmentation. More to the point, the Word achieves material presence in “IESU” not by being named, for the name shows itself to be frangible, but in the physically perceptible artifacts of the word that persist whatever the semantic status of the name may be.

Similarly, the poem “Love-joy” engages the question of substantial textuality both in the “hieroglyphic riddle” of its allegorical narrative and in the graphic signs of its poetic presence.³² This poem foregrounds the tension between representation and ground from its first line:

As on a window late I cast mine eye,

I saw a vine drop grapes with J and C Anneal’d on every bunch. One standing by Ask’d what it meant. I (who am never loth To spend my iudgement) said, It seem’d to me To be the bodie and the letters both Of Joy and Charitie. Sir, you have not miss’d, The man reply’d; It figures JESUS CHRIST.

The “window” upon which the speaker gazes advertises the interpretive dynamic of aesthetic media; as Herbert himself explains in “The Elixer,”

A man that looks on glasse,

On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,

And then the heav’n espie. (9–12)

In “Love-joy,” the window becomes emblematic of the poem, which as it proceeds presents signs that the speaker must contemplate as objects. Whalen nicely summarizes what we might call, with a nod to Fish, the aesthetic catechism of the poem’s narrative—the lesson in reading signs dramatized by the poem’s dialogue:

While the emphasis is on simply recognizing and accepting the presence of Christ, the speaker cannot resist offering an explanation, to wit, the letters J and C are “the bodie and the letters both / Of Joy and Charitie” (6–7). His interlocutor corroborates and adds “It figures JESUS CHRIST.” The simultaneous presence of both body and sign is common to most sacramental formulae; here, however, the letters are “anneal’d on every bunch” thus suggesting an inscription that goes beyond the surface to share in a portion of the grapes’ substance. The fruit is neither merely a vehicle for J and C, nor is it displaced by them. And because they do not simply reside on the surface, the letters are more than disembodied signs; rather, J and C do not cease to be signs even as they are inextricable from the matter to which they are joined.³³

Whalen’s insight about the annealing of letters into the substance of the grapes is a fine one, though the “matter” Whalen describes as manifesting “the simultaneous presence of both body and sign” is narrative rather than textual: the grapes are not materially present on the page, as they are present to the persons in the poem. Still, it is helpful to apply Whalen’s impression to the way the poem’s aesthetic catechism extends to the experience of the poem as a text that likewise manifests the presence of body and sign: for here, as in “IESU,” the work of identifying appropriate signifieds for J and C (and the attendant allegorical claims about the way Christ and joy/charity figure one another) has not compromised their status as signs any more than the ontological identity of grapes is compromised by their typological association with the Eucharist. But unlike the visible sign of grapes, which is sensorily apprehensible to the persons in the poem but not to the reader of the poem, the letters J and C persist in their nontransparent textual substantiality beyond the resolution of the poem’s interpretive drama. The poem sustains the artifacts of its own textuality, emphasizing their matter as distinct from the spiritual meanings generated by the poem’s allegorical interpretations.

The poem’s investment in the material of its own language redounds to its treatment of the figure of Christ (and by “figure” I mean to evoke both the physical and representational senses of that term). When the speaker reads the letters J and C as signifying “Joy and Charitie,” his interlocutor both endorses and corrects that interpretation in his response: “It figures JESUS CHRIST.” This statement simultaneously invites and frustrates a consideration of what “JESUS CHRIST,” as a linguistic sign, means. Does the name of Christ reference the person of Christ? Or does it reference the principles of joy and charity? Or again, do we resolve the conundrum by concluding, with Fish, that “properly understood, they imply each other”?³⁴ And how exactly are we to read the verb “figures” here: with its corporeal echoes or as an act of metaphor? These perplexities foreground interpretation as the central action of the poem, and both the terms and the questions they provoke reveal the proximity of its hermeneutic concerns to the eucharistic debates, thematizing as they do the unstable referentiality of the visible sign. This sacramental crisis comes to a head in the last line of “Love-joy,” where the figure of Christ is both referenced and supplanted by its own sign, a text the drama of whose interpretation constitutes the catechistic narrative of the poem. But even as that interpretive crisis reaches its uncertain resolution, the capitalized, italicized text “JESUS CHRIST” emphasizes the wordiness of the Word. The conclusion of “Love-joy” forces a confrontation with the Logos as a sign, one whose presence is ever more reified in the diminishing certainty of its signifieds. That is, as we grow more uncertain about how the words “JESUS CHRIST” mean, we grow more aware of their presence as words.

The incarnational underpinnings of such poetic strategies are made explicit in this short poem, in which Herbert engages in a series of incarnational puns:

How well her name an Army doth present,

In whom the Lord of Hosts did pitch his tent!

In what continues to be after nearly fifty years the most attentive critical reading of this poem, Louis H. Leiter (who has a well-calibrated antenna for poetics) summarizes the overlapping vectors of typology and typography, noting that Christ’s fleshly presence is anticipated in its title’s graphic play. Here, the letters of Mary’s name are braced on one side by the name of her mother (Anne, derived from Hebrew hnh [Hannah], or divine grace) and on the other by “gram,” or writing, which points toward Christ as Logos. Mary is thus located physically between bodily generation and the Word, just as the phrase “Lord of Hosts” is tented typographically in the poem’s final line, in the middle of two textual phrases. Noting that contemporary usages of the word “tent” included “pulpit” (specifically, a portable pulpit set up for administering the sacrament to overflow crowds) and “wine” (the Oxford English Dictionary describes it as “A Spanish wine of a deep red colour, and of low alcoholic content … Often used as a sacramental wine”),³⁵ Leiter ably delineates the poem’s incarnational argument, beginning with the title anagram’s rearranged M: “‘M’ stands for Mary, Master, and Mass; ‘Hosts’ for eucharistic bread; ‘tent’ for red wine, a pulpit, and the means by which man is healed. The physical shape of the poem is then either an altar or a pulpit with the first line serving as the lectern on which the written word lies…. His presence is felt, implied, tucked away in words, buried in letters, before He is incarnated in the last line.”³⁶ And with his use of the term “incarnated,” Leiter suggests, though he does not articulate this point fully, that Christ is made present in the words of the poem, the words on the page, of whose material substance we have been made by the poem’s title acutely aware. Far from being an interpretive transparency that gestures beyond itself to the idea of hypostasis, the text is the body in which the Lord of Hosts pitches his tent.³⁷ Moreover, the predominance of puns in this poem works to ensure that the text be encountered as text, as a set of signs whose sign-ness is reified by the uncertainty of their referents. The punning words resist determinate integration into a referential schema, instead announcing themselves as objects. Heather Asals has observed that Herbert’s frequent punning, which she terms “equivocation” (in which “one word equals two definitions”), emphasizes “the surface of language”;³⁸ and while Asals ultimately reads this focus on the discursive surfaces—or, to use the terminology of this present study, the objecthood of poetic artifacts—as aligning the creative work of poem-making with the creative character of divine making, unifying the poet with God, I wish to seize upon Asals’s remark that in his language play “Herbert breaks the host of language itself; he breaks the Word itself.”³⁹ With this rhetorical flourish, Asals identifies the fundamentally incarnational character of Herbert’s writing and registers the crucial correspondence that Herbert perceives between the poetic text, Christ’s Incarnation, and the physical event of eucharistic worship.

For Herbert does treat poetry as an incarnational mechanism, able to enflesh the abstract and make the absent literally present on the page. Throughout The Temple, the aesthetic is rendered as a site of immanence, an instrument by which presence is made possible. It is not, after all, by their referential transparency that “The Windows” in the poem of that title disclose God’s “light and glorie,” but rather by their resistance to referential transparency; like the J and C of “Love-joy,” it is when divine principles are “anneal[ed]in glasse,” made materially substantial objects of themselves, that they become apprehensible to man. The poem’s conclusion meditates on the effects of incorporating such a material encounter into worship:

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one

When they combine and mingle, bring

A strong regard and aw: but speech alone

Doth vanish like a flaring thing,

And in the eare, not conscience ring. (11–15)

Herbert’s investment as a poet is not to produce “speech alone” but to produce the “aw” of presence, and in urging such veneration, Herbert’s language echoes John Chrysostom’s sentiments about the Eucharist: “Ὤπεϱ ἄγγελοι βλέποντες φϱίττουσι, ϰαὶ οὐδὲ ἀντιβλέψαι τολμῶσιν ἀδειῶς διὰ τὴν ἐϰείθεν φεϱομένον ἀστϱαπὴν, τούτῳ ἡμεῖς τϱεφόμεθα, τοὐτῳ ἀναφυϱόμεθα, ϰαὶ γεγόναμεν ἡμεῖς Χϱιστοῦ σῶμα ἔν ϰαὶ σὰϱξ μία” [That which when the Angels behold they tremble, and dare not even to look without awe because of the shining it bears, by that we are nourished, with that we are mingled, and we become one body and the one flesh with Christ].⁴⁰ Like Chrysostom’s materially efficacious sacrament, Herbert’s poetics seeks to acknowledge signs as effectual things, as becomes clear in the preponderance of his writing about the material efficacy of writing. In Herbert’s aesthetic system, God may “Engrave” his “rev’rend law and fear” in the heart (“Nature,” 14); the hungry man may “conceit a most delicious feast” and find that he has “had it straight, and did as truly eat, / As ever did a welcome guest” (“Faith,” 6–7); the poet’s rhymes may “Gladly engrave thy love in steel” (“The Temper,” 2). The embodying effects of Herbert’s immanent textuality offer an answer to the aesthetic complaint of “Jordan (I)”: “Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines, / Catching the sense at two removes?” (9–10). Herbert’s poetics collapses those “two removes” by asserting the substantial presence, the real presence of language in verse, and by registering writing as an incarnational act.

The notion that such incarnational power might be immanent in the textual finds authorization, of course, in the characterization of Christ as the Word, as Logos, an identification of which Herbert makes frequent use in The Temple. And it is precisely its status as an opaque set of signs on the page that makes the Word present to the senses in so many of Herbert’s poems, as the poet invests this theological commonplace with all the material force he claims for the poetic text. This principle animates “The Sonne,” a poem that celebrates not just the happy coincidence of meanings in a pun but also the way that the orthography and sound of a word intervenes in, even precedes, any engagement with its meaning. “A sonne is light and fruit” (6), Herbert explains, delighting (if not originally) that the sun/son homophone on which the poem turns encompasses both Christ’s divinity and his humanity.⁴¹ The poem’s celebration of the ways in which the pun constitutes a kind of hypostatic union between two realms of christic signification leads Herbert to a consideration of the Word as a sign with sonic and graphic properties:

So in one word our Lords humilitie

We turn upon him in a sense most true:

For what Christ once in humblenesse began,

We him in glorie call, The Sonne of Man. (11–14)

As Elsky has shown, here “The Word as spoken sound thus becomes for Herbert the sounded encoding of a series of natural, historical, and spiritual truths,” and these truths are revealed “as the sacred pun is vocalized when ‘We him in glorie call [emphasis added] The Sonne of Man.’ ”⁴² Elsky’s remark recognizes the corporeal actualization of the Word’s meaning in this poem; indeed, the central argument of “The Sonne” concerns the ways in which the word reifies the Word. It is “in one word,” the poem argues, that we are able to grasp Christ’s nature, but because the poem attends to the ways in which that word’s referential function exhibits slippage—the same word has at least two different referents—the word as such is once again emphasized as distinct from its designative content. Rather than standing for a defined and stable signified, “Sonne” asserts itself as a sign; as we are conscious of engaging with it as a verbal artifact before we engage with its meaning, the referential function of “Sonne” is displaced by the idea that referentiality is one property of the word among many. As the word’s referential function becomes distinct from its textual substance—one thing the word does rather than all that the word is—“Sonne” becomes apprehensible as an object, a perceptible and nontransparent textual presence. Moreover, the poem’s title (which is consistently spelled “The Sonne” in both the Williams and Bodleian manuscripts as well as in the 1633 printing of The Temple) reinforces the presence of this word/Word by promoting the poem as a textual artifact even as it introduces the sun/son homophone: Matthias Bauer notes that “The form of this poem is actually announced by its title, to which one only has to add the sign of the son, the cruciform letter T,” in order to spell sonnet.⁴³ This focus on the surfaces of language, on the sonic and graphic properties of words, makes the Word that is both representative and constitutive of Christ’s presence in this poem ostentatiously available for sensory apprehension, an effect in strong contrast to the poem’s thematic suggestion of referential or signifying instability. In other words, Christ is more present in this text as a sign than as a signified.

Poetry serves for Herbert, then, as an instrument for enfleshing Christ, for manifesting the divine as material presence. As in “Sepulchre,” where the incarnate Christ appears as “the letter of the word,” the graphic embodiment of divinity every bit as material as the engravings of the law on stone, the physical character of the Word achieves substantial expression in Herbert’s antiabsorptive poetics. Exploiting the textual qualities of Christ as Logos, Herbert’s formal extravagance promotes the incarnational capacities of language. The physical absence of the body of Christ, both from the world of flesh into which the Incarnation intervenes and from the experience of eucharistic observance across the confessional spectrum, provokes in Herbert’s verse strategies that counter the troubling perceptual unavailability of divinity. It is worth recalling that the poem that concludes by identifying Christ as “the letter of the word” begins with the anxious exclamation: “O blessed bodie! Whither art thou thrown?” (“Sepulchre,” 1). As the poet laments elsewhere, “thy absence doth excel / All distance known” (“The Search,” 57–58). For Herbert, poetry itself begins to answer the terrifying proposition of Christ’s absence, establishing the Word as an object that does not dissolve into the vapor of mere referentiality. Cognizant of the ways in which Christ as Logos is invested with textuality, Herbert makes deliberate use of the materializing valences of text to present Christ. To put it another way, Herbert’s Christ is made present in the objecthood of text.

Given Herbert’s investment in the capacities of text to make present what is perceptually absent, it is perhaps not surprising that the eucharistic poem “The Agonie” begins with an assertion of the epistemological obscurity of spiritual principles:

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,

Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:

But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love. (1–6)

Though philosophers can “measure” geologies and geographies, the histories of nation and rule, sin and love resist this kind of empirical investigation. Vast and spacious in a way that physical things seem not to be, they exceed the senses. As Herbert’s poem continues, it offers alternative means for understanding such spiritual matters:

Who would know Sinne, let him repair

Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see

A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,

His skinne, his garments, bloody be.

Sinne is that presse and Vice, which forceth pain

To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein. (7–12)

In order to understand sin, the poem instructs, we must “see” Jesus in Gethsemane, and Herbert’s verse provides us with details from the scriptural record to compose a scene: Jesus’s bloody garments, skin, and even hair so particularized as to conjure up the vision to our imaginations.⁴⁴ It is thus remarkable that the stanza begins by displacing these details out of the physical: the bloody skin and hair with all their physical vividness are explicitly identified as standing not for themselves but for something else—for “Sinne.” Christ’s corporeal particularities are offered here as a sign, whose presence in the poem delineates an abstraction too vast to be measured.

In the third and final stanza, the poem’s eucharistic interests are made explicit, even as its language continues to redefine the visceral as significative:

Who knows not Love, let him assay,

And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike

Did set again abroach; then let him say

If ever he did taste the like.

Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,

Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine. (13–18)

Here, Christ’s body is veiled, as it were, behind the rich language of religious emblem so thoroughly charted by Rosemond Tuve decades ago.⁴⁵ Christ’s body, breached by a sword, spills forth the blood represented in eucharistic wine. And though Tuve finds Herbert’s imagery perfectly “conventional,”⁴⁶ consistent with a long iconographic tradition, his handling of the vectors of referentiality is provocative both in the context of “The Agonie” and in consideration of the commitment to signs as such that pervades The Temple. For Herbert’s poem does not make it easy to keep the figurative and literal registers separate. By inviting us to “taste that juice set abroach by the spear,” he renders identical the figure and the ground—the blood that flows from the spear wound and the metaphoric juice by which it is represented to the eucharistic worshipper. Christ is in these lines the signified—as the body represented eucharistically in the wine. But Christ also serves here as the sign—the body whose “taste” prompts the figural leap into “juice” and “liquour.” Yet after all, even these sign/signified complexes collapse into the sign position because the poem argues that they represent something else: the principle of Love. The body of Christ in agony, whether it is seen primarily as the emblematic subject or the emblematic object, is finally the word/Word that means love—just as in the previous stanza, it means sin. Helen Vendler has noted that though the qualities of sin and love stand in opposition to one another, the emblematic descriptions featured in stanzas two and three of “The Agonie” are “identical,” both depicting “Christ shedding blood under torture.”⁴⁷ Thus the suffering body of Christ signifies in multiple registers, meaning two distinct, even opposite, ideas. The poem encourages us to stop on the surface of signification, on the Word which is Christ the Logos, and to register it as an artifact whose referential transparency is prevented by its referential slippage. In “The Agonie,” the meaning of the Word becomes a pun of the same order that Herbert explored in “The Sonne.” Once again, Christ’s body is offered as a sign whose signified remains unfixed, a sign that therefore persists untransparently, antiabsorptively, in the poem’s system of signification.

In Love Known, Richard Strier asserts that the “knowledge” advocated by these stanzas is “entirely a matter of immediate experience, not of conceptual formulation.” Strier goes on to claim that what he calls “the essential terms of religion” gain priority over the sciences in Herbert’s hierarchy of knowledges because they are known by immediate experience. “For Herbert,” Strier declares, “it is science that is abstract and religion that is concrete and empirical. The ‘knowledge’ described in stanza 3 is entirely a matter of immediate experience, not of conceptual formulation.” Strier identifies the depictions of sin and love in “The Agonie” as exemplary of the spiritual knowledge that comes by immediate experience. “Sin and love,” he claims, “cannot be fathomed in the way that seas can.”⁴⁸ Strier is absolutely correct in this last pronouncement, but I would argue that he is absolutely wrong in his reasoning. For “The Agonie” takes pains not to imagine “spiritual experience” as an event directly channeled into the worshipper’s apprehension with epistemological immediacy. Mountains and seas can be understood through the apprehension of the senses, but as Herbert’s poem presents it, the problem with spiritual knowledge is that it must come through the mediation of terms whose objecthood is ultimately more stable, more apprehensible, than the abstractions to which they refer. In the case of “The Agonie,” the spiritual meaning of Christ becomes available to our apprehension insofar as he is textualized: Christ is manifested here not just in or through the eucharistic elements but as a text that by the act of signifying maintains its own presence.