6—
Word without End:
The Comforts of George Herbert's Temple
And in this enumeration of [Donne's] friends, though many must be omitted, yet that man of primitive piety, Mr. George Herbert may not; I mean . . . the Author of the Temple . . . in which by declaring his own spiritual Conflicts, he hath Comforted and raised many a dejected and discomposed Soul, and charmed them into sweet and quiet thoughts.
— Izaak Walton[1]
Day and night I was upon the rack, lying down in horrors and rising in despair. I presently lost all relish to those studies I had been closely attached to, [but] with Herbert's poems, gothic and uncouth as they were, I yet found . . . my malady . . . never seemed so much alleviated as while I was reading him.
— William Cowper[2]
I find more substantial comfort, now, in pious George Herbert's "Temple," which I used to read to amuse myself with his quaintness—in short, only to laugh at—than in all the poetry since the poems of Milton.
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge[3]
These epigraphs all portray The Temple as a kind of euphoric tranquilizer relieving some severe but unspecified cause of depression. Modern Western culture has been in large measure shaped by our need to deny collectively our individual mortality—that is, to deny its inevitability, or its finality, or both. This need has been skillfully exploited, consciously and unconsciously, to enlist us in a variety of basic social projects, including war, worship, and procreation. The seductively pious lyrics of "The Church"—the lyric section of The Temple —boldly acknowledge that death is inevitable, in order to express the author's confidence that, for the faithful Christian, it will not be final. Herbert works ingeniously and relentlessly to dispel the anxieties attaching to closure. These poetic exertions indicate that such anxieties were indeed an epidemic threat among Herbert's Christian audience, in much the way that antibodies indicate exposure to a disease. Herbert offers a sort of Paracelsian cure: the reader absorbs poems that yield to, and then overcome, their own mortality. The terminal silence that becomes an occasion for heightened anxiety about annihilation in most Jacobean authors becomes in Herbert an occasion to celebrate, even demonstrate, the promise of Christian salvation, the redemptive renewal that faith or extrapolation allows us to perceive in the apparent blankness, the white space, that follows a physical ending. In the ending is a beginning, because the last human words—as if they were a human soul—are savingly assumed into the Word of God.
Herbert's lyric form thus recapitulates a standard Renaissance reply to a common Renaissance anxiety: "Let them feare death, who live without Christ ," one Jacobean preacher proclaimed: "Christians dye not, but when they please GOD they are like Enoch translated unto GOD ."[4] Another promised that "God then shall be our Sanctuarie , in whom we shall have joye and gladnesse without feare of ending."[5] The poems of "The Church" are these translations, these endless sanctuaries; and they offer incentives to Christian belief, because what looks like a concluding sequence proves to be part of an ongoing presence, what looks like a cessation proves to be a transfer of power to a comforting and everlasting Being who will allow our voices to blend into His. The closing couplet—associated in Renaissance drama with dying words[6] —becomes in Herbert's lyrics a marker of perfect reunion with God.
Herbert's persistence in this pattern suggests a strategic response to a specific anxiety in his culture. He offers heaven as an alternative, not to hell, but to mere termination. The eminent critic Joseph Summers echoes an assumption familiar from early commentators such as Walton
and Coleridge through the latest historicist scholarship: namely, that Herbert's poetry can be properly read "only within the light of the ideas, beliefs, and conventions of early seventeenth-century England," and that primary among these cultural facts is the "wholeness of an earlier age's Christianity" which might be overlooked by our modern "secular culture."[7] While the importance of cultural context is beyond dispute, Summers's reading of that context is not. In any case, no absolute belief exists without the systematic exclusion of conflicting perceptions, and no culture can claim a "wholeness" of belief without leaving traces of its repressive strategies within that very claim. Those traces, in which the heterodoxy awaits recuperation, become increasingly visible as the repressive struggle becomes more urgent (as it did during Herbert's brief lifetime), and become increasingly legible as the culture reading them shifts to other systems of belief and consolation (as ours has partly done). What follows is an effort to define the dark shadow of Herbert's trustful Christianity by tracing the types of comfort he feels compelled to offer his audience.
Donne and Herbert: Redeeming Relationships
Donne once preached that death resembles poetic closure:
the force of the whole piece, is for the most part left to the shutting up; the whole frame of the Poem is a beating out of a piece of gold, but the last clause is as the impression of the stamp, and that is it that makes it currant.[8]
In the Christian model (as opposed to many Eastern religions, where escaping the cyclical business of life is itself the desideratum), the goal is not a stamping out but a stamping on, a judgment that marks the soul for renewed currency in heaven. Herbert follows out the logic of Donne's statement into an anti-closural poetic: his poems formally endorse the Christian idea that mortal endings are immortal beginnings.
Donne rehearses for death by parting from his beloved; Herbert does it by ending his lyrics. The parting shot of Herbert's "Artillerie" is typical: "I am but finite, yet thine infinitely" (32). The identical line could easily pass for the ending of a typical Donne love-lyric, a metaphysical plea for erotic fulfillment. What Donne seeks through intercourse with his mistress, Herbert seeks through an exchange with his deity, an exchange of Herbert's adoration for God's forgiveness. Where
Donne runs a thread horizontally between his eyes and those of his beloved, Herbert describes the uneven trade of his gratuitous words for God's efficacious ones as a vertical "Pulley." Donne's amorous "dialogue of one" ("The Extasie," 74) becomes "a supplemental society of two," as one critic describes "The Church"; Donne's sensual reciprocity becomes in Herbert what another critic calls a "reciprocity" of speech that metaphorically enacts "the redeeming bond of grace, in which sentience moves continuously in both directions between God and man."[9] The cure for mortal isolation that Donne seeks through the physical penetration of his mistress and the intellectual penetration of his reader, Herbert achieves more chastely through an inward catechistic exchange with God, reproduced as dialogue with the responding reader. Stanley Fish perceives this catechistic strategy as the very essence of The Temple , and formulates it as a logical analogy: "Reader : Herbert : : Herbert : God."[10] My point is that these relationships pertain to the defeat of closure as well as of ignorance: Herbert spares the reader from mere ending, as God spares Herbert.
Herbert repeatedly recasts the conventions of love-complaint into poems of spiritual frustration addressed to an elusive God. In Herbert's versions, however, the courtship and its narrative both end in a kind of redeeming capitulation that is neither conquest nor defeat. Stereotypical categories of male sexual aggression inform most Renaissance discussions of death: one must conquer it boastfully, or else suffer a mortifying negation. The Temple argues that this phallocentric approach, this linear and binary focus on final goals, tends to taint life with mortality-anxiety ("Death"), sexuality with performance-anxiety ("Love [III]")—and creativity with writer's block (the "Jordan" poems). Herbert obliges his lyric speaker to abandon misguided efforts to "pierce" God's ears with his will and his virtues (as in "Deniall"), proposing instead what might be described as a gynocentric model, replacing the desire for a single decisive ending with the satisfactions of an ongoing surrender to benevolence.[11]
Donne's compulsion to seek reassurance about his personal immortality in the transactions of sexual love appears to reflect a failure of the caretaker's gaze by which most children acquire their narcissistic faith. In the case of Herbert, usually so confident of the personal attention of a nurturant deity, the psychoanalytic critic can build on direct evidence of the poet's powerful attachment to his mother. Even for an early hagiographer such as Walton, that is where the story begins: "George Herbert spent much of his Childhood in a sweet content under the eye
and care of his prudent mother. . . ."[12] Magdalen Herbert's demeanor toward her eldest son, Edward, after sending him to Oxford, sounds remarkably like God's demeanor toward His human creatures throughout George Herbert's The Temple : "she continued there with him, and still kept him in a moderate awe of her self: and so much under her own eye, as to see and converse with him daily; but she managed this power over him without any such rigid sourness, as might make her company a torment to her Child. . . ."[13] When Donne preached her funeral sermon, he described her as particularly expert in dispelling the fear of death:
So her selfe, with her whole family . . . did, every Sabbath, shut up the day, at night, with a generall, with a cheerfull singing of Psalmes ; This Act of cheerfulnesse , was still the last Act of that family, united in it selfe, and with God . . . . Truly, he that can close his eyes, in a holy cheerfulnesse, every night, shall meet no distemper'd, no inordinate, no irregular sadnesse, then, when God , by the hand of Death , shall close his eyes, at last. (Sermons , VIII, 86)
Aided by poetry and a cyclical ritual of renewal, the corporate family could override the annihilationist anxieties surrounding closure and darkness. Donne's sermon suggests that he watches that achievement—the consoling spiritual unity of a family—with a predictable amalgam of admiration and envy, like Milton's Satan gazing into a potentially immortal Eden.
The Temple is proof that George Herbert learned from his mother's example. In "Martens," for example, he passes on to the reader this maternally imbued faith that a provident God will follow every night with a nurturant morning. The great mystery in the Protestant experience of God resembles the infant's no less wonderful and terrifying mystery concerning the mother: as Herbert expresses it in "Mattens," what is this poor little mortal creature, "That thou shouldst it so eye, and wooe, / Powring upon it all thy art, / As if that thou hadst nothing els to do?" (10–12). This is the maternal godhead familiar from the writings of Julian of Norwich, "a kind nurse that hath naught else to do but to attend to the well-being of her child," a Jesus who feeds us from "his blessed breast," and to whom we can say,
"my most dear Mother, have mercy on me. I have made myself foul and unlike to thee; and I cannot or may not amend it but with thine help and grace." . . . For the flood of mercy that is his most dear blood and precious water is plenteous to make us fair and clean. . . . The sweet gracious hands of our Mother are ready and diligent about us.[14]
The God who is "ready there to catch / My morning-soul" in "Mattens" (2–3) reappears in Herbert's "The Glance" as a nearly transparent recollection of the caretaker who comes in the night to clean, feed, and comfort an infant needing all those services:
When first thy sweet and gracious eye
Vouchsaf'd ev'n in the midst of youth and night
To look upon me, who before did lie
Weltring in sinne;
I felt a sugred strange delight,
Passing all cordials made by any art,
Bedew, embalme, and overrunne my heart,
And take it in.
Since that time many a bitter storm
My soul hath felt, ev'n able to destroy,
Had the malicious and ill-meaning harm
His swing and sway:
But still thy sweet originall joy
Sprung from thine eye, did work within my soul,
And surging griefs, when they grew bold, controll,
And got the day.
(1–16)
As psychoanalytic theory would predict, the ability to weather the midlife depressions stirred by mortality depends on the narcissism generated by that "originall" gaze of the provident caretaker. The similarity to Donne's God "who hath often looked upon me in my foulest uncleanesse" (Sermons , V, 266) is clear enough, but so is the contrast: what Donne primarily remembers about this gaze is his abysmal misery when it turns away, a misery he associates with unredeemed death. To win the love of God and "the grace of his lips," according to Donne, you must never "lock up your door till you have carried out your dust; never to shut your eyes at night, till you have swept your conscience, and cast your foulness into that infinite sea of the blood of Christ Jesus" (Sermons , I, 205). Though critics who make absolute and contradictory assertions about Herbert's political and doctrinal inclinations may accord in condemning as hopelessly speculative my attention to these far less contingent aspects of his experience, the conjecture still seems worth offering: perhaps the same infant bodily needs that made Herbert feel unreservedly forgiven left Donne tainted with a guilt that he translated into a harsher deity.
As E. Pearlman has forcefully argued,[15] Herbert grew up in a family characterized by an extreme polarity of conventionally masculine and
feminine traits and occupations. The masculine stereotypes were claimed by his brothers, apparently following their father, who had "a manly or somewhat stern look" and a tendency to battle with mobs.[16] The brothers' lives reportedly comprised an astonishing catalogue of duels, single combats, and general martial fortitude. These stories appear in the rather fanciful and egotistical autobiography of Edward Herbert, who was not only a Metaphysical poet in the mode of Donne, but also a founding father of the deism that bred Enlightenment-style atheism. Voltaire identified Edward Herbert as "one of the first . . . who had the daring to stand up, not only against the Roman Church, but also against the Christian Church."[17] This may be an exaggeration, but there can be little doubt that George Herbert built his pious submissiveness against a variety of contrary pressures. Opting out of the emulative rivalry among his brothers, George chose to identify instead with conventionally feminine virtues: neatness, humility, frailty, piety, domesticity, artistry.[18]
From the ages of three to fifteen, Herbert had no father; then his mother—Magdalen Herbert, by all accounts a person of extraordinary strength, charm, and maternal attentiveness—married a man much closer to her son's age than her own, a man named John Danvers. Herbert himself remained single until his late thirties; then, two years after his mother's death, he married a relative of his step-father, a woman named Jane Danvers. The poet could hardly have overlooked the virtual homonym. Jane had no children during her marriage to Herbert, but did with her subsequent husband. In other words, Herbert fits the pattern of a man whose primary attachment to his mother—revolving identification and a deeply conflicted eroticism—impairs some of the functions of conventional masculinity.
To discern this pattern in the biographical fragments is not to reduce Herbert's poetry, his religion, or even his sexuality to a single psychopathological reflex (nor is it to imply that conventional masculinity is necessarily better than some other kind). But these suggestive facts do lend extra weight to Herbert's remarkable emphasis on breast-feeding as a metaphor in his early writings, and cast new light onto works such as "The British Church," which anxiously describes religion as a mother who sometimes mistakenly presents herself either as a meretricious (Roman) Whore of Babylon or a naked (Puritan) ingenue.[19] Herbert sees his mother through a glass darkly, and recognizes his deity. The Christian God allowed Herbert to displace an oedipally dangerous mixture of filial and erotic feelings.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Herbert's poetic mission should feature so prominently an urgent and explicit determination to sublimate expressions of sexual desire into expressions of Christian piety: eros into agape . Nor, from this perspective, is it surprising that Herbert concludes a poem commemorating Magdalen Herbert's death by describing her as the source of both his mortal physical birth and his eventual rebirth into Christian immortality: "By you I was born into this world; by your example I am born into the other. You are twice a mother to me."[20] Here is a man who indeed believes that he ends at his beginning, that the savior who renews him at death is indistinguishable from the woman who bore him into mortality.
In the Holy Sonnet "Since She Whom I Lovd," Donne says that he was led to God by his wife;[21] Herbert was no less clearly led by his mother. Donne's model of divine love manifests all the heat and instability of adolescent sexuality; Herbert's God is nurturant, and his Magdalen is an erotic object miraculously transformed into an avatar of the Virgin Mother, who comforts him in a primal scene that seems to conflate a pietà with breast-feeding, a death scene with the renewal of earthly comforts. In another Latin poem, Herbert imagines competing for "access to [Christ's] breast, I claim the milk mingled with the blood."[22] In Communion, a sacrament which drew Herbert's special approbation, transubstantiation becomes a safely imperfect decoding of his sublimation.
At times this association—between the mother who first fed him and the God he hopes will finally save him—may have become too explicit for Herbert's own comfort. In "Longing" he strives to re-establish the orthodox priorities:
Mothers are kinde, because thou art,
And dost dispose
To them a part:
Their infants, them; and they suck thee
More free.
(14–18)
The mother nurses on God, the son on God in her. In constructing the final version of The Temple , moreover, Herbert omitted a poem called "Perseverence" which (after the speaker worries that his sins may forbid him to "wedd" his savior) depicts the penitent sinner as something very like that savior's suckling infant:
Onely my soule hangs on thy promisses
With face and hands clinging unto thy brest,
Clinging and crying, crying without cease
Thou art my rock, thou art my rest.
(13–16)
The hand that rocks the cradle truly rules this world.[23]
"Love (III)," the final poem in "The Church," provides a culminating instance of Herbert's gynocentric eroticism, the ongoing surrender to benevolence I have contrasted to Donne's erotic agon . Perhaps the argument among critics over whether to read sexuality into the penetrations and tastings of this poem can best be resolved by recognizing that Herbert's own ambivalences toward the maternal body suspend the poem between the two alternatives. The sexual aspect of desire is necessarily both present and unacknowledged as he imagines yielding to the limitless kindness of this nurturant creature who made him ("Who made the eyes but I?" 12), consenting finally to taste her flesh.[24]
It might be objected that such modern psychoanalytic categories are inapplicable to a Jacobean family, but surely a nursing infant's experience is so primal that the burden of proof falls on those who would claim both that culture intervenes powerfully in that transaction, and that its mode of intervention in a behavior older than the species has shifted radically in the past few centuries. Herbert's persistent association of salvation with breast-feeding is strong evidence, instead, of a continuity with the patterns explicated by Melanie Klein and contemporary object-relations analysts. The preceding chapter offered some historical reasons to suppose that Herbert would have been nursed by his mother, and more direct and compelling evidence appears in his poems on his mother's death: "Your breasts, composed of air, untrue to me your child with an open mouth—are these what I possess? Cursed be the cloud weighed down with rain, not milk. . . . Begone, you ghost."[25] But the use of a wet-nurse would not eliminate the profound link between the infant's early feeding experiences and its sense of its place in the universe. Nor would changing social conventions likely alter the regressive character of Herbert's desire for a pre-linguistic—literally, "infant"—harmony with his creator. On behalf of this harmony, Herbert often surrenders the verbal form of his poem in order to replace it with a musical form that forestalls any ominous terminal silence—again, replicating a bonding ritual he evidently shared with his mother.[26]
In a sense, Herbert was as determined as Donne to expand, represent, and preserve the ego; he merely had a less boastful, less idiosyncratic way of making the universe a part of his own consciousness. As Summers observes, "For Herbert, Christianity provided the means of giving order and universal significance to his personal experience."[27] The fact that Herbert experimented with self-consuming verse forms does not necessarily demonstrate the self-annihilating impulse Stanley Fish deduces.[28] Instead, Herbert was able to find in the doctrines and rituals of his church, and the anti-closural devices of the poems that reflect them, a safe context for relaxing his grip on the mortal self. Even when Herbert is reluctant to save himself by eating, a voice coaxes him, as at the end of "Love (III)." When he is afraid to yield to regenerative sleep, he feels loving eyes watching him until he trusts their protection, as at the end of "Even-Song" and "Death."[29] When, in exhaustion and petulance, Herbert despairs of reaching an important destination, he can rely on being carried, as at the end of "The Pilgrimage." When he rebels in an escalating tantrum against the constraints on his desires, a call of "Childe" brings him safely back into obedience, as at the end of "The Collar."[30] If all these instances evoke the image of a boy testing the vigilance and resourcefulness of parental protection, the correlation may not be merely coincidental. Herbert's primary faith is in a provident maternal deity, and he repeatedly lets go of the living ego to prove that he will not be allowed to die, that "thou art ready there to catch / My morning-soul" ("Mattens," 2–3).[31] The Fall of Man can be rendered as harmless as the stumble of a loved child.
As Donne approaches closure, he usually finds himself alone on the brink of death; as Herbert approaches closure, he finds himself back in his mother's embrace. Donne struggles to tame death by focusing on it intently; Herbert instead brushes death aside by construing it as a milder echo of birth, as a transitional moment surrounded by life. In contrast to the fierce morbidity of Donne's preacherly role, Herbert's long treatise, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Country Parson , makes virtually no mention of either the funerals that must surely have engaged a large share of a parson's energies, or the memento mori themes that dominated the preaching of most of his contemporaries.[32]
Nor does Herbert seem eager here to confront the forces of disbelief; he comments parenthetically that "disputation is no Cure for Atheisme."[33] But, as the first stanza of the first part of The Temple asserts, "A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies" ("The Church Porch," 5). That principle may apply to Herbert's own confrontation with
annihilationism: the role of poet permits him an advantageous release of the anxious energies accumulated in his role as priest. The dynamics of his lyric sequence systematically refute death and atheism, allowing him to confront boldly the very issues he evades in his clerical office.
My study of Donne's poems began with "The Good-Morrow." My study of Herbert's begins with the implicit revision of "The Good-Morrow" contained in "The Temper (I)." At the core of Donne's poem—indeed, in its central line—is the assertion that the presence of the beloved "makes one little room an everywhere" (11). The resolution of Herbert's poem—in its final line—is the recognition that his loving trust and God's powerful love together "Make one place ev'ry where" (28). What Donne seeks in the middle of his life (and poem) from a sexual counterpart, Herbert seeks at the end of his life (and poem) from a divine complement. Donne concludes that, if he and his mistress "Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die" (21); Herbert denies that such constancy can be achieved even in relation to God. Herbert thus characteristically confronts the fear that Donne's erotic megalomania evades, namely, that mortal endeavors may be swallowed up by an infinite universe:
Although there were some fourtie heav'ns, or more,
Sometimes I peere above them all;
Sometimes I hardly reach a score,
Sometimes to hell I fall.
O rack me not to such a vast extent;
Those distances belong to thee:
The world's too little for thy tent,
A grave too big for me.
("The Temper [I]," 5–12)
Both poets thus confront a basic problem, perhaps the basic problem that culture and human intimacy help us resolve on this side of insanity (by resolving it on this side of infinity). Lacking an Other who gives the Self a measure of worth, a sense of place, and a moment in (or out of) time, a human being would be utterly overwhelmed by the universe. Though the new "tuning of my breast" (23) Herbert requests is performed by faith rather than science, these poems emerge from the same Renaissance crisis that made astrology important "because it offered the reassurance of identifying with a circular destiny, solidary of a solid and visible cosmos whose eternal movements were known"; the
same crisis produced a "vogue of astronomical clocks" by which the passage of time could be "transformed into spatial perspective," a perspective that was linked in turn to musical forms in which "duration or succession is replaced by simultaneity."[34]
"The Temper (I)" exposes the bravado of Donne's romantic solution to this cosmic agoraphobia. The distances are now immeasurably greater than those covered by Donne's "sea-discoverers," and the time-span dwarfs even Donne's hyperbolic comparison to "the seaven sleepers'" long repose (12, 4). Where Donne boasts of sustaining endlessly an ideal state of physical union with a mortal beloved, Herbert prays for a perpetual spiritual union with God. Donne's resolution had been to make his mistress the center of a sufficient—indeed, paradisal—universe; Herbert's solution is to hope that God, the being whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere, will become his lover and beloved.[35] The shrinking of the lines within each stanza reflects submission to the divine embrace.
Protective Custody: "A Daintie Lodging"
The theme of enclosure in Herbert's poetry has generally been thought to express an orthodox belief that the soul must escape the sinful body and gain the paradoxical freedom of pious restraint.[36] But what is consoling as theology—nothing can harm him "While the inclosure is thine ARM," Herbert asserts in "Paradise" (6)—proves equivocal as psychology. The agoraphobia of an infinite universe can quickly give way to the no less terrifying claustrophobia of a grave. As Herbert writes in "Mortification," a person's house is a "dumbe inclosure" that "maketh love / Unto the coffin, that attends his death" (23–24). The grave may prove to be a "dungeon" rather than a "house," as in "Grace" (6); a quarry of mere residual dregs, as in "Nature"; a "poore cabinet of bone," as in "Ungratefulnesse" (28); or a mere sinfilled box, like the heart in "Good Friday." Sometimes, as in "Confession," the nightmarish regress of boxes within boxes separating the speaker from God seems to demand a Houdini. As death and closure converge on his mortal body and his poetic voice, Herbert becomes an escape-artist, while the spectators squirm empathetically in their seats.
Yet, as the first great modern editor of The Temple comments, and as "The Temper (I)" confirms, "Herbert often shows a fear of unlimited
space and loves the shelter of an enclosure."[37] If he is no longer oppressed by the constraints of the body and its burial, what is Herbert so afraid of? The answer is, everything. If the "Collar" of pious restraint constricts his visual aperture as well as his moral conduct ("While thou didst wink and wouldst not see," 26), then to rebel recklessly against it threatens not only his piety but his sanity as well, by offering him a glimpse of the infinite. Is there any sustainable middle setting between accepting the tunnel-vision of our mundane enterprises and confronting the devastating face of God? A person may go on "schooling his eyes" ("Mortification," 22), hiding from the universe in a nutshell, but we all have (as Hamlet says) bad dreams. Human beings need psychological enclosure for protection from the dizzying and demoralizing scope of the universe we inhabit, no less desperately than we need physical enclosure from the harsh forces of nature; we can be destroyed by exposure. Our cognitive development necessarily involves a deliberate ignorance of imponderable or unmasterable realities, and a narrowing of the spectrum of sensual input so that we can establish the categories without which we could not truly perceive at all, only dazzle—the glorious danger that propels Thomas Traherne's descriptions of childhood wonderment in his "Centuries," and lends Baldwin's Beware the Cat its sinister fascination.[38]
Avoiding such overload is the psychological aspect of the imperative which critics such as Robert Higbie have generally read theologically, as the promise that "if man accepts the limits God sets him, the contents of his mind will have value." Higbie observes that Herbert, though not exactly "hostile to the power of reason . . . seems to feel the need to limit it, to create some sort of wall in his mind, to keep it under lock and key."[39] Higbie attributes this reaction to an orthodox Christian mistrust of fallen, prideful intellection, but perhaps it reflects a blasphemous suspicion that any truly open-minded evaluation of the human situation would breed madness. To climb the Tower of Babel and not find a heaven would induce both vertigo and despair; it is a long way down, and there is nowhere else to go. A loss of boundaries—even if they were only arbitrary ones—makes Herbert "A wonder tortur'd in the space / Betwixt this world and that of grace" ("Affliction (IV)," 5–6), just as the morbid Hamlet finds himself miserably "crawling between earth and heaven" (3.1.128–29), and the morbid Donne tortures language into yielding him a metaphysical middle ground.
The constraint of an eternal tomb and the boundlessness of a godless universe are equally horrifying. So the poems themselves must both
refute and restore closure.[40] Heaven—its confines and its hierarchy—offers the only alternative to an infinite scattering of the bodily dust and a permanent dissolution of the individual soul. The catacomb becomes a honeycomb: the nurturant "hive" of Herbert's "Home" (20) or "cupboard" of his "Providence" (49). The "chest of sweets" that became "winding sheets" in "Mortification" (2, 5) are neatly folded back into sweetness.
Human beings can imitate and anticipate that redeeming kind of containment through pious artistic structure. The music in church provides in itself a "daintie lodging" that leads to "heaven's doore" ("Church Musick," 4, 12); and the "closes" of Herbert's own poetic music ("Vertue," 11) can similarly offer the "stay against confusion" that Robert Frost (among others) has defined as poetry's essential gift to human morale in an age of deteriorating religious belief. If it is true that "Herbert makes poetry an enclosed epitome of the world and an incarnation of paradise,"[41] it may be because the lyric form generates an object enclosed and yet infinite, empowered and enlivened by its very constraints. When Herbert's immortal longings take on earthly forms, they enact the salvational process they celebrate.[42] If the structure of The Temple as a whole "may be called LEITOURGIA, a pattern of worship" divisible "into the liturgy of time and the liturgy of space,"[43] we must also notice that the individual poems are often technopaignia , with their implied worship of pattern as it tames time and space. These tightly designed, seemingly playful lyrics provide extreme examples of an essential function of the lyric: to sit on the page as an example of how linear human experience can overcome temporal sequence, if it achieves the virtue required to capture the eye and ear of an ideal reader. These poetic games are presumably what Coleridge initially found laughable about Herbert's verse; but, as the aging Coleridge discovered, they help to control a serious anxiety.
The first thing one encounters upon entering Herbert's "Church" is his "Altar," a sort of spiritual prosthesis Herbert trusts will speak for him if he should lose his capacity for prayer: "if I chance to hold my peace, / These stones to praise thee may not cease" (13–14). The poem thus acknowledges its function as a defense against terminal silences. Having his prayer carved into a sacred shape redeems it from the linear aspect of human utterances that doom them to ending, even as God's reshaping—"altaring"—of his heart will redeem the speaker from the fatally linear aspect of human life. Unlike the ordinary forms of verbal art,
sculpture has no end-point; it achieves wholeness rather than extinction at the point of completion. By abjuring pride of creation, Herbert can further evade the pressures of closure.[44] The poem seeks, not to be flawed (like certain Asian artworks whose makers maim them as a gesture of pious humility) but to be temporarily incomplete. It reaches beyond its apparent boundaries, both for renewal (since the word "Sacrifice" in the penultimate line anticipates the following poem's title), and for a timeless fulfillment (since it looks forward to the communion table of "Love (III)," which will end the lyric sequence). The building of this "Altar" serves as a model for the defense Herbert constructs in assembling "The Church" as a whole, a sanctuary against the sentence of annihilation that haunts temporal human existence.[45]
A slightly different carving trick dictates the shape of "Paradise": within each tercet, the rhyme-word keeps losing its first letter. Clearly there is a suggestion of Adam and Eve pruning their own Paradise, but the final stanza makes this pattern of diminishment a model for the benevolent pruning performed on all Christians to prepare them for salvation, for finishing their lives in a new beginning, however decisively it may look like an END:
Such sharpnes shows the sweetest FREND:
Such cuttings rather heal than REND:
And such beginnings touch their END.
(13–15)
We arrive at this overdetermined closure only to discover—to our relief—that it is already compromised, both by its association with beginnings, and by the suggestion that it was there all along, present outside of time and waiting to be discovered. This subversion of the poem's apparent sequence assures us that the Divine presence transcends chronological events and the losses they appear to cause. Donne's unstable religious poetry suggests that any assurance about salvation must be repeatedly hard-won through the speaker's anguish and hardsold to us through the voice of a preacher. Herbert's poetic constructions gradually reveal their solid foundation: the speaker's delight both in God and His gift of poetry become more manifest as extraneous conceits and letters are snipped away, and we approach the END.
"Coloss. 3.3" links its own poetical progression to a pilgrim soul's progress. By fusing poetic gimmickry and scriptural glossary, the poem
formally enacts the timeless grace overseeing the speaker's migration through time toward death:
Our life is hid with Christ in God
My words & thoughts do both expresse this notion,
That Life hath with the sun a double motion.
The first Is straight, and our diurnall friend,
The other Hid and doth obliquely bend.
One life is wrapt In flesh, and tends to earth.
The other winds towards Him , whose happie birth
Taught me to live here so, That still one eye
Should aim and shoot at that which Is on high:
Quitting with daily labour all My pleasure,
To gain at harvest an eternall Treasure .
The divine Word—the excerpt from Scripture stretched at an angle across Herbert's words—thus accompanies the speaker throughout his lifetime, finally manifesting its ultimate bounty. The same Word also saves the poem, giving the last word (after a minimal white-space) to a Testamentary speaker who can sustain it forever. The poem, like "Life" itself, has "a double motion," and in provoking its own retrospective rereading, it refutes a tragically linear view of life. Playing off Augustinian notions of double time,[46] Herbert juxtaposes mortal sequence with perpetual presence. Artistically, biographically, and theologically, death becomes salvation. What is buried at the bottom of the poem, what finally rises to view, is not a corpse but a living and "eternall Treasure ."
His Master's Voice: "God Doth Supplie the Want"
In many other, less markedly contrived poems, Herbert's last words belong to God. Herbert thus obeys his own recommendation in The Country Parson that the preacher make "many Apostrophes to God, as, Oh Lord blesse my people, and teach them this point; or, Oh my Master, on whose errand I come, let me hold my peace, and doe thou speak thy selfe."[47] Instead of seeking static integrity, as the pattern poems sometimes do, these poems accept the self-effacement necessary for admission to the divine sanctuary. As the soul (according to Herbert's "The Flower") must overcome its narcissistic craving for personal immortality, so must the poetic voice. The ability—and humility—to "copie out" the simplest word from God's book redeems both
the poet and his poem from the ending that is annihilation; the imitatio Christi becomes a redemptive act of plagiarism.[48] Copying becomes the ultimate achievement and explicit goal of the poem—I say "goal," because it is usually the opposite of a conclusion. To elicit a saving intervention, the voice of "The Church" must always acknowledge its own inadequacy, just as the speakers must avoid Pelagian impulses and, in a mortified Protestant spirit, let a divinity shape their rough-hewn ends. Anything else is not "a crown of praise" (the last words of "A Wreath") but a Tower of Babel.
"A True Hymne" argues that poetic success can be measured only by the piety it expresses and inspires. Technical skill may have its place, the poem asserts in its final lines, but
if th' heart be moved,
Although the verse be somewhat scant,
God doth supplie the want.
As when th' heart sayes (sighing to be approved)
O, could I love! and stops: God writeth, Loved .
(16–20)
This amendment validates the assertion in the moment of making it. Nothing more needs to be said, because the brief intervention of divine authorship both endorses and perfects a poetic effort whose voice has become, in several senses, passive. If "the soul unto the lines accords" (9–10), then the speaker's soul meets its end in a state of grace.
Herbert's "The Sacrifice" ends with Christ meeting His end:
But now I die; now all is finished.
My wo, mans weal: and now I bow my head.
Onely let others say, when I am dead,
Never was grief like mine.
(249–52)
One editor assures us that "the speaker throughout is Christ,"[49] but in this closing line, the poet's own words plausibly unite across time with Christ's endless ones, which have all along been in a continuing present tense. The line is invisibly double-struck on the page, to the extent that the grieving Herbert is among those "others." By recording this timely and timeless answer to the rhetorical question that ends the previous stanzas—"Was ever grief like mine?"—Herbert promptly responds to Christ's request. By rendering prophecy and fulfillment simultaneous,
the poem evokes the atonement of the soul with its Savior at the (literally) crucial moment of ending. The speaker's words, like his salvation, come from the body of Christ, and will be repeated forever by the body of Christian believers.
"The Sacrifice" appears to reverse Herbert's usual pattern: most of the poem is spoken by the Savior, and the human persona shares only in the closing words. But which voice the poem chooses to track in the perpetual dialogue of humanity and divinity is less important than the ultimate union of those two voices, which dispels the closural anxiety of death enough to allow the poet to finish his lyric.[50] Herbert's penitent grief remains perpetually present to Christ's perpetual suffering. By providing this last reflexive sympathetic response, Herbert's speaker precludes the available vengeful reading of these last words; if Christ's killers are already sorry, then he need not tell them that they will be. The burden of guilt imposed by Christ's sacrifice becomes the refrain of a song the sinner shares with his savior—as Herbert shared pious songs with his mother—to dispel the terrors of their shared mortality.
The anticipation of a saving divine voice applies equally to the poem and the speaker in "The Method," which chronicles a struggle for reconciliation with God—a reconciliation joyfully achieved (where it is most badly needed) in the poem's final line. As in Herbert's other complaint poems, the speaker must move beyond his accusation that "God refuseth still" (2) and blame instead his own failure to "look" toward or "heare" the divine good (13, 27); God will cure blindness and silence—in other words, oblivion—if humanity will let Him. The conscientious readiness to read creates a blank page on which God Himself writes, just as the readiness to listen in the final lines of "Deniall" creates a silence in which God Himself speaks. The poem's speaker reminds himself: "Seek pardon first, and God will say, / Glad heart rejoyce ." And so it has been said. We cannot tell whether those italicized words come directly from God (their first cause) or through the speaker's hopeful voice (as an efficient cause), and really we need not choose: the distinction is, happily, without difference. In this sense, "The Method" is the same story as "The Sacrifice," told from the human side. The benevolent divine voice has always been present, needing only the subsiding of the speaker's cacophonous self-will to become audible. As the mystic Jacob Boehme wrote at about the same time Herbert composed The Temple , if a man can "remain quiet for an hour or less in his inner self-will and
speaking, then the divine Will might speak into him."[51] The loss of that will and its worldly values is life rather than death.
Even when God does not appear to speak for himself, he lends the poet a redeemed voice in which to complete his verse, a tonic note that gives health and fulfillment to both the soul of the speaker and the form of the poem. The human voice can be made an echo of God's voice, as our bodies are made in His image. The only price of this blessing, as a citizen says to Shakespeare's Coriolanus, is to ask it kindly: a small price, perhaps, but one with large implications for the doctrine of irresistible grace. As Herbert himself writes in The Country Parson , "The thrusting away of his arme makes us onely not embraced."[52]
In the last stanza of "Nature" the struggling speaker asks God to write a saving ending directly onto his wayward spirit, to edit his spiritual tombstone into a tablet of commandments:
O smooth my ragged heart, and there
Engrave thy rev'rend law and fear;
Or make a new one, since the old
Is saplesse grown,
And a much fitter stone
To hide my dust, then thee to hold.
(13–18)
The echoes of "The Altar" (as well as of the Bible) are clear enough, but this time the speaker wants his heart to be reshaped into something less concrete, to reassure him that new life will sprout from his desiccated inward grave. Otherwise his soul might "turn to bubbles straight, / And thence by kinde / Vanish into a winde" (9–11). God's engraving will be an ungraving: the words will change the lifeless structure back into flesh. What lies in unredeemed closure at the end of this poem corresponds only to the speaker's body. What is beyond nature remains beyond "Nature," gratifyingly outside the limits of both the tomb and the poem. God will hold Herbert, if Herbert can be made worthy to hold God.
The saving relationship proves even more dialogic than might appear from this description: to save the speaker and the poem, God must undergo the same kind of change they request for themselves. The death-bound physical aspect of human existence, and the mortal flaws reflected in the uncorrected verse, correspond to the Old Testament covenant. Herbert and his words can escape closure only because the
Incarnation spared God's Word from the same fate. The antecedent of "new" and "old" in line fifteen is strategically ambiguous: God will make a smoother new heart in Herbert only by making a less fearsome new law for judging that heart. Until it is revised, the letter kills.
Noting in himself the signs of advancing age, the speaker of "The Forerunners" recurs repeatedly to some words from the Psalms—"Thou art still my God "—as a spell to ward off the threat of annihilation, of blankness, that might otherwise envelop both his poem and his consciousness:
The harbingers are come. See, see their mark;
White is their colour, and behold my head.
But must they have my brain? must they dispark
Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred?
Must dulnesse turn me to a clod?
Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God .
Good men ye be, to leave me my best room,
Ev'n all my heart, and what is lodged there:
I passe not, I, what of the rest become,
So Thou art still my God , be out of fear.
He will be pleased with that dittie;
And if I please him, I write fine and wittie.
(1–12)
The standard assumption that Herbert is worried about senility rather than death in this poem overlooks the use (by Herbert and his contemporaries) of "dulnesse" as a symptom of preterition rather than stupidity, and of "clod" as a synecdoche for the unredeemed corpse.[53] Relatedly, commentators have generally assumed that "I passe not" in lines 9 and 31 means "I do not care." But, given Herbert's distinct appetite for double meanings, the phrase is also likely to mean, "I myself do not pass away."[54] From this perspective, the speaker of "The Forerunners" derives full personal immortality, not merely an indifference to senility, from the magic psalmic phrase and the providential love it comports. Whatever other aspects of his poetic voice expire, he lives in that phrase as much as Donne does in his name inscribed in the window.
In "The Forerunners," Herbert multiplies his standard defense against the isolation of his mortal voice. To express and preserve what is truly essential about himself, paradoxically, Herbert must efface himself, quoting the psalmist who is quoting himself in a prayer God himself
quotes and binds (as Psalm 31) into his eternal Bible. When death silences the poetic nightingale, that unembellished phrase will preserve the core of the poem, and the meaning of the phrase will preserve the core of the poet:[55]
Yet if you go, I passe not; take your way:
For, Thou art still my God , is all that ye
Perhaps with more embellishment can say,
Go birds of spring: let winter have his fee,
Let a bleak palenesse chalk the doore,
So all within be livelier then before.
(31–36)
That an imperious monarch threatens to seize the rooms which constitute the speaker's identity is the fundamental metaphor of the poem. That this monarch will fulfill the speaker's piety and poetry (as a provident God) rather than erase them (as a blankly indifferent Death) is the fundamental consolatory assertion. Like its pale writer, "The Forerunners" subsides into white space, as those undergoing near-death experiences report travelling into a white light, fully expecting to be met and affirmed there. Just as "Thou art still my God " escapes both the historical composition and the sequential development of the poem—remains, in both senses, immutable—the poet's soul may hope (if his God is still his God) to persist when the eye, like the page, goes blank. He has been marked, but marked for new life through a divine visitation.
Psalm 38 evokes and then dissipates annihilationist anxieties:
But I am like a deaf man, I do not hear,
like a dumb man who does not open his mouth.
Yea, I am like a man who does not hear,
and in whose mouth are no rebukes.
But for thee, O LORD, do I wait;
It is thou, O LORD my God, who wilt answer.
(Psalm 38:13–15)
In "The Quip," this last line becomes Herbert's defensive spell, not only against worldly taunters and tempters, but also against the fears of voiceless oblivion. The speaker is a virtuous spirit withstanding the assaults and allures of Beauty, Money, Glory, Wit, and Conversation by allowing his silence to bespeak his faith in another world: each of the four middle stanzas ends with the Psalmist's, "But thou shalt answer,
Lord, for me." In the sixth and final stanza, however, the speaker looks forward to the day of final Judgment, when God will indeed answer for him simply by claiming his soul:
Yet when the houre of thy designe
To answer these fine things shall come;
Speak not at large, say, I am thine:
And then they have their answer home.
(21–24)
The ambiguity of the pronouns in the penultimate line—since the saying may be either quotation or indirect discourse—is precisely the point. God belongs to the speaker, because the speaker belongs to God, because he has spoken in His voice. "The Quip" here goes a step beyond the poems that triumphantly escape closure by ending in God's voice. Here, God's simple powerful words promise to intervene in some indeterminate future, the mere anticipation of which spares Herbert the obligation to make any temporal argument or to close any temporal dialogue. The ending confidently awaits an ending, as the speaker's humble human silence confidently awaits God's home thrust, the word of divine judgment. "The Quip" thus becomes a triumph of wit in which Herbert settles for the role of straight man. To win the argument against worldly enemies with silence is to win, prospectively, the argument against annihilation.
The key to salvation in The Temple is a conjunction of divine grace with humble human faith—hardly a surprising doctrine in the writings of a moderate English cleric such as George Herbert. His "Faith" shows how, when plea replaces pride and complaint, "grace fills up eneven nature" (32); it also fills up uneven lines of verse. God is a faith-healer, and he works on poetic feet as well as human ones, allowing them to continue their spiritual pilgrimage beyond their physical limits: "That apprehension cur'd so well my foot, / That I can walk to heav'n well neare" (11–12). Herbert thus offers his anxious readers special incentives for their receptivity to grace, most notably the same equanimity the speaker expresses about his mortal end, and that the poem evinces in the face of its own demise:
What though my bodie runne to dust?
Faith cleaves unto it, counting evr'y grain
With an exact and most particular trust,
Reserving all for flesh again.
(41–44)
Herbert evokes the conventional association of closure with death for the sake of subverting it; the last words point to the Christian promise of a new beginning at the general resurrection.
"Deniall" begins with the poetic prayer threatened by silence, as the poet is by despair:
When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent eares;
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse:
My breast was full of fears
And disorder:
(1–5)
Here as in the other stanzas, the typography reflects this disorder, and the truncated and unrhymed final line echoes the discontented silence that God seems unwilling to complete with a (saving) reply. Eventually the poem obliges us to recognize, in retrospect, that the problem is not God's "denial" of the speaker's requests, but the speaker's profound denial of God in the spirit of those requests; "silent eares" is not a solecism, but a hint that the speaker has actually neither managed to pray, nor listened for a response—which for Herbert are indistinguishable failings. As a prominent contemporary of Herbert's, John Everard, preached, "All the Artillery in the World, were they all dischardged together at one clap, could not more deaf the ears of our bodies than the clamorings of desires in the soul deaf its ears, so you see a man must go into silence or else he cannot hear God speak."[56]
When Herbert's speaker turns from complaint to humble entreaty in the final stanza, God mends the terminal rhyme—"making a chiming of a passing-bell," as Herbert writes in "The Flower." In the final syllable "Deniall" achieves an affirmative closure: an imbalanced but harmonious couplet marking his recoupling with God. This poetic redemption grants the speaker a renewed confidence that salvation will arrive in his hour of need, when his heartbeat gives way to the tolls of a death-knell:
O cheer and tune my heartlesse breast,
Deferre no time;
That so thy favours granting my request,
They and my minde may chime,
And mend my ryme.
(26–30)
Once denial is mercifully over, "Deniall" can end no less happily.[57] The disguised import of the title—that the speaker has been denying God,
not vice versa—reminds us that we, too, were in danger of misperceiving and undervaluing God's generosity.
Herbert's punning titles in "The Church" (such as "The Collar" and "Redemption") are particularly remarkable because the names of lyrics commanded very little attention in the Jacobean period; most poems had no consistent title except for their opening words, and the few that did rarely assigned the title any real hermeneutic function.[58] Herbert, however, makes his titles surrogates of divine presence, seated on high as wise judges and teachers of the responding reader. The titles "Drop from above," as divine blessing does in Herbert's rendering of "Grace," once we are prepared to receive them piously. They demand an eschatological reading: backwards from the revelation of Last Things. Moreover, because they exist outside of a poem's narrative sequence, applying equally to each utterance within that sequence, they become reflections of the idea that God is perpetually present, making linear time—which seems to doom us to mortality—an illusion which can be cured by reference to an authority above. As Nicolas Cusanus writes, "I can only read one letter in turn after another. . . . But Thou, lord, dost see and read the whole page together, in an instant."[59]
A particularly revealing example of this divine function concludes Herbert's "Home." As in "Deniall," the speaker at first misunderstands the obstacle between himself and God as temporal rather than spiritual, and as God's fault rather than his own:
Come Lord, my head doth burn, my heart is sick,
While thou dost ever, ever stay:
Thy long deferrings wound me to the quick.
(1–3)
Actually, God has not deserted, or even deferred, a good soul here; He is "staying" patiently by the sickbed of a sinner whose brain has contracted a hellish fever, whose heart has gone bad, and whose eyes have failed so severely that he pleads repeatedly for the Savior who is close by him to appear: "O shew thy self to me, / Or take me up to thee!" The speaker's yearning for home is here a yearning for death, which promises a reunion with God, schematized by the rhyme of "me" and "thee" in each refrain. The real self is waiting in death, not lost there:
What have I left, that I should stay and grone?
The most of me to heav'n is fled:
My thoughts and joyes are all packt up and gone,
And for their old acquaintance plead.
O show thy, & c.
Come dearest Lord, passe not this holy season,
My flesh and bones and joynts do pray:
And ev'n my verse, when by the ryme and reason
The word is, Stay , sayes ever, Come .
O show thy, &c.
(67–71)
A poem conventionally seeks the closure of rhyme; a living body conventionally flees the closure of death. The strength of this speaker's pious yearning, however, overrides both conventions: the homing device in his soul overrides ordinary worldly navigation, and he chooses the word that expresses his feelings over the word that fulfills his rhymescheme. In "Deniall," God's merciful intervention provides the rhyme missing in the previous stanzas; here the craving for divine mercy removes the rhyme present in the previous stanzas.
But perhaps the rhyme is relocated rather than eradicated. "Come " establishes at least an eye-rhyme with the title of the poem, "Home," the thing to which the speaker wants to reconcile himself, the place of his only true completion.[60] This again implies a triumph over the dangerous worldly illusions of place and time: instead of responding to the localized demands of its own stanza, the final rhyme-word attunes itself to the word that is perpetually present overseeing the poem, as God oversees the world. "Home"—the word as well as the place—is the locale of a perpetual reunion, and so there is nothing to be feared from an apparent ending of the worldly and poetic journeys.
If the word "Home" seems more applicable to a point of origin than a destination, it is worth remembering that Herbert probably wrote this poem in the five years between his mother's death and his own.[61] After the primary source of his being, his feeding, his love, and his faith is consumed by death, the "meat and drink" and the "woman-kinde" of "this weary world" become disgusting to him (37, 39). Escaping to heaven would mean returning to the womb and the breast that first gave him life; death is, to that extent, a regressive fantasy for Herbert. When humanity was doomed to mortality, he reminds God, "The help did in thy bosome lie . . . / There lay thy sonne; and must he leave that nest, / That hive of sweetnesse?" (16–20). Herbert's complacency in the face of death reflects a deep-seated trust that his mother will (again) pick him up, and give him life, in a moment of need.
Time out of Joint: "Our Disorder'd Clocks"
The orderly measures and enclosures of poetry have always been a precious commodity in the economy of human morale. As an exponential function of language itself, poetry provides a structure that can preserve the impression of meaning, and can record (along with other great human conquests) the conquest of time. Verse has often been assigned to hold the myths that make our existence comprehensible and therefore bearable. From this perspective, deconstruction is a dirty business, next to godlessness; an indeterminate universe is profoundly unsatisfying to the terminal cases inhabiting it. To vanquish death, a religion must tame linear chronology. Whereas several Eastern religions reconceive time as purely irrelevant or illusory, Christianity subjugates it to eschatology: salvation is a timeless condition produced through time, which is both our reality and God's illusion.
Herbert's poems offer and then correct the illusion of sequence, to glorify the time-transcending power of the God they praise. Because "all time is present with God,"[62] we need not die in the verb tenses we live by. God's omnipresence remedies our isolation in endless space, and his "omni-present" tense remedies our isolation in endless time. As eternal salvation is produced through mortal chronology, so Herbert's lyrics could hardly exist as their triumphant final simplicities and silences alone; without the preparatory process, no one would value a poem that said only, "My God, My King " ("Jordan [I]"). But with that preparatory process, these lyrics can imply that oblivion is not the only escape from the temporal.
Little wonder that Christian authors strove so heartily to associate immeasurable time with a benevolent ordering consciousness. The apparent timelessness of death—its endlessness in the experience of mourners, its oblivion projected into the experience of the dead—has proven extremely threatening in modern chronometric Western culture. Death reminds us that, whatever our clocks might seem to say, "the time [is] neither wrong nor right," as Robert Frost reports in the poem "Acquainted with the Night,"[63] and as Ingmar Bergman vividly depicts in the nightmare sequence of his movie Wild Strawberries . These mortally terrifying modern evocations of the clock without hands recall Donne's broken clocks and buried sundials, but also Eliot's "Little Gidding," a modernist meditation on the paradoxes of time under a
Christian eschaton. The "Little Gidding" to which Eliot refers was a small religious community, led by Nicholas Ferrar, where Herbert probably wrote much of The Temple . There Herbert would have been exposed daily to Ferrar's "Harmonies," which cross-correlated Biblical passages in ways that undermined all conventional notions of chronological sequence.[64] Herbert's pious poetic denial of mortal chronology thus has a history all its own, a history at once synchronic and diachronic.
The history of Herbert's death suggests how heavily he relied on this denial of linear time as a means of denying death. According to Walton's biography:
The Sunday before his death, he rose suddenly from his Bed or Couch, call'd for one of his Instruments . . . and having tun'd it, he play'd and sung:
The Sundays of Mans life,
Thredded together on times string,
Make Bracelets, to adorn the Wife
Of the eternal glorious King:
On Sundays, Heavens dore stands ope;
Blessings are plentiful and rife,
More plentiful than hope.
Thus he sung on Earth such Hymns and Anthems, as the Angels and he, and Mr Farrer , now sing in Heaven.[65]
Horatio-like, Walton feels compelled to deny the silencing of his hero's voice. But the lyric Herbert chose was itself an insistent refutation of mortal closure. "Sunday" begins:
O day most calm, most bright,
The fruit of this, the next worlds bud,
Th' indorsement of supreme delight,
Writ by a friend, and with his bloud;
The couch of time; cares balm and bay:
The week were dark but for thy light:
Thy torch doth show the way.
(1–7)
Christ leads us from this world to the next, from darkness to light; otherwise "Man had straight forward gone / To endlesse death: but thou dost pull / And turn us round" (15–17). By making the human body an analogue to time itself (8–14), and playing on the Renaissance association of that body with the number seven, Herbert gives it a place in the Christian rhythm of renewal, which his prayers allow him to join
"from sev'n to sev'n, / Till that we both, being toss'd from earth, / Flie hand in hand to heav'n!" (61–63). It is hard to imagine a more joyously assured choice of last words; on the seventh day, he will rest with God.
The joys of heaven and the defeat of time alike were purchased with Christ's agony and death. The first stanza of "Affliction (II)" urges God to recognize that killing the speaker daily with afflictions will prove both inadequate and superfluous, "since thy one death for me / Is more then all my deaths can be, / Though I in broken pay / Die over each houre of Methusalems stay" (2–5). The business of death, which includes making measurements (of time) absurd, has come under new management; God has reorganized it into a charity. The second stanza suggests that all men's tears, like their hours, are lost in an immeasurable sea; but since Christ has already absorbed more death and suffering than any mortal could experience, he has also perhaps absorbed the meaninglessness.
If "The Altar" is a poem prospectively replaced by its own configuration, "Affliction (II)" is a poem superseded by a symbolic form it cannot presume to imitate, a burden Christ must bear on its behalf. It is ultimately His "Affliction." The symbol of the cross—the symbol of death turned to life at the heart of Christianity—has prepaid and thus precluded "all my future mone" (15). And that is where the poem ends, not with its life or voice ended, but instead with its prospective sorrows retracted in favor of a silent joy, swallowed up into a rederuptively agonized past rather than a meaningless future. The poet can afford to fall silent here because all his hopes and fears have already been spoken for. All that is really silenced is a cry of pain that he will never be compelled to emit. The apparent termination of the poem in the sequential experience of a reader is refuted by the recognition that Christ's sacrificial miracle has changed, not just the valence of suffering, but also the directionality of time. Affliction, time, even death, have become the agencies of joyous endless life.
The same point is made more starkly by "Mortification"—another title that changes in meaning to reflect a (perpetually available) Christian recognition. What seems to refer to the steady passage through and toward mortality finally refers to the Christian humility that defeats mortality. The poem asserts the smothering presence of death, its vermicular insinuation of all our seemingly lively and life-affirming activities. Each six-line stanza moves from a third line ending in "breath"
to a sixth that ends in "death," and in sequence they tell a compressed Five Ages of Man story:
How soon doth man decay!
When clothes are taken from a chest of sweets
To swaddle infants, whose young breath
Scarce knows the way;
Those clouts are little winding sheets,
Which do consigne and send them unto death.
(1–6)
Like Marvell in "To His Coy Mistress," Herbert sedulously provokes claustrophobia in his audience, to augment the appeal of the release he finally offers from the linear path toward death. So when the poem expires—literally, runs out of the "breath" it has emphasized throughout—it does so with a plea for renewal: "Yet Lord, instruct us so to die, / That all these dyings may be life in death" (35–36). By the time the word "death" makes its closing appearance, it has already been neutralized by a new form of "life." If the process is full of endings, then the ending may be caught up in process; again, the retrospective activity of the responding reader corresponds to a reversal of the seemingly implacable movement through time and change toward death.
"Time" also describes a triumph over the conventional forces of chronological mortality, but its victory is equivocal. We come to the end of "Time," and yet the clock is still ticking. The speaker narrates an encounter with a Reaper whose grimness has been transformed by Christianity: if death is merely the passage to a better life, then this supposed "executioner" is actually "a gard'ner" (15–16). As in "Paradise" and "The Flower," even the harsher sort of agricultural metaphor can be adduced to offer a model for renewal after seeming annihilation; immortality manifests itself in perennials. But the Reaper becomes exasperated with—perhaps even suspicious of—the speaker's gloating, concluding that while the speaker claims to be eager to exchange his temporal existence for a blessed afterlife, "He doth not crave lesse time, but more" (30). This is deeply ambiguous: is the speaker proudly seeking eternity in place of earthly transience, or covertly seeking more time on earth through pious expostulations? Is this a prayer, or a filibuster? The former is the more orthodox reading, yet the poem certainly highlights the long-windedness of the speaker. Resisting vocal
closure becomes a version of, and a symbol of, resistance to death—as in children who protract disputes to defer the terrors of bedtime, or critics who seem unable to end lengthy books. In his letters, Donne jokes about "the dilatory ceremonies" Catholics indulged in before execution.[66] The common Christian desire to prepare properly for death may sometimes mask a fearful tactic of deferral.
So while this ending may describe Time's perplexity in front of a man confidently yearning for his perpetual reward, it seems alternatively to diagnose the speaker's volubility as a symptom of doubt, an effort to forestall the very death he claims to crave. If so, it would nicely exemplify the pattern—fearful resistance disguised as Christian confidence—that this book seeks to excavate from Jacobean culture. Herbert himself apparently has enough distance from this tendency to criticize it, but who then does this speaker represent? How many other Renaissance proclamations about the irrelevance of earthly time, how many texts ostensibly expressing a Christian contemptus mundi , may prove to be evasions of temporal extinction—quests for fame or for divine favor—rather than wholehearted affirmations of eternal providence?
Famous Last Words: "More" and Mort
Ars poetica and ars moriendi alike put considerable weight on last words.[67] Herbert's lyrics challenge poetic closure with the same riddle that Christian theology poses to death: when is an ending not an ending? He diligently marks closure as merely a "relief," or a "stay" awaiting ultimate Redemption. In the nothingness of death one may find "all" (as at the end of "Trinity Sunday," "The Quidditie" and "The Invitation"). Consider the last two poems discussed above. "Time" ends with the word "more," because the fundamental conflict between temporal life and Christian eternity generates an equivocation about what truly constitutes "more time." "Mortification" ends with the word "death," largely for the sake of proving that death can be defeated even in its native corner of the poetic landscape. Herbert's vocabulary of ending is largely divisible into these two words: "more," which promises to extend both life and poem into an indescribable Beyond; and "death," which is usually ingeniously transformed from a gravestone that marks termination into a stepping-stone toward a higher existence.
The great antecedent for Herbert's confidence in a closural "more" is Donne's "Hymne to God the Father," written (according to Walton) during Donne's dangerous illness of 1623.[68] Donne's first two stanzas end with the assertion that though God has forgiven him much, "When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For, I have more" (5–6). The poem, too, has more to come at those moments, but since it will not always, the poet's mortality-crisis can accrete around the poem's closural crisis. This tangle of gratitude and fear activates a series of puns, "done" with Donne, and "more," not only with Ann More, but with mort , death, the seeming opposite of more.[69] The first two refrains mean what they say, but they also warn God that he does not really "have Donne" yet, has not securely captured him for salvation, because he is still susceptible to new sin, which is both cause and effect of his fears of mortality. So his essential selfhood (located characteristically in his name) remains susceptible to mere annihilation. God has not done/ Donne, because Donne has not God, because God has not Donne/ done. Donne's Christian faith is unsettled, because mort may not be more, because he lacks conviction that it will be.
The vindication of this reading lies in the anxious concluding stanza, which extends the punning to express Donne's fear that he will not have the sun, because the Son will not have him. Donne is not expressing confidence here that he will be spared hell by divine payment of his sins; instead, he is offering to reward God for assurances against dark and destinationless annihilation, conceived in a pagan mode (13–18). God can win him by assuring him that death will not be (deservedly) the onset of an ultimate darkness. "No more" carries an emphatic threat of closure, yet here it implies (like "Death, Be Not Proud") that death itself will be extinguished. As in Colin's punning emblem in Spenser's "November" eclogue, "La Mort n'y Mord ": death has lost its sting.
The pun across languages serves to span the anxious gap between death and afterlife, and Herbert may have had Donne's word-play in mind when he ended "A Dialogue-Antheme" with "Christian" warning "Death" that, after the Last Judgment, Death itself "shalt be no more" (10). These last words announce that there will be no mort , that the ultimate closure will inaugurate eternal life. By allowing Death no reply, "A Dialogue-Antheme" displaces the burden of terminal silence, and employs the leverage of closure against the usual closural anxieties. "Praise (III)" ends each stanza of praise with the word "more," implying that neither version of the word marks a final enclosure:
O that I might some hearts convert,
And so take up at use good store:
That to thy chests there might be coming in
Both all my praise, and more!
(39–42)
This time Herbert surrenders his poetic voice, not in order to merge with the Word of God, but in order to elicit the pious response of other Christians. "Praise (III)" is thus less a self-contained lyric than a verbal catalyst designed to rouse a louder song at the very moment its own voice falls silent, as if joining a heavenly chorus at the moment of death.[70]
Herbert's characteristic alternatives to this terminal assertion of a "more" that undoes mort are the no less comfortable suggestions that a good Christian ends at "heavens doore" ("Church Musick"), "in heav'n above" ("The Glance"), at God's "breast" ("The Pulley"), with "salvation" ("An Offering"), or in "eternall blisse" ("Holy Scriptures [II]"). The poem "Sunday," which (we have seen) Herbert chose as a poetic last word on his deathbed, ends at "heav'n." In Herbert's two "Even-Song" poems, the terminal words are "for ever" and "rest," each of which elicits a fundamental annihilationist concern in a context that allows Christianity to dispel that concern.
The Williams manuscript version of "Even-Song" provides a stark example of Herbert's reliance on Christian faith and poetic form as allies against the fear of death. The occasion of Evensong—nightfall—is predictably an occasion for mortality-anxiety,[71] here manifest as a fear of endless repose in a dreamless darkness. Rather than permit the occasion of poetic closure to reinforce that anxiety, Herbert ends with a plea for new beginning, as evening services were understood as the beginning of the next liturgical day. Translated into Christian eschatology, the simple model of the daily solar cycle endorses the hope for renewal, as the seasonal cycle of vegetation in "The Flower" endorses that poem's warning that accepted endings are the only acceptable means to endlessness.
Yet the mysterious darkness at the end of a day or a life is still so threatening that Herbert must confuse dark and light through a series of strenuous paradoxes, finally construing night or death as the time when the soul has internalized the eternal radiance of God:
O lett my Soule, whose keyes I must deliver
Into the hands of senceles Dreames
Which know not thee; suck in thy beames
And wake with thee for ever.
The speaker, who at first sounded rather like the despondent Donne of the "Nocturnall upon St. Lucies Day," has found a "Good-Morrow"; the despairing entropy of the opening stanza, dusk to dust, has found its way to an endless sunlit morning, curing the horribly senseless dreams of the annihilationist grave. "Night, earths gloomy shade / fouling her nest," threatening to trap him in the cycles of natural decay (9–12), gives way to the sweet morning breast of Herbert's maternal God, who feeds with light instead of milk.
The poem that appears as "Even-Song" in "The Church" seems to run in the opposite direction: it begins with the blessing of "the God of love," and ends in simple "rest." But the struggle for light at the end of a dark tunnel remains prominent. The speaker must again confront the fear that the loss of the sun through time and of the Son through sin will turn his life into a brief, meaningless exhalation of the earth:
Thy diet, care, and cost
Do end in bubbles, balls of winde;
Of winde to thee whom I have crost,
But balls of wilde-fire to my troubled minde.
Yet still thou goest on.
And now with darknesse closest wearie eyes,
Saying to man, It doth suffice:
Henceforth repose; your work is done .
Thus in thy Ebony box
Thou dost inclose us, till the day
Put our amendment in our way,
And give new wheels to our disorder'd clocks.
I muse, which shows more love,
The day or night: that is the gale, this th' harbour;
That is the walk, and this the arbour;
Or that the garden, this the grove.
My God, thou art all love.
Not one poore minute scapes thy breast,
But brings a favour from above;
And in this love, more then in bed, I rest.
(13–32)
The defense—the psychic defense that denies death—here "rests" too; the imminent condemnation has been skillfully deflected by testimony that the poetry itself serves to corroborate. The metaphors of the penultimate stanza all serve to blur the conventional distinctions be-
tween life and death, to alter its harsh binary arithmetic of one and zero; their redundancy suggests the overdetermination of this essential denial. Night entails more enclosure than day, but only inasmuch as ports are more enclosed than oceans, porches than paths, orchards than flowerbeds. Life goes on, and it retains the imprint of human consciousness.
As in most of the poems discussed earlier in this chapter, God's vocal intervention corresponds to the moment of death. But by placing that italicized divine interjection in the middle of "Even-Song" rather than at the end, Herbert demonstrates that spiritual existence continues beyond death. Death becomes merely a "rest" before a new task, making nightfall and sleep into assurances about mortality rather than occasions to fear it. Herbert transforms the coffin-like "Ebony box" of stanza six into the fruitful protected landscapes of stanza seven, answering both the physical claustrophobia and the spiritual agoraphobia of annihilationism. In the same way, he offers an eternity that is not terrifyingly beyond measurable time. Herbert's God—an interventionist version of the watchmaker God his brother would bequeath to the Enlightenment—will simply make some repairs, and we will emerge from the timeless nightmare. God is a night-light, and an alarm clock. Assured that the Son or Sun of God will rise for him in love, whether on the cross or on the horizon, the speaker can dare to go to bed. As in "The Pulley," the word "rest" can promise "the rest," a residual benefit that matures beyond earthly limits (14–16). So as the final strains of "Even-Song" subside, the rest is not silence, but a sort of musical rest, a pause that emphasizes the beauty that follows. We may "rest" in peace without disappearing into eternity: in "the grave, the body lies still," Donne told his congregation, "but it is not a Rest, because it is not sensible of that lying still; in heaven the body shall rest, rest in the sense of that glory" (Sermons , V, 213). Herbert has again characteristically found a last word that allows him to elide fears into consolations.[72]
As a last word, "relief" is a viable alternative to the sabbatic "rest," particularly because "relief" suggests assistance and (as for the sentries in Hamlet ) the beginning of a new cycle.[73] After a series of symmetrically enclosed stanzas, "Sighs and Grones" ends with a stanza expressly concerned with the fear of death as mere ending:
But O reprieve me!
For thou hast life and death at thy command;
Thou art both Judge and Saviour, feast and rod ,
Cordiall and Corrosive : put not thy hand
Into the bitter box; but O my God,
My God, relieve me!
The prayers for reprieve or relief that bracket the stanza reflect an imperfectly voiced prayer for retrieval from the ending that is merely a box of wormwood. The poem threatens to forfeit its metaphoricity, revealing a man afraid he will be strewn with quicklime rather than any revivifying holy water. In this sense, "Sighs and Grones" treats death in much the way Donne's "Loves Alchymie" treats sex, hiding in plain sight a disgusting materialist perspective on the human body. Herbert's theological discussion of Last Judgment edges uneasily close to the fears of sheer physical decay, damnation reconceived as the corrosion of the grave, where the worm never dies.
All the standard symptoms of Renaissance mortality-anxiety haunt the brief lyric "Complaining": the fear of becoming mere "clay" and "dust" in stanza one, of resembling a pointlessly redundant and imminently mortal "flie" in stanza two, of forfeiting the ordinary functions of "throat or eye" in stanza three, and, in the fourth and final stanza, of amounting to a mere "houre" or "inch" in an infinite universe. When it ceases complaining, "Complaining" ceases, but does not die: "let thy gracious power / Contract my houre, / That I may climbe and finde relief" (18–20). There the poem willingly subsides, as if the turn from complaint to humble plea had itself been enough to earn the speaker, and the poem, an ending that is "relief."
Much of the appeal of "Redemption" lies in the shock value of its abrupt and enigmatic ending. The poem concludes with a paramount example of famous last words and a stark assertion of death: the Lord "straight, Your suit is granted , said, and died" (14). God's last word is, characteristically, "granted"; but the poem's last word is "died," marking the distance remaining between Christ's gift and the human recognition of that gift. The glorious paradox of Christianity (here radically defamiliarized) is that these are essentially the same word. Christ's real last word is His voluntary expiration, which renegotiates the speaker's stringent lease with God. Only by choosing to endure a mortal end does Christ enable us to escape our finitude. The speaker's stunned suspension between relief and sorrow at the end of the poem is a necessary suspension for any Christian contemplating the Passion. The abrupt
poetic ending provokes us to continue intellectually beyond the end of the poem—or (which is essentially the same thing) to retreat back into the poem in review. As we review, absorb, and extend the poetic movement, we receive the poetic moral. Christ's physical dying redeems us from linear time, as well as from spiritual bankruptcy.
What looks literally and figuratively like a death-sentence at the end of "Vanitie (I)" is successfully appealed to the divine life-source. Herbert's usual tactics for opening his readers' hearts to God are all manifest here. The Christian God is a Lord of love, not merely of power, if we will accept His infinite tenderness; God is not hidden, He is everywhere obvious, if we will cease averting our eyes in petty pride and despair. The ostensible topic of "Vanitie (I)" is Renaissance discovery, the scientific and colonial explorations that (my Introduction argues) threatened to reveal a cold and overwhelming universe. To Herbert, these exertions of his imperialist culture are symptoms, as well as provocations, of doubt. The progress of the poem appears to ally itself with the progress of these technologies, before finally rejecting progress altogether in favor of presence, and technology in favor of theology. A divine revelation has been gloriously available all around us every day (stanza four), while men eke out the petty revelations of worldly analysis from top (astronomy, stanza one) to bottom (pearl-diving, stanza two) and everywhere inbetween and within (chemistry, stanza three). The poem thus depicts an illusion of progress in the Renaissance, which by itself might appear to constitute a progression toward deeper and deeper truths, but (to the spiritual eye) produces only rape, decay, and destruction.
Against that scientific version of the Renaissance, God offers the miracle of spiritual rebirth. The end of "Vanitie (I)" insists that the saving truths are not found by accretive or corrosive process, but by immediate appreciation. To overlook life so badly in pursuit of it seems finally even stranger than the Christian paradox of finding life by seeking death. The dizzying heights of the sky and depths of the ocean become consolingly irrelevant, since blessedness is in the soil of every backyard and the soul of every willing Christian. As in our own bewilderingly large and technological world, a stubborn domesticity seems the nearest way to immortality. By abjuring progress, in either sense, the poem reinforces its assurance that one can escape the linear model of time and the facts of biological science that together steer us toward individual annihilation, and steer our cultures toward atomistic annihilationism.
Instead, the final line of "Vanitie (I)" (like those of "Mortification" and "Vertue") simply replaces the word "death " with "life "; as so often in Herbert's lyrics, God does His work in italics.
Waiting at the Terminal: "As If Thy Love Could Fail"
Clearly Herbert was determined to demonstrate that death could be confronted at an ending, as an ending, without precluding hope for a redeemed afterlife. To prove his confidence, he plays at a kind of brinkmanship with the terrors of annihilationism. His "Longing" seems actually to expire in despair, with "dyes" as its last word. In theme and form, "Longing" is highly reminiscent of "Deniall," but this time there is evidently no response from God (or perhaps no room for Him in the desperate heart and the closed rhyme-scheme). By being closed in itself, in its own voice, the poem must merely end, as must the longing soul unless God graciously intervenes. What mitigates this threat is (aptly) Herbert's "Church," which rescues the individual poem from its damning isolation, as Herbert's church rescues souls whose individual communion with God might falter: the poem following "The Longing" begins, "Away, despair; my gracious Lord doth heare."[74] So this note of despair yields to a footnote of redemption, another ending transformed into a new beginning. But the danger of terminal failure apparently persists even within Herbert's "Church." It remains at least conceivable that the governor's pardoning call might never come—not audibly, at least—before the death-sentence is carried out as an irreversible closure.
Herbert's chief poetic effort to respond to the Passion, "The Thanksgiving," appears to fall short of any conventionally satisfactory ending. Yet what looks like final defeat may lead to final victory. The speaker finds apt ways to repay (often through writing) several of the blessings that Christ so painfully won for him, but each response falls two syllables short of repaying its metrical debt; and in the end the speaker must be simultaneously saved and defeated by the Passionate sacrifice which no mortal can reciprocate, since we have no immortality to abjure. This human incapacity breaks the balance and the flow of the poem, leaving no recourse for the poet or the poem other than meek surrender—which
is the silence, the awed death of the will, that qualifies the unworthy soul for salvation.
The art of this poetry, like the art of Christian dying, lies in the terrible beauty born of failure. Only by welcoming its own demise can the human voice appropriately respond to the astonishing fact for which thanks are here given—most truly given by finally giving no thanks except astonishment. The failure of poetic closure, however guilt-ridden, celebrates the defeat of closure in individual human experience. The poem finishes its term with a deficit, but Christian salvation depends on an acknowledged debt; and in Reformation Christianity any expectation of closing out one's own accounts successfully would itself be damnable. In content as in form, neat closure would be an empty triumph indeed; but by defining death as debt (a familiar Renaissance pun), Christianity renders it susceptible to restitution from different sources. As so often in "The Church," when the poetic heartbeat falters, when the EKGs of meter and refrain suddenly read flat, that is precisely where true salvation can intervene; Christ's sacrifice is the heroic measure taken to save both poem and poet, at their moment of seemingly tragic failure.
Sometimes, however, the defaults of Herbert's spiritual repayment, marked by failed endings, threaten to foreclose his bond with God in a way that precludes redemption. Avoiding closure is consoling only if the continuation is marked as salvation. In "Grief," poetry is defeated—rather than enhanced, as Herbert usually implies—by theological concern. Trapped in the "narrow cupboard" of earth, the speaker's grief "excludes both measure, tune, and time." The poem overflows its sonnet form, but with an expression of despair rather than renewal: "Alas, my God!"[75]
Since Herbert's God responds to faith rather than to grievances, complaining about spiritual frustration initiates a vicious cycle; like the cycle of human generations, it is profoundly futile unless grace interrupts and augments it. Without any compass, without any point of celestial reference by which to navigate, the wayward soul can wander in circles indefinitely. "Sinnes Round" might be compared to another cyclical work such as "JESU," but this time the closing repetition of the opening line becomes an index of futility rather than redemption, since by the end it means nothing more to either the reader or the speaker than it did the first time.[76] The joyless carousel of "Sinnes Round" ends as it begins,
with "Sorrie I am, my God, sorrie I am," itself a repetitive statement in which apology never breaks free from desperate self-denigration. In between, the final line of each stanza serves—or rather, imposes itself—as the opening line of the next one. The speaker is left repeating his apology like an actor desperately repeating a cue into the wings, waiting for the entrance of the divine voice that so often resolves both the religious and the prosodic perplexities of other poems; but his words never become Word.
Linear time can be even less consoling than cyclical time, because the body is bound to deteriorate regardless of the condition of the soul, and its endings are rarely happy. "Church-Monuments" is Herbert's most direct confrontation with the stubbornly physical aspect of human mortality. In form as in content, the poem studies death as decay: the lines and sentences about the crumbling of corpses and tombstones themselves collapse in enjambment and shifting syntax, and meaning disperses in the dust.[77] Nor does the message finally seem to escape this medium. "While" and "Here," the anchors of the first two lines, the anchors of human sanity as well, yield to infinities of time and space:
While that my soul repairs to her devotion,
Here I intombe my flesh, that it betimes
May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;
To which the blast of deaths incessant motion,
Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,
Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust
My bodie to this school, that it may learn
To spell his elements, and finde his birth
Written in dustie heraldrie and lines;
Which dissolution sure doth best discern,
Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.
These laugh at Jeat, and Marble put for signes,
To sever the good fellowship of dust,
And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,
When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat
To kisse those heaps, which now they have in trust?
(1–16)
Signs here lose their reference in a kind of infinite regress, pulling each other into the abyss. What geologists call "deep time" atomizes even the tombstones meant to prolong our identities and forestall the scattering of our bodies. The love these stones supposedly express diminishes to a
transient optical illusion, and our trust in them becomes an utterly futile defense against the implications of eternity for individual mortal beings. As in "JESU" and "The Flower," Herbert reverts to the metaphor of spelling, but this time, instead of discovering God's providential Word written everywhere in His world, the speaker finds his own body broken down into a kind of periodic table of elements. How can one adequately fit oneself against the "fall" that is the end of "Church-Monuments"? The poem contains an admonition against sin, but no assurance at all of salvation; philosophy, but no spirituality. The poem is moralized, but also demoralized; a memento mori is superfluous in an entropic vision of the universe. Deprecating the value of monumental tombs, Thomas Browne comments that a Christian "cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow;"[78] but neither can a person who believes in eternal annihilation rather than eternal afterlife.
"Employment (II)" is arguably the blackest hole in the starry night of The Temple . In its darkness and futility, it comes even nearer to Donne's "Nocturnall upon St. Lucies Day" than does the Williams-manuscript "Even-Song." Though little noted and innocuously titled, "Employment (II)" expresses vividly the dangerous doubts that are generally visible only as resistance elsewhere in the volume.[79] Human life becomes a voyage to nowhere, a running in unenlightened circles until we drop straight into ultimate darkness. The moral of Herbert's poem sounds surprisingly like Drummond's wistful warning (written at about the same time) that "Every day we rise and lie down, apparel our bodies and disapparel them, make them sepulchres of dead creatures, weary them and refresh them; which is a circle of idle travails and labours, like Penelope's task, unprofitably renewed" (p. 31).
As Ernest Becker observes, employment is often a function of denial: "The defeat of despair is not mainly an intellectual problem for an active organism, but a problem of self-stimulation via movement. Beyond a given point man is not helped by more 'knowing,' but only by living and doing in a partly self-forgetful way" (p. 199). The speaker of "Employment (II)" never pauses to receive God's message, apparently for fear there will be none; what might pass for high aspiration is here exposed as a defensive compulsion. He will undertake the silly businesses of worldly life for lack of any better otherworldly offers, in a futile flight from death:
He that is weary, let him sit.
My soul would stirre
And trade in courtesies and wit,
Quitting the furre
To cold complexions needing it.
Man is no starre, but a quick coal
Of mortall fire:
Who blows it not, nor doth controll
A faint desire,
Lets his own ashes choke his soul.
(1–10)
Determined to remain in motion, the speaker becomes increasingly aware that his efforts are unproductive in themselves and impossible to sustain. Survival depends on remaining busily distracted from the pointlessness of survival. Employment seems justifiable only because a human being, like an ember, must move through the air to sustain its heat for a while.
No transcendence lends significance to these essentially physical efforts. The glowing coal might evoke symbolically the Hermetic spark, the Gnostic pneuma , except that it here seems doomed to die in a body of ashes and earth.
But we are still too young or old;
The man is gone,
Before we do our wares unfold:
So we freeze on,
Untill the grave increase our cold.
(26–30)
With this chilling last word, Herbert's characteristic wait for divine intervention has become Waiting for Godot.[80] The final chill corresponds to the silence of closure, both pointing toward the annihilationist grave. The man, the poet, is buried with his talents. The impossibility of properly serving God—the subject of many Herbert lyrics, and the titular subject of this one—transmutes into the possibility that there is no God to serve. If life seems a fool's errand, it may be because, as the Biblical fool says in his heart, there is no God, at least none offering a timely answer to these nihilistic anxieties. As idle hands are proverbially the devil's workshop, and out-of-work workers the arms of rebellion, so are unemployed spiritual yearnings the eyes of a terrible atheistic vision.
The corrosive function of my larger argument might be strengthened by ending on this despondent note, but that would misrepresent the consolatory thrust of Herbert's poetry as a whole, which must admit the possibility of suffering and despair to show the miraculous ease with which God can repair the body spiritual of the patient human. The Reformation both reflected and encouraged an increased emphasis on the individual in Renaissance society, and it is not surprising that (as Debora Shuger observes) "the locus of the sacred shrinks to the private spaces of the psyche" in The Temple .[81] This narrowing made heaven a cozier place, but also a smaller target; it became more difficult to tell faith from pride, and a paradise within from a solipsistic fantasy. Herbert had to demonstrate that, even in imposing the punishment of death, God remained a constant friend to our varying interiorities. Through his remarkable flair for parable and innocence of tone, Herbert maintains a voice that at once reflects the intimate subjectivity of Reformation piety, and remains open to a wide range of readers as an affirmation of their common experience of God. His speakers tell their individual stories of search and inward discovery in a way that allows us to travel along, sometimes even further than the speakers themselves.
The trip is not always a pleasant one, but it can lead to salvation, without ever moving toward it. At any place in the world, and at any moment in time, the blessed soul can step off the train of "Employment," off the unmerry-go-round of "Sinnes Round," and into the sweet chariot that carries weary pilgrims to a timeless "Home." Death is not an end, for Herbert, but a means to an end. "The Search," for example, ends with the finding of God, but it begins as if it were in the elegiac genre of "Lycidas," a futile search for some meaningful remainder of a beloved lost to death:
Whither, O, whither art thou fled,
My Lord, my Love?
My searches are my daily bread;
Yet never prove.
My knees pierce th' earth, mine eies the skie;
And yet the sphere
And centre both to me denie
That thou art there.
(1–8)
As in the other complaint poems, God may seem to "denie" His presence, even if He has actually been present from the beginning, as in the "daily bread."[82] But what if it is God Himself—the sphere whose
center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere—who has died? The notion of God's death is not merely glib modern skepticism or Nietzschean self-assertion; it is the most fundamental premise of Christianity. Herbert here assumes a voice much like that of the conventional Mary Magdalen figure who understands her beloved Christ as a bodily creature now gone forever. A terror that the Crucifixion had taken away the only God accessible to humanity seems to permeate "The Search":
Where is my God? what hidden place
Conceals thee still?
What covert dare eclipse thy face?
Is it thy will?
(29–32)
What if God's will now exists only as that other kind of testament, bequeathing to us a universe we cannot profitably manage on our own? If divine omnipresence makes one place everywhere, then this divine absence collapses anyplace into nowhere: "East and West touch, the poles do kiss" (43). We can only hope that (as in "Antiphon [II]") the countdown from two to one in the final line bespeaks an at-one-ment of the speaker with God, assuring eternal being, rather than a descent toward nullification.[83]
By refusing to narrate a satisfactory ending, "The Pilgrimage" instructs its readers in the Protestant answer to despair. The first words from Herbert's pilgrim, as from Dante's, suggest that he is in the middle of wandering through life, but the paradisal ending of the journey is far less explicit in Herbert's Reformed version than in Dante's more traditional one.
At some point in his hopeful expedition, the pilgrim confronts the prospect of mortality, which (as in the mid-life crisis depicted by modern social psychology) throws all his purposes into doubt at the height of achievement, leaving him (like the speaker of "Employment [II]") alternately frantic with denial and new enterprises, and passive with morbid depression:
At length I got unto the gladsome hill,
Where lay my hope,
Where lay my heart; and climbing still,
When I had gain'd the brow and top,
A lake of brackish waters on the ground
Was all I found.
(19–24)
Those final two lines describe and evoke a desperate letdown. The disappointment is worse than any defeat, because it arouses a terror that the world, which had seemed so richly populated with allegorical sigificances (4–6), might be merely a physical place in which our actions have no meaning beyond the schemes of desire we generate to keep ourselves in motion—as if Don Quixote were being rewritten as a theological tragedy. This pilgrim's anguish resembles the anguish of Donne's "Loves Alchymie" and "Farewell to Love," which expose his scheme of romantic transcendence as a shallow projection onto what is merely another all-too-temporal, all-too-physical event.
What if the human pilgrimage is merely employment rather than progress? What if the sufferings of this life are not a preparation for some eternal reward, and the envisioned mountaintop is merely a saltwater swamp, aswarm with stinging insects, to which we all contribute our tears:
With that abash'd and struck with many a sting
Of swarming fears,
I fell, and cry'd, Alas my King;
Can both the way and end be tears?
Yet taking heart I rose, and then perceiv'd
I was deceiv'd:
My hill was further: so I flung away,
Yet heard a crie
Just as I went, None goes that way
And lives: If that be all, said I,
After so foul a journey death is fair,
And but a chair.
("The Pilgrimage," 25–36)
This ending is hardly a satisfying closure; it seems, in both senses, graceless. The narrative and the poet seem to have given themselves over to mere exhaustion, just as the speaker has.
Yet by provoking our dissatisfaction, Herbert compels us to look beyond the end of the poem, and beyond the consciousness of the speaker. The paradox of Christian heroism makes the apparent anticlimax of "The Pilgrimage" into a perfect fulfillment. What the speaker (and very likely the reader) at first takes to be the voice of the standard way-blocker of chivalric romance—the troll at the bridge—can be reinterpreted, by thinking in a new genre, as the misunderstood voice of a benevolent God who says, "None sees my face and lives" (Exodus 33:20, King James version). Herbert characteristically provokes a generic misprision that exposes a theological error. At about the time Herbert apparently began writing The Temple , Zacharie Boyd attacked
precisely this error with yet another rhetorical question: "What is this, that men should so feare death, which is the end of the louie and cumbersome way of our pilgrimage. Hath not God made death like a chariote to a wearied man, for to carie him to his everlasting rest?"[84]
By surrendering to death at the end, the speaker becomes eligible for the exaltation he sought all along. A train leaves from this terminal. In "Mortification," "A chair or litter shows the biere, / Which shall convey him to the house of death" (29–30); in "The Pilgrimage," the sedanchair that the speaker sardonically imagines coming for him in the guise of death at the end may be a Charon for the penniless, a sweet chariot of Christian salvation.[85] Even if one finds traces of absolute meaning in the temporal world—rocks of Pride to sidestep, wilds of Passion to traverse, good Angels to embrace—one still cannot navigate to heaven. This, then, is a Reformed pilgrimage: a story of rescue rather than achievement. The ending of the poem and the ending of the speaker are again redeemed together, in a way that answers the darkest human fears.
Last Things: From "Death" to "Love"
"The Church" ends with a consolatory eschatology, a poetic sequence that resists closure by telling a story of salvation. Aptly, the sequence begins with "Death" and ends with the ultimate version of "Love,"[86] moving from a literalist view of the corpse to an allegory of eternal redemption. Herbert thus offers a perspective on mortality much like that of Thomas Browne (p. 116), who thinks
the way to be immortall is to die daily, nor can I thinke I have the true Theory of death, when I contemplate a skull, or behold a Skeleton with those vulgar imaginations it casts upon us; I have therefore enlarged that common Memento mori , into a more Christian memorandum, Memento quatuor novissima , those foure inevitable points of us all, Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell.
Herbert's "Death" begins by equivocating on the distinction between death as a realistic physical condition of humanity, and death as an allegorically externalized enemy of humanity:
Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,
Nothing but bones,
The sad effect of sadder grones:
Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.
(1–4)
This is the emblematic figure of the skeleton, but one deprived of articulation, deprived of even the prospective music by which Herbert repeatedly dispels the fear of mere oblivion.
Again Herbert arouses this annihilationist anxiety for the purpose of attributing it to a narrow, materialist conception of (last) things, the kind preceding centuries had expressed through the macabre:
For we consider'd thee as at some six
Or ten yeares hence,
After the loss of life and sense,
Flesh being turn'd to dust, and bones to sticks.
We lookt on this side of thee, shooting short;
Where we did finde
The shells of fledge souls left behinde,
Dry dust, which sheds no tears, but may extort.
(5–12)
The speaker thus reproaches us for imposing our worldly perspective—or, more precisely, our worldly horizon—on the fate of the soul. He hints, further, that while we do so under the guise of pity for the dead, we are actually seeking reassurance for ourselves. The dead feel no sorrow, and crave no commiseration, but extort our tears by holding hostage our narcissistic valuation of ourselves, displaced into the future. These stanzas discourage some of the commonplace strategies of denial, such as hiding behind time to avoid confronting timelessness, and mourning the residual body to avoid contemplating the evanescent soul. Herbert does not empower the macabre here (his decay is dry where Donne's is soggy), any more than he evokes hellfire in other poems, despite the immense popularity of disgusting transi figures and horrifying portraits of damnation in the art and sermons of the period.
In this sense, "Death" endorses my claim that such images became popular precisely by helping to hide the repressed fear of annihilation behind a bold acknowledgment of the fear of death; they are denial conveniently disguised as confrontation. In this reading of the denial of death, as in New Historicist readings of political hierarchy, the cultural conspiracy defends itself by permitting an apparent subversion that ultimately enables containment. The vivid residue of the body, even the vivid torments of hell, commonly serve to solve the unrepresentability of death, and thereby to mitigate the fear of purely annihilated consciousness. Morbidity appears as a sort of hysterical symptom, a limiting illness tolerated precisely because it helps limit a terrible thought cathected to it; in "Death," Herbert plays the role of psychotherapist, showing that
we do not really need to hide from the eternal by fixating on the macabre. By showing himself unafraid to confront the transience and ultimate insignificance of the body, Herbert can more effectively project his confidence in the soul as a permanent bearer of meaning.
Against the nightmares born of repression, Herbert offers a dreamvision of death itself gloriously resurrected. Everyone is welcome at the doomsday celebration, because spiritual grace will assure physical grace:
But since our Saviours death did put some bloud
Into thy face;
Thou art grown fair and full of grace,
Much in request, much sought for, as a good.
For we do now behold thee gay and glad,
As at dooms-day;
When souls shall wear their new aray,
And all thy bones with beautie shall be clad.
Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust
Half that we have
Unto an honest faithfull grave;
Making our pillows either down, or dust.
(13–24)
The poem reasserts its confidence by willingly ending in "dust." This speaker is neither afraid of the physical nor much impressed by it, and his confidence that the grave will prove a "faithfull" bed contrasts significantly with Donne's anxiety about that very topic in "The Relique."
What follows "Death"—after an indeterminate white-space—is "Dooms-day." In a characteristic swerve of genre, Herbert rewrites carpe diem motifs into a mild Dies Irae lyric.[87] The lover called upon is Christ, who, instead of initiating the experience of bodily love, will renew the experience of bodily life. Resurrection cures an ailment that is at once terrible physical pain and a complete lack of physical sensation, as if the agonies of dying had remained imprinted in these corpses through an oblivious interim:
Come away,
Make this the day.
Dust, alas, no musick feels,
But thy trumpet: then it kneels,
As peculiar notes and strains
Cure Tarantulaes raging pains.
(7–12)
The movement of the poem is backward toward the beginning (of the line) as well as onward toward the end (of the page); typography recapitulates Christian eschatology, in yet another formal defense against the notion of a linear path through time toward oblivion.
Herbert suggests that there is nothing to fear but this fear itself:
Come away,
O make no stay!
Let the graves make their confession,
Lest at length they plead possession:
Fleshes stubbornnesse may have
Read that lesson to the grave.
Come away,
Thy flock doth stray.
Some to windes their bodie lend,
And in them may drown a friend:
Some in noisome vapours grow
To a plague and publick wo.
(13–24)
Corpses threaten us with a spiritual as well as a physical contagion. Christ must hurry, because the longer the dead remain in their graves, the more people will begin to suspect and rumor that no resurrection is forthcoming—a loss of faith that might indeed doom us to eternal death.
Bodily decay is important only to the extent that it provokes a decay of belief. The chaotic scattering of human dust—the problem that worries Donne about the logistics of Judgment Day (Sermons , III, 97, 109)—reflects the threat of annihilation, and the decentering of the human project, in the Jacobean period:
Come away,
Help our decay.
Man is out of order hurl'd,
Parcel'd out to all the world.
Lord, thy broken consort raise,
And the musick shall be praise.
(25–31)
The answer to this fatal disease called death in the individual, or deathconsciousness in the culture as a whole, lies in poetic music or Christian mythology, things that (especially as Herbert combines them) restore shape and scope to our existence by promising to restore the integrity and viability of our bodies.
After this "Dooms-day" summons comes "Judgement," which emphasizes the consoling side of Reformation doctrines that allow God to choose his own society of souls. Since no human being can testify on his own behalf without thereby incriminating himself (of the deadly sin of pride), the speaker invokes the New Testament as a defendant might invoke the Fifth Amendment. Scanning his Book of Life for "some leaves therein / So void of sinne" as to preclude damnation (8–9) would be futile; as Donne observes, "if we will stand mute , and have nothing to say to God, we are condemned already, condemned in our silence; and if we do plead, we have no plea, but guilty " (Sermons , III, 203). This was the paradox troubling Marlowe's Faustus in his opening soliloquy:
If we say that we have no sinne
We deceive our selves, and there is no truth in us.
Why then belike we must sinne,
And so consequently die,
I, we must die, an everlasting death.
(B-text, 1.1.69–73)[88]
Instead of turning to books of magic, Herbert's speaker replaces the chronicle of his sinful life with "a Testament" of God's own words, with Christ's testamentary will:
But I resolve, when thou shalt call for mine,
That to decline,
And thrust a Testament into thy hand:
Let that be scann'd.
There thou shalt finde my faults are thine.
(11–15)
This ending wittily converts Christ's voluntary assumption of the burden of human sinfulness into a version of the Measure for Measure defense, in which a man cannot be condemned for a crime of which the judge is no less guilty.
The result is evidently an acquittal, because the next poem is "Heaven." The Echo device Herbert employs here crystallizes a central paradox of Herbert's catechistic theology: that God can be omnipresent yet also responsive, dialogic. God takes over the ending of every line in "Heaven," as elsewhere in "The Church" He takes over the endings of individual lyrics and, it is thereby implied, of individual lives. A close look at any pious ending will find in it a signal of a redemption from
beyond, harmonizing from heaven with the earthly voice. Poetic wit thus becomes a metaphor for divine benevolence, from the opening to the closing lines:
O who will show me those delights on high?
Echo: I
Thou Echo, thou art mortall, all men know
Echo: No
(1–4)
Light, joy, and leisure; but shall they persever?
Echo: Ever .
(19–20)
Like the Williams-manuscript "Even-Song," "Heaven" disavows its closure by ending with "Ever." The end of the line is not, so to speak, the end of the line; it is the site of a reunion with God. What is written on these pious "leaves" is indeed "the echo then of blisse" (5–12). As in Paradise Lost , the reader must learn to recognize the pagan deity as an inferior or misperceived type—indeed, a mere echo—of the redeeming Christian godhead.
To misread that typology is to court despair through skepticism. Echo is notorious for her attachment to Narcissus, and we might easily mistake divine responses for the projected residue of our egoistical desires. Many of Herbert's happy endings—which double as renewals of the divine voice—could be depreciated on precisely that basis. Correctly read, "Heaven" is a consoling exhibition, both in form and in content, because it suggests that what might seem merely a reverberation of our desires is truly an affirmation from beyond, however well hidden (like the "chime" in "Deniall") inside the words of human plea. That plea itself, as Reformation theology would insist, proves ultimately to be part of a redemptive plan for atonement with the divine Word.
We thus arrive in Heaven and meet a final incarnation of Love, "Love (III)." The house of death becomes a cozy inn, perhaps even the body of a beloved offering a desirable mutual consummation. The movement out of life proves finally to be a movement into love, and it becomes difficult even to know the difference. Like the scene encountered by the astronaut at the end of the film 2001 , this is, oddly, an interlude of ordinary earthly domesticity, somehow lifted out of time. Herbert ends "The Church" sequence not with a whisper, but a banquet, not with a
muting finality, but with an extension of worldly sensual life. Part of the appeal of rituals, including Communion, is their existence outside of time, their ability to create their own stable and manageable chronology, as well as their ability to assert the local and sensible presence of the transcendent. The anti-closural poetic of the lyrics within The Temple culminates in the anti-eschatological theology of this closing scene.
"The Church" then ends with a coda of new beginnings. It announces its official "FINIS" with a quotation from the Book of Luke in the New Testament. Before disappearing back into heaven, the heavenly host spoke these same hopeful words, promising new birth, to the shepherds watching their flocks by night: "Glorie be to God on high, and on earth peace, good will towards men ." These are the opening words of the Gloria in Excelsis that the Book of Common Prayer designated as the end of the Holy Communion service.[89] So this ending begins another ending that promises a new beginning and "world witthout end."[90]
Even this highly equivocal conclusion only prepares The Temple to begin again with "The Church-Militant," which is itself a kind of anticlosural device.[91] "The Church-Militant" begins by praising God for controlling the extremes of space and time—"The smallest ant or atome knows thy power, / Known also to each minute of an houre"—then closes with an "Envoy" that begs Christ to silence annihilationism:
Let not Sinne devoure thy fold,
Bragging that thy bloud is cold,
That thy death is also dead,
While his conquests dayly spread;
That thy flesh hath lost his food,
And try Crosse is common wood.
Choke him, let him say no more,
But reserve his breath in store,
Till thy conquests and his fall
Make his sighs to use it all,
And then bargain with the winde
To discharge what is behinde.
Blessed be God alone,
Thrice blessed Three in One.
FINIS .
(5–19)
Once the evil voice has expired, Herbert himself can speak Christian doctrine in the italics formerly reserved for Christ himself. In this odd
closing piece (including what seems a strangely scatological joke),[92] the gentle Herbert turns harsh against an enemy which he calls Sin, but which seems to consist primarily of a materialist reading of mortality that would dismiss Christian resurrection as a fantasy.
Before silently resting my own case, therefore, I want to look back to my own beginning: Coleridge's response to Herbert's Temple . Coleridge insisted that "To appreciate this volume . . . the reader . . . must be an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church, and . . . find her forms and ordinances aids of religion, not sources of formality; for religion is the element in which he lives, and the region in which he moves."[93] But what is the threatening vacuum outside those formal structures and the pious atmosphere one breathes there? The reader of The Temple —an analytic if also appreciative reader—can legitimately infer repressed anxieties about annihilation from the redundant assurances Herbert arrays against them. All of Herbert's most characteristic maneuvers—the ingenious evasions of chronological sequence and ending, the word-play that disarms last words such as mort and rest, the personal demands on divine attention through a projection of maternal care, and the strategic transference of the confessional poetic voice to the validating divine Word—bespeak an elaborate psychological denial of death, performed on behalf of his culture as well as himself. W. B. Yeats was right to identify Herbert's poetry as a "form of propaganda."[94]The Temple is indeed supremely consoling, but only until we ask what it is consoling us about.