Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson
of the divine Word and the flesh in which it was made present to man; this principle of holy and meaningful presence effected by the hypostatic union of sign and signified ramifies into Herbert’s perception of texts.16 Over the course of The Temple, Herbert consistently and explicitly evokes the function of Christ as Logos in a way that foregrounds the textuality of that designation, as when in “Sepulchre” he imagines the crucified Christ as an inscription:
And as of old the Law by heav’nly art
Was writ in stone; so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart
To hold thee. (16–19)
The comparison to the material ground of the engraved Decalogue gestures toward Christ’s allegorical associations with rock,17 and also calls up an uneasy awareness of the engraving of Christ’s flesh by the spears and nails during the crucifixion (a concept that Christian readings of Isaiah 49.16, “Behold, I haue grauen thee vpon the palmes of my hands: thy walles are continually before mee,” made familiar).18 The meaning of the “letter” here follows from its having been inscribed in the flesh, and Christ’s flesh signifies spiritually because it has been marked materially. Christ is both transparent gospel text and harrowingly, transformatively, unsublimable object.
The consistency with which Herbert foregrounds the sign as a site of substantiality and consequence is a key feature of his poetics. In Herbert’s work, this emphasis arises in part out of his extravagant formal experimentation, a set of antiabsorptive strategies that, to return again to the terms of Bernstein’s analysis, lends to the poetic text a “thickness” that continues to “obtrude impermeably into the world.”19 Herbert’s work is, I argue, radically invested in promoting its own surface, asserting the sign as such as an object rather than treating the text as a transparent conduit to content. Herbert’s incarnationalist poetics bespeak a fundamental faith in the meaningfulness of the material in general and of the material valences of text in particular. When, in “The H. Scriptures I,” Herbert says of the Bible that “heav’n lies flat in thee” (14), he affirms that the physical dimensions of the page parameter heaven itself, and he reacts accordingly with a desire to “Suck ev’ry letter” (2) of that page. Herbert’s attention to the topography of text, with all its surface contour and formal architecture, is at bottom a confirmation of the text’s objecthood. In this project, Herbert shows himself to be in sympathy with the textual experiments at Little Gidding, the religious community established by Herbert’s acquaintance Nicholas Ferrar. The Ferrar household pursued a rigorous devotional life that included communal worship and biblical study; part of this practice involved the construction of Gospel concordances or “harmonies,” in which passages from the four gospels were cut and glued into new arrangements in order to harmonize their narratives. “One of these books,” reports Ferrar’s brother John, “was sent to Mr. Herbert which, he said, he prized most highly as a rich jewel.”20 The book arts projects of Little Gidding, with their endlessly mobile word packets in a variety of fonts, emphasize the physical manipulability of text as well as its hefty substantiality, and argue implicitly that content is contingent on the material. Their emphasis on the physical artifact as an instrument that expresses holy worship claims for words and phrases a meaningfulness that inheres in their very objecthood.
Throughout The Temple, Herbert performs a poetics that likewise claims for language a meaningful objecthood, a poetics in which the material of text tenaciously obtrudes into the transparency of semantic projection. The antiabsorptive qualities of Herbert’s verse are evident, to be sure, in the extraordinary formal innovation that characterizes The Temple, where among other experiments, as Joseph Summers has noted, “Herbert used twenty-nine different patterns with the simple a b a b rhyme scheme.”21 Such formal ingenuity should not be regarded as mere ornamentation or even a reinforcement of the “real meaning” of the poem as expressed in its content. Rather, an emphasis on form, on surface, as opaque in Herbert’s poetry demands that we confront form qua form, that we register the presence of the poem as a material artifact. I mean to echo and refine Whalen’s point when I say that to recognize Herbert’s stake in the relationship between the objecthood of poems and the incarnational poetics of the sacrament is to go to the heart of Herbert’s project.
Herbert treats the signifying capacity of sacramental form itself most conspicuously, of course, in “The Altar,” in which the shape of the poem on the page approximates the site of the encounter for which it yearns.22 Summers identified this poem many years ago as an example of the importance to Herbert’s poetry of the hieroglyph, which Summers defines as a figure that “presented its often manifold meanings in terms of symbolic relationships rather than through realistic representation.”23 Summers sees the structure of “The Altar” as “Herbert’s attempt to use the shape of a classical altar as a hieroglyph of his beliefs concerning the relationships between the heart, the work of art, and the praise of God,”24 and though these relationships are undoubtedly interrogated in Herbert’s poem, Summers’s influential view repeats the distinction between representational means and ends that Calvin articulates in his exegesis on the species of Communion. Such an account fixes the form of “The Altar” as representationally transparent, pointing ever beyond itself to a set of ideas; for Summers, as for many other readers of Herbert, those ideas encompass both the offering of the broken heart in worship and the offering of the poem as an emblem both of praise and of the surrender of the will.25 While I do not mean to suggest that the shape of “The Altar” does not relate symbolically to the content of the poem, to view the poem’s presence on the page as if it merely served a referential function, as if it were simply a vehicle by which we understand the “real meaning” of the poem, is to undercut the poem’s powerful emphasis on textual embodiment. Even prior to the drama of the poem’s content, the structure of “The Altar” asserts its ontological sufficiency such that Stanley Fish, who turns immediately to the work of discrediting the poem’s strident constructedness as “one path Herbert chose not to follow,” nevertheless initiates that argument by remarking that “The most notable and noticeable feature of the poem is, of course, its shape…. In fact, one might say that the first thing the poem does, even before we take in any of its words, is call attention to itself as something quite carefully made.”26
In practical terms, the form of “The Altar” interacts puzzlingly with the content of the poem. The physical presence of the poem on the page, rather than reinforcing or supplementing the sense of its words, seems disorientingly resistant to the argument of the language it contains:
A broken A L T A R , Lord, thy servant reares,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch’d the same.
A H E A R T alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name;
That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine,
And sanctifie this A L T A R to be thine.
Even as this poem argues for the replacement of the material altar with the spiritual offering of the heart, of the will, of the potentially idolatrous work of art, of all three together,27 this repudiation of the physical altar is contradicted by the presence on the page of a perfectly symmetrical and self-consciously constructed arrangement of text, whose structure is made most complete when the last line renounces artistic ownership over the altar of the poem/altar of the self to God. But the inevitable identification of the shape of the poem with an altar introduces a dimension of referentiality to which the poem’s textual material is yet prior. Thus, to adapt Fish’s claim, the first thing