Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson
poem’s shape remain uncertain: does it depict a Communion table? A classical altar? A deuteronomic altar of unhewn stones? A pillar? The letter I? Each of these referents has been defended by readers eager to establish how the ostentatious form of the poem contributes to its semantic content.28 But the very referential uncertainty of the shape indicates the ways in which it resists stable representation even as it projects its own ineffaceable presence as an object. Moreover, the language of “The Altar” explicitly reflects upon the poem’s textuality as a site of immanence, for each piece of the broken heart “Meets in this frame / To praise thy name” (emphasis added). In self-reflexively implicating the “frame” of the poem, as well as the larger frame of The Temple, these lines point toward the architecture of the texts in which they are embedded and locate conservative efficacy in their materiality.29 For the frame of the poem—its graphic presence on the page—and the artifact of the book each embody the cries of the heart, making them both permanent and materially apprehensible. By foregrounding its own textuality both in its form and in its semantic selfreflexiveness, the poem invites an encounter in which the textual is material, an association recapitulated in the capitalization and expanded spacing of “A L T A R,” “H E A R T,” and “S A C R I F I C E,” which dramatize brokenness in form. Through such formally assertive poetic strategies, the poem insists on itself as a sensible (or perhaps rather sense-able) object, and the poem’s language hints at the presence that inheres in its formal frame.30 Poetic form, in “The Altar,” means—which is to say, presence as such means.
The notion that presence means is, to be sure, particularly relevant to the long debate about the mode of divine presence in the eucharistic species. But Herbert’s treatment of presence intriguingly avoids engaging the terms of theological disputation, displacing any argument about the operation of signs into his poetics, which exhibits considerable reluctance to divest the corporeal of significance. Herbert’s conjunction of corporeality and textuality may well invite comparisons to a kind of via media between the word-based pieties of Calvinism and the purportedly sensualist ceremonialism of the Roman church, but I am far more interested here in the way that Herbert collapses the two approaches into one another, regarding text as a kind of presence machine. This emphasis on textual immanence recurs in “IESU,” in which the word for the Word, the name IESU, is broken into pieces. The poem’s conceit asks us again to imagine, as in “The Altar,” that the heart is a quasilinguistic “little frame” (3), upon which a variant of the name of Jesus is “deeply carved” (2). When the speaker’s heart breaks in pieces, the name likewise breaks into its constituent parts, the poem literalizing the “parceling” of “thy glorious name” discussed in “Love I” (3). As Martin Elsky explains, “Broken into I, ES, U, Christ’s name is divided into components of sound” in which “the speaker deciphers lexical units, words, which in turn make up a syntactical unit, ‘I ease you’ (9).”31 And yet, even as this narrative of meaning-making plays out in the poem, the word IESU, or rather the letters that constitute that word, remain separable into units, materially manipulable—like children’s wooden blocks with the alphabet painted on them. The “heart” of line one dissolves irrevocably, and especially in its breaking, into the realm of the metaphoric, but the breakage of word into letter happens not at some conceptual remove but before our eyes, on the page. The signifier IESU, far from allowing transparent access to the identity of Christ, disintegrates into graphic units, signs that announce themselves as signs, parts that no longer function referentially. The term IESU is repositioned thus from signifier at the poem’s beginning to opaque sign through its narrative of fragmentation. More to the point, the Word achieves material presence in “IESU” not by being named, for the name shows itself to be frangible, but in the physically perceptible artifacts of the word that persist whatever the semantic status of the name may be.
Similarly, the poem “Love-joy” engages the question of substantial textuality both in the “hieroglyphic riddle” of its allegorical narrative and in the graphic signs of its poetic presence.32 This poem foregrounds the tension between representation and ground from its first line:
As on a window late I cast mine eye,
I saw a vine drop grapes with J and C Anneal’d on every bunch. One standing by Ask’d what it meant. I (who am never loth To spend my iudgement) said, It seem’d to me To be the bodie and the letters both Of Joy and Charitie. Sir, you have not miss’d, The man reply’d; It figures JESUS CHRIST.
The “window” upon which the speaker gazes advertises the interpretive dynamic of aesthetic media; as Herbert himself explains in “The Elixer,”
A man that looks on glasse,
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav’n espie. (9–12)
In “Love-joy,” the window becomes emblematic of the poem, which as it proceeds presents signs that the speaker must contemplate as objects. Whalen nicely summarizes what we might call, with a nod to Fish, the aesthetic catechism of the poem’s narrative—the lesson in reading signs dramatized by the poem’s dialogue:
While the emphasis is on simply recognizing and accepting the presence of Christ, the speaker cannot resist offering an explanation, to wit, the letters J and C are “the bodie and the letters both / Of Joy and Charitie” (6–7). His interlocutor corroborates and adds “It figures JESUS CHRIST.” The simultaneous presence of both body and sign is common to most sacramental formulae; here, however, the letters are “anneal’d on every bunch” thus suggesting an inscription that goes beyond the surface to share in a portion of the grapes’ substance. The fruit is neither merely a vehicle for J and C, nor is it displaced by them. And because they do not simply reside on the surface, the letters are more than disembodied signs; rather, J and C do not cease to be signs even as they are inextricable from the matter to which they are joined.33
Whalen’s insight about the annealing of letters into the substance of the grapes is a fine one, though the “matter” Whalen describes as manifesting “the simultaneous presence of both body and sign” is narrative rather than textual: the grapes are not materially present on the page, as they are present to the persons in the poem. Still, it is helpful to apply Whalen’s impression to the way the poem’s aesthetic catechism extends to the experience of the poem as a text that likewise manifests the presence of body and sign: for here, as in “IESU,” the work of identifying appropriate signifieds for J and C (and the attendant allegorical claims about the way Christ and joy/charity figure one another) has not compromised their status as signs any more than the ontological identity of grapes is compromised by their typological association with the Eucharist. But unlike the visible sign of grapes, which is sensorily apprehensible to the persons in the poem but not to the reader of the poem, the letters J and C persist in their nontransparent textual substantiality beyond the resolution of the poem’s interpretive drama. The poem sustains the artifacts of its own textuality, emphasizing their matter as distinct from the spiritual meanings generated by the poem’s allegorical interpretations.
The poem’s investment in the material of its own language redounds to its treatment of the figure of Christ (and by “figure” I mean to evoke both the physical and representational senses of that term). When the speaker reads the letters J and C as signifying “Joy and Charitie,” his interlocutor both endorses and corrects that interpretation in his response: “It figures JESUS CHRIST.” This statement simultaneously invites and frustrates a consideration of what “JESUS CHRIST,” as a linguistic sign, means. Does the name of Christ reference the person of Christ? Or does it reference the principles of joy and charity? Or again, do we resolve the conundrum by concluding, with Fish, that “properly understood, they imply each other”?34 And how exactly are we to read the verb “figures” here: with its corporeal echoes or as an act of metaphor? These perplexities foreground interpretation as the central action of the poem, and both the terms and the questions they provoke reveal the proximity of its hermeneutic concerns to the eucharistic debates, thematizing as they do the unstable