Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson

      How well her name an Army doth present,

      In whom the Lord of Hosts did pitch his tent!

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

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

      Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one

      When they combine and mingle, bring

      A strong regard and aw: but speech alone

      Doth vanish like a flaring thing,

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

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

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

      So in one word our Lords humilitie

      We turn upon him in a sense most true:

      For what Christ once in humblenesse began,

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

      As Elsky has shown, here “The Word as spoken sound thus becomes for Herbert the sounded encoding of a series of natural, historical, and spiritual truths,” and these truths are revealed “as the sacred pun is vocalized when ‘We him in glorie call [emphasis added] The Sonne of Man.’ ”⁴² Elsky’s remark recognizes the corporeal actualization of the Word’s meaning in this poem; indeed, the central argument of “The