Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson
function exhibits slippage—the same word has at least two different referents—the word as such is once again emphasized as distinct from its designative content. Rather than standing for a defined and stable signified, “Sonne” asserts itself as a sign; as we are conscious of engaging with it as a verbal artifact before we engage with its meaning, the referential function of “Sonne” is displaced by the idea that referentiality is one property of the word among many. As the word’s referential function becomes distinct from its textual substance—one thing the word does rather than all that the word is—“Sonne” becomes apprehensible as an object, a perceptible and nontransparent textual presence. Moreover, the poem’s title (which is consistently spelled “The Sonne” in both the Williams and Bodleian manuscripts as well as in the 1633 printing of The Temple) reinforces the presence of this word/Word by promoting the poem as a textual artifact even as it introduces the sun/son homophone: Matthias Bauer notes that “The form of this poem is actually announced by its title, to which one only has to add the sign of the son, the cruciform letter T,” in order to spell sonnet.43 This focus on the surfaces of language, on the sonic and graphic properties of words, makes the Word that is both representative and constitutive of Christ’s presence in this poem ostentatiously available for sensory apprehension, an effect in strong contrast to the poem’s thematic suggestion of referential or signifying instability. In other words, Christ is more present in this text as a sign than as a signified.
Poetry serves for Herbert, then, as an instrument for enfleshing Christ, for manifesting the divine as material presence. As in “Sepulchre,” where the incarnate Christ appears as “the letter of the word,” the graphic embodiment of divinity every bit as material as the engravings of the law on stone, the physical character of the Word achieves substantial expression in Herbert’s antiabsorptive poetics. Exploiting the textual qualities of Christ as Logos, Herbert’s formal extravagance promotes the incarnational capacities of language. The physical absence of the body of Christ, both from the world of flesh into which the Incarnation intervenes and from the experience of eucharistic observance across the confessional spectrum, provokes in Herbert’s verse strategies that counter the troubling perceptual unavailability of divinity. It is worth recalling that the poem that concludes by identifying Christ as “the letter of the word” begins with the anxious exclamation: “O blessed bodie! Whither art thou thrown?” (“Sepulchre,” 1). As the poet laments elsewhere, “thy absence doth excel / All distance known” (“The Search,” 57–58). For Herbert, poetry itself begins to answer the terrifying proposition of Christ’s absence, establishing the Word as an object that does not dissolve into the vapor of mere referentiality. Cognizant of the ways in which Christ as Logos is invested with textuality, Herbert makes deliberate use of the materializing valences of text to present Christ. To put it another way, Herbert’s Christ is made present in the objecthood of text.
Given Herbert’s investment in the capacities of text to make present what is perceptually absent, it is perhaps not surprising that the eucharistic poem “The Agonie” begins with an assertion of the epistemological obscurity of spiritual principles:
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love. (1–6)
Though philosophers can “measure” geologies and geographies, the histories of nation and rule, sin and love resist this kind of empirical investigation. Vast and spacious in a way that physical things seem not to be, they exceed the senses. As Herbert’s poem continues, it offers alternative means for understanding such spiritual matters:
Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments, bloody be.
Sinne is that presse and Vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein. (7–12)
In order to understand sin, the poem instructs, we must “see” Jesus in Gethsemane, and Herbert’s verse provides us with details from the scriptural record to compose a scene: Jesus’s bloody garments, skin, and even hair so particularized as to conjure up the vision to our imaginations.44 It is thus remarkable that the stanza begins by displacing these details out of the physical: the bloody skin and hair with all their physical vividness are explicitly identified as standing not for themselves but for something else—for “Sinne.” Christ’s corporeal particularities are offered here as a sign, whose presence in the poem delineates an abstraction too vast to be measured.
In the third and final stanza, the poem’s eucharistic interests are made explicit, even as its language continues to redefine the visceral as significative:
Who knows not Love, let him assay,
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine. (13–18)
Here, Christ’s body is veiled, as it were, behind the rich language of religious emblem so thoroughly charted by Rosemond Tuve decades ago.45 Christ’s body, breached by a sword, spills forth the blood represented in eucharistic wine. And though Tuve finds Herbert’s imagery perfectly “conventional,”46 consistent with a long iconographic tradition, his handling of the vectors of referentiality is provocative both in the context of “The Agonie” and in consideration of the commitment to signs as such that pervades The Temple. For Herbert’s poem does not make it easy to keep the figurative and literal registers separate. By inviting us to “taste that juice set abroach by the spear,” he renders identical the figure and the ground—the blood that flows from the spear wound and the metaphoric juice by which it is represented to the eucharistic worshipper. Christ is in these lines the signified—as the body represented eucharistically in the wine. But Christ also serves here as the sign—the body whose “taste” prompts the figural leap into “juice” and “liquour.” Yet after all, even these sign/signified complexes collapse into the sign position because the poem argues that they represent something else: the principle of Love. The body of Christ in agony, whether it is seen primarily as the emblematic subject or the emblematic object, is finally the word/Word that means love—just as in the previous stanza, it means sin. Helen Vendler has noted that though the qualities of sin and love stand in opposition to one another, the emblematic descriptions featured in stanzas two and three of “The Agonie” are “identical,” both depicting “Christ shedding blood under torture.”47 Thus the suffering body of Christ signifies in multiple registers, meaning two distinct, even opposite, ideas. The poem encourages us to stop on the surface of signification, on the Word which is Christ the Logos, and to register it as an artifact whose referential transparency is prevented by its referential slippage. In “The Agonie,” the meaning of the Word becomes a pun of the same order that Herbert explored in “The Sonne.” Once again, Christ’s body is offered as a sign whose signified remains unfixed, a sign that therefore persists untransparently, antiabsorptively, in the poem’s system of signification.
In Love Known, Richard Strier asserts that the “knowledge” advocated by these stanzas is “entirely a matter of immediate experience, not of conceptual formulation.” Strier goes on to claim that what he calls “the essential terms of religion” gain priority over the sciences in Herbert’s hierarchy of knowledges because they are known by immediate experience. “For Herbert,” Strier declares, “it is science that is abstract and religion that is concrete and empirical. The ‘knowledge’ described in stanza 3 is entirely a matter of immediate experience, not