a constant Pole. (37–42)
Despite the poem’s professions of its own uninterest in “the maner how” Christ might be present in the sacramental elements, it spends twelve lines worrying about precisely that question: how can Christ be present to the soul in the Lord’s Supper, especially in light of the fact that he is completely absent to the senses? Herbert’s insistence that “Bodyes and Minds are different Spheres” may address the problem of Christ’s sensory imperceptibility, but it also forecloses the possibility that God might be transmitted to the incorporeal soul by means of this corporeal ritual.
Herbert returns to the relationship between these “different Spheres” in his later poem also called “The H. Communion,” which was included in The Temple. This poem opens by rejecting the idea that God employs material finery to communicate himself to man. “Not in rich furniture, or fine aray, / Nor in a wedge of gold” (1–2), Herbert insists, and although the imagery he refuses seems to invoke the ceremonial richness of the Mass, the poem’s objection to such stuff has less to do with its confessional extravagance than with the fact that its materiality remains unassimilable: “For so thou should’st without me still have been” (5). The phrase “without me,” in its conflation of physical separation and lack of possession, is attuned to the difficulty of apprehending God (in both physical and non-physical senses of that verb) through a material medium. Though Schoenfeldt concludes that “The H. Communion” resolves this difficulty by defining divine presence not as if it might be located in any external trappings but as an internal, spiritualized process, the poem nevertheless exhibits a continued preoccupation with the relationship between physical signs and their immaterial referents:
But by the way of nourishment and strength
Thou creep’st into my breast;
Making thy way my rest,
And thy small quantities my length;
Which spread their forces into every part,
Meeting sinnes force and art.
Yet can these not get over to my soul,
Leaping the wall that parts
Our souls and fleshly hearts;
But as th’ outworks, they may control
My rebel-flesh, and carrying thy name,
Affright both sinne and shame. (7–18)
After the poem’s opening repudiation of luxurious trappings as a conduit for Christ, the second stanza prefers a view of sacramental contact in which the divine presence creeps in by “nourishment and strength,” which Schoenfeldt glosses as “the medium of food.”6 Herbert’s echo of Cranmer’s sacramental formulation rings loudly enough here: Holy Communion, explains Cranmer, is a “visyble sacrament of spirituall nourishment in bread and wyne.” Still, as Cranmer, and later Hooker, must acknowledge, a conception that the spirit is nourished by means of the sacramental elements makes this process of spiritual sustenance discomfitingly inextricable from the processes of the body. Cranmer goes on in the same passage to say that the spiritual nourishment of the bread and wine is “to the intent, that as muche as is possible for man, we may see Christe with our eies, smell hym at our nose, taste hym with our mouthes, grope hym with oure handes, and perceaue him with al our senses. For as the word of god preached putteth Christe into our eares, so lykewise these elementes of water, breade and wyne, ioyned to Goddes woorde, doo after a sacramentall maner, put Christe into our eies, mouthes, handes, and all our senses.”7 What Cranmer describes is a sacrament of dual significance, body and spirit alike invigorated by the encounter with the elements of bread and wine. He advocates that the communicant fuse the spiritual to the sensual, which Herbert’s poem accomplishes in the slippage of its language between corporeal and noncorporeal registers. Just as in Herbert’s phrase “nourishment and strength,” the terminology of the poem’s second stanza activates physical and spiritual associations as it charts the progress of the sacramental experience: Christ “creep’st into my breast,” the poem reflects, suggesting both the abstracted seat of emotions and the vault of the body that encases those emotions. And when divine power manages to fill the speaker’s “length” and to “spread … forces into every part,” the physical suggestiveness of both “length” and “part” is supplemented by the way that this divine occupation develops at the stanza’s end, for what it meets is not bodily substance but “sinnes force and art,” a figurative army whose spiritual encampment cannot be pinpointed in fleshly coordinates. As Cranmer yokes the mouth, hands, and eyes to the spiritual apprehension of Christ in his rhapsody on sacramental contact, Herbert joins the physiological to the spiritual, such that the two modes of sacramental experience cannot be distinguished from one another.
In his attentive study The Poetry of Immanence, Robert Whalen steps away from the confessional squabbling of much twentieth-century criticism on Herbert in order to recognize (appropriately irenically) the poet’s synthesis of sensual ceremonialism and internal spirituality; accordingly, Whalen acknowledges Herbert’s investment in a Eucharist that maintains both spiritual and material significance. For Herbert, writes Whalen, it was important “to realize in the sacramental sign an effectual, objective communication of grace and not merely the outward symbol of a process with which it has no material connection.” Though Whalen glances at the resemblance between the dual signification of Herbert’s Eucharist and the Incarnation’s mysterious joining of divine spirit to carnal flesh, Word to body, he seems not to appreciate the implications of that conjunction for Herbert’s view of language generally, and of poetry in particular. Whalen rightly declares that “it is through the insistent fleshly status of the eucharistic species that the paradox of the Word become flesh is stubbornly proclaimed,” but he does not mark the ways in which his own insight bears upon Herbert’s poetics.8 For both Communion and the Incarnation provide for Herbert a literary model in which the divine Logos gains significance by its material expression, a model that Herbert imitates in his own poetic texts. Whalen acknowledges that the material aspects of eucharistic presence “go to the very heart of [Herbert’s] sacramental poetic,”9 and his close readings are specific and sensitive to Herbert’s eucharistic preoccupations, but he does not pursue his insights to discuss the way that Herbert’s verse makes use of representational strategies that emphasize his poems as material artifacts—that is, the way they repeat the incarnational model of Communion. Or, to put this problem in the terms with which this book began, Whalen is admirably exhaustive in cataloguing what Herbert’s poems say about the Eucharist but gives scant attention to how they say it.
The distinction I am making between even a careful review of the content of poems and an assessment of their poetic function is particularly germane to a reading of Herbert. I argue that Herbert’s sense of the affinity between text and sacrament is recorded in the very representational architecture of The Temple. Herbert himself provides in the later version of “The H. Communion” a virtual pronouncement of the way that texts, like sacraments, can operate with an incarnational, instrumental force born simultaneously of the substance of their signifieds and the accidents of their material expression. What usually gets overlooked in critical treatments of the climactic stanza of “The H. Communion” is that “Leaping the wall” is accomplished neither by the material substance of the bread and wine nor by the force of spiritual nourishment. Instead, Herbert concludes,
Onely thy grace, which with these elements comes,
Knoweth the ready way,
And hath the privie key,
Op’ning the souls most subtile roomes;
While those to spirits refin’d, at doore attend
Dispatches from their friend.
