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 this poem does is advertise its own objecthood, its presence on the page as a physical shape. We need only to consult a handful of critical opinions on the poem’s shape to grant that the referential ends of the 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,
