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 referentiality of the visible sign. This sacramental crisis comes to a head in the last line of “Love-joy,” where the figure of Christ is both referenced and supplanted by its own sign, a text the drama of whose interpretation constitutes the catechistic narrative of the poem. But even as that interpretive crisis reaches its uncertain resolution, the capitalized, italicized text “JESUS CHRIST” emphasizes the wordiness of the Word. The conclusion of “Love-joy” forces a confrontation with the Logos as a sign, one whose presence is ever more reified in the diminishing certainty of its signifieds. That is, as we grow more uncertain about how the words “JESUS CHRIST” mean, we grow more aware of their presence as words.
The incarnational underpinnings of such poetic strategies are made explicit in this short poem, in which Herbert engages in a series of incarnational puns:
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
