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 Sonne” concerns the ways in which the word reifies the Word. It is “in one word,” the poem argues, that we are able to grasp Christ’s nature, but because the poem attends to the ways in which that word’s referential 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
