A Reading of Herbert's "Coloss. 3. 3"

Abstract

A Reading of Herbert's "Coloss. 3. T by Chauncey Wood "Coloss. 3.3" by Herbert has not attracted a great deal of critical attention because its demands on the readerseem to be easily satisfied. The title informs us that the poem is inspired by a specific Biblical text, and gives us not only chapterand verse but even a partial citation. The poem that follows picks up the idea of something hidden, as one's life is to be hid with Christ, and through the use of italicized words traces a paraphrase of the Biblical passage in the title: My words & thoughts do both expresses this notion, That Life hath with the sun a double motion The first Is straight, and our diurnal! friend, TheotherHId and doth obliquely bend. One life is wrapt In flesh, and tends to earth: The other winds towards Him. whose happie birth Taught me to live here so, Thet still one eye Should aim and shoot at that which Is on high: Quitting with daily labour all Mypleasure, Togainatharvestaneternali Treasure The poet tells us plainly enough that his words and thoughts, which undoubtedly include this poem as well as other ideas and utterances, express a notion about life. Life imitates the sun's daily and annual motions in that the visible, outward, fleshly life, corresponding to the sun's daily journey from east to west, is counterbalanced by an inner, invisible, spiritual life corresponding to the sun's annual motion from west to east. The poem, like life itself, has its own doubleness, and as readers we may congratulate ourselves for seeing that the outer, visible, "straight" poem contains within ita line that is more or less hidden in spite of its italics, and which literally is oblique across the page in correspondence with the hidden life with Christ, which is said to "obliquely bend." 2 15 Chauncey Wood If this moment of critical self-congratulation passes, as it should, our response to the poem begins to appear somewhat premature, for there are several vexing questions that arise. The first of these would have been much more insistent in Herbert's day than it is in our own: why does he select the annual , west-to-east motion of the sun in the zodiac to represent the spiritual life, since commonly the east-to-west daily motion is "good," and the contrary annual motion "bad"? Secondly, why does Herbert insist that one eye looks "on high" towards God, when the "hidden" text is so contrived as to be read downwards on the page rather than up towards God? Which leads to the third, related question, why does he put his supposedly hidden message in italics, which seem rather to underscore than to hide it? And, finally, since Herbert seems able to surmount virtually any technical problem of poetry with aplomb, why does he change the text of the Biblical quotation that appears in his title, to the similar but slightly different message that is given in the poem? To answer these questions we must begin by considering Colossians 3:3 itself. To anyone familiar with the writings of St. Paul, the letter to the Colossians is clearly a kind of compendium of Pauline ideas and images. 3Thus the idea that lies behind Herbert's poem would have been both familiar and evocative to his audience. Surely Herbert's partial quotation of Colossians 3:3 was intended as a shorthand note to remind readers of the entire verse, rather than as an attempt to suppress the remainder, for the whole verse helps us make sense of the whole poem. The verse is, in its entirety: "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." It is as near as one can get to a brief statement of the central paradox of the Christian's life on earth, and must consequently have been an oft-quoted verse in the seventeenth century Herbert himself caused the verse tò be painted at his wife's seat at Bemerton Church4 The paradox insists that what seems to be life is really death, while correspondingly a dying to the world can open the way to true life...