Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert's Poetry

Abstract

Reviews Barbara Leah Herman, Costly Monuments: Representations of the Selfin George Herbert's Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982. 225 pp. $17.50. by John T. Shawcross An important critical study, Costly Monuments cannot be overlooked by serious students of George Herbert's poetry. Not only does it present its own reading of some of the poems, but it also reviews some of the critical oppositions today in approaches to (and thus readings of) the poems. Therein are also its difficulties. The number of poems even mentioned is few — only thirty-five — and one wonders whether a poem like "Sunday" or "Giddinesse" fits into one of the classifications under which some of those thirty-five poems are discussed, and whether one can arrive at a meaningful reading of "The Banquet" or "Love" (III) through the approaches advanced. Of the important group of "Affliction" poems, only "Affliction" (I) is examined, and that extensively, but is what we comprehend through Herman's astute reading of that one poem the delimited way to deal with "Affliction" (M)-(V)? Yes, the method of reading will inform each of those four poems, but separately, and most students of Herbert will, I believe, acknowledge that there is change (in large part through comparison and contrast) aswe read through The Temple. The problem with deconstructed readings is that they deal only with the small. I believe that such an approach is not only valid, but good; yet it should be only a beginning which sets a foundation from which may arise, as in the case of The Temple, a larger reading which encompasses structures, genres, individual placement of parts, the literarily contextual — a developed reading employing both the "internal," as here, and the seemingly "external." Herman does not give the impression that her reading of "Affliction" (IV), for example, would be tempered by her 57 John T. Shawcross reading of "Affliction" (III) or by its placement between "The Pearl" and "Man." What I am cautioning here is that the reader of Costly Monuments should not expect comprehensive or final readings of Herbert's poems but nevertheless should appreciate the study as it is. The long introduction is given over to "The Critical Controversy," ranging on one side the critical positions of Rosemond Tuve, Joseph Summers, and Barbara K. Lewalski, and on the other William Empson, Helen Vendler, and Stanley Fish. A few other critics are cited, but there is no attempt to review the scholarship that might construe other "meanings" forthe poemsexamined. (Forexample, there is no referenceto Coburn Freer's Music fora King or Mary Ellen Rickey's Utmost Art.) Harman places her own work on the side of EmpsonVendler -Fish, although she certainly does not always read a poem in the same way as they. The discussion points up underlying assumptions (as well as some circumscribed readings) in all these commentators, and will be significant for readers of this journal as they take perspective on the varying critical approaches to Herbert found in four recent volumes by Heather R. Asals, Richard Strier, Diana Benet, and Chana Bloch. But while this strategy is useful here, it may discourage some readers who say, "Let's get on with Herbert." One author of basic importance for Herman's study is George Herbert Palmer, from whom the title of this book is derived. Palmer conceives a biographical stance in the poems, and Harman, eschewing the externally biographical, is concerned with the internalities ofthe poemsas representations of Herberts self. While there is attention to the "performing self" and to "self-fashioning" — views made particularly cogent through the work of Richard Poirier and Stephen Greenblatt —Harman does not really pay attention to the literary aspects of thatfashioning ofself, but is, rather, in Palmer's biographical camp. For instance, she sees the dissolution in "Churchmonuments " as "a sign that personal dissolution has a textual representation" (p. 136), which leads to disagreement with both Summers' position and Fish's. She does not really entertain the possibility that the "I" of the poem is not Herbert himself (which thus flirts with reductionism) or that the four six-line stanzas, with a rhyme scheme of abcabc, may comment 58 BOOK REVIEWS upon the subject of the...