George Herbert's "Significant Stuttering"

Abstract

George Herbert's "Significant Stuttering' by Thomes F. Merrill Reeding Herbert's "The Reprisell" or "Vertue," eccording to Rosolie Colie, is "something like the experience of seeing e poem in, soy, Swedish. One knows thot the Arrangement of words forms the poem, recognizes just enough of the cognote words to suspect thet the poem is good, but in the end one is forced to recognize the brute feet thet one doesn't know the lenguege."' She exeggeretes, of course. It is not thot Herbert's diction or grammer violetes standard English usage; he uses no specielized vocabulary, ond his syntax, even considering customary poetic license, is proper enough. The "Swedishness" goes deeper. "As a natural child of the Church," Colie surmises, Herbert "rarely saw fit to explein anything relevant to that condition. For him, the worship of God . . . was so securely immutable and timeless as to require neither comment nor explanation."2 For Colie (and presumably for contemporary readers like her) Herbert's language strains intelligibility not because of what it says but because of what it finds unnecessary to soy. What is missing is not "facts" but rules — unconscious canons of verbal coherence which govern what Friedrich Waismann would call its "logical style."3 An invisible grammar dictotes the "puzzling" conduct of this lenguege — o gremmer, os the lete Bishop of Durhem, Ion Remsey, once put it, for "significant stuttering about the Inexpressible."4 Herbert's devotional lenguege mey baffle modern readers not beceuse it is Swedish but beceuse it is God-talk.5 God-tolk hes olweys been difficult beceuse it is e deliberate misuse of language.6 It is ordinary lenguege "stretched" beyond its functionel limits to Address supernAtural "fACts."7 Its inedequecy to this tosk hes been witnessed from St. Augustine ("When we speok of the Three Persons of the Trinity it is 'not beceuse the phrases ore edequote — they ere our only olternetive to silence' "a) to Wittgenstein ("Whot we connot 2 Thomes F. Merrill speek ebout we must consign to silence"9), end todey, when God, os one leeding Christien scholer puts it, iso "ghost ... so leid to rest thet it is now only 'the lest foding smile of e cosmic Cheshire Cot,' "10 the issue of God-tolk's odequecy hes feilen beck to one of its relevence. No wonder, then, thot its "stuttering" hes become foreign to meny reoders' eers. The words ere femilior, the bosic grammer seems right, but somehow its sense oppeers oddly oskew.1' Under the circumstences.it is not surprising thet Herbert's devotionel poetry (so misleedingly spare and simple on its surface) should créete mischief for literary scholers. Williem Empson hes token Herbert to task for his "successive fireworks of contradiction, end e mind jumping like e flee."12 Coburn Freer remorks how "the formel pettern" of Herbert's poems seem disturbed end rearranged."13 Helen Vendler speaks of how the poems disrupt their own order, thus effecting the "re-invented poem."14 Stanley Fish writes persuasively of the se//-destructive15 logic of Herbert's language which sponsors a "poetics of tension," and then, surveying recent trends in Herbert criticism, observes that "the older view of a calm end resolute Herbert is no longer in feshion,"16 thot it hes given wey to the picture of o much more unstable poet whose "Jordons never stay crossed"17 end who in feet "re-invents" his poetic devotions. All of this mokes Fish wonder "how it is thet e poet end the poetry he writes cen be restless end secure af the same time?"™ Fish mey not hove intended it so, but "restless security" is more then e critical paradox; it is an essentiel fact of Christian anthropology. In one of his sermons, John Donne notes thet "To escend to God, To ottend Gods descent to us, is the Motion, end Rest of o Christien. . . . ell Motion is for Rest."19 Herbert conveys Donne's point in "The Pulley" by rendering the dynemic interploy between men's "repining restlessnesse" ond his security in God's bosom es the very essence of the Christien life end, hence, the essence of its lenguege too.20 God-talk indeed does "stutter...