"Lord, In Thee the Beauty Lies in the Discovery": "Love Unknown" and Reading Herbert

Abstract

Although Rosemond Tuve's brilliant Reading of George Herbert through biblical typology (Old Testament prefigures of Christian salvation) is universally acknowledged, most recent critical approaches to that country parson's poetry circumvent typology.' Yet such illuminating readings of Herbert's poems as emblems, meditations, allegorical dramas, religio-aesthetic rituals, re-inventions, and self-destructions seem to derive from Herbert's typological orientation.2 Moreover, they seem to converge on an extended critical paradigm of Herbert as a radically typological lyricist, whose poems are structured on personal neotypology. In much of The Church we read a persona who in contention against or in search of God discovers that he himself is a contemporary neotype of Christ akin to Old Testament types of Christ. Herbert places his persona in legal Old Testament typological situations with traditional allusions, diction, and imagery; during the dramatic lyric the persona senses implications of New Testament redemption through Christ, as God's primal and Herbert's imitative prophecy inevitably fulfills itself. The persona discovers