Rereading Ourselves in "Redemption"

Abstract

Rereading Ourselves in "Redemption" by Robert Kilgore Between "Good Friday" and "Sepulchre" in George Herbert's The Temple is "Redemption." In Herbert's liturgical calendar, this is a dark interim to be endured before "Easter." We should keep vigil by rereading "Redemption." The poem suits the purpose: after we read the poem for the first time, we are understandably shocked and confused about the lord's saying and dying — not enough seems to be said. The end, "Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died," is a call to the beginning. We mimic the speaker's main action of the poem: we straight return to the start. Having been tenant long to a rich Lord, Not thriving, I resolved to be bold, And make a suit unto him, to afford A new small-rented lease and cancell th' old. In heaven at his manour I him sought: They told me there, that he was lately gone About some land, which he had dearly bought Long since on earth, to take possession. I straight return'd and knowing his great birth, Sought him accordingly in great resorts; In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts: At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth Of theeves and murderers: there I him espied, Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.1 During our second reading of the poem, more becomes clear to us. Our interpretation of the poem grows in complexity, and we begin to "make sense." This essay recaptures a way of reading Herbert's "Redemption" that is experiential, yet not subjectively so: to borrow from the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, "understanding" the poem is "participating in an event of tradition."2 That is to say, "Redemption" works in many of the same ways as a parable does, creating a trial of interpretation for readers, a trial that also reflects how early moderns read, heard, and interpreted parables. I use the word "parable," as opposed to "allegory," to describe "Redemption" chiefly because the poem recalls the biblical parable 2 Robert Kilgore of the Wicked Tenants.3 Most critics have been content to call the poem an allegory: to Joseph Summers, it is "an allegorical account of the granting of the Covenant of Grace"; to Virginia Mollenkott, "the sonnet is objective fiction, an allegorical narrative in the first person point-of-view."4 Dennis Burden calls the poem a "parable," but does not articulate why "Redemption" is a parable or how parables may differ from allegories. In one essay, Esther Gilman Richey provides a more thorough analysis of Herbert's use of parable, articulating Herbert's debts to Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Augustine, and in another she shows how "Redemption" and other tenant parables were deployed politically in the seventeenth-century. Richey's work also brings us closer than many other critics to the central issue in Herbert's parable-like fictions: the issue of "audience response."5 Ultimately, whether we use the term "parable" or "allegory" matters less than whether these parable-like fictions obscure interpretation and application or facilitate access to interpretation and application. Anne Williams, with good sense, points out that "the meaning of 'parable,' like the related term 'allegory,' is controversial." She explains the alternatives available after the Reformation this way: whether these narratives of humble things were intended to fulfill the allegorical function of concealing mysteries known only to the elect or whether they sought precisely the opposite: to reveal the truth to unbelievers through the everyday and familiar.6 The implications of this issue seem to affect us as we reread Herbert's "Redemption." Critics who have thought that "Redemption" facilitates revelatory access include George Ryley, an early critic of Herbert, and Chauncey Wood, who nicely works out the chronology of the poem in regard to the Old and New Covenants.7 Other critics tend to take the view that the poem creates obscurity, placing the speaker in the role of the un-elected reader as "slow-witted" and "utterly oblivious."8 Kathleen Weatherford notes that the speaker's "train of thought" is "twisted," and that "he is clearly not as perspicuous as he would have his audience believe."9 Chana Bloch argues that...