Sacred Measures: Herbert's Divine Wordplay

Abstract

Sacred Measures: Herbert's Divine Wordplay by Kathleen J. Weatherford The poem "The Sonne" gives clear testimony to Herbert's delight and belief in the power of puns. Herbert argues that the particular splendor of the English language is that it gives one name to different yet subtly and significantly related things: "How neatly doe we give one onely name / To parents issue and the sunnes bright starre" (11. 5-6).1 Both "the sun" and "a son" provide "light" and "fruit"; both chase away "dimnesse"; both bring "new discov'ries of posteritie." Of course, the real point of the poem is that our name for Christ, "The Sonne of Man," (1. 14) is the most significant meaning of "Sonne," which fully embraces the other two. "Sonne" in the poem acquires a three-in-one meaning that not only demonstrates the consonance of sound but also the relation between God's creations and sacrifice: man, the sun, and Christ. The earthly is related to the celestial, which in turn is related to the divine, yet not in a manner that highlights the distinction between them but rather fuses the three into one. Herbert's poem makes a unity out of differences, and as Chana Bloch in Spelling the Word so aptly expresses it " 'in one word' . . . convey[s] a world."2 Like other writers of the time, Herbert viewed verbal ambiguity as a poetic possibility to be exploited to make his poetry function on multiple levels simultaneously. Herbert's puns are not just stylistic or ornamental devices; they are figures of thought that can convey issues of real philosophical and theological importance and that have precedence in Biblical as well as classical tradition. M.M. Mahood's assessment in Shakespeare's Wordplay of the Elizabethan attitude towards multiple meanings of one word applies equally well to the function of wordplay in Herbert's poetry in general and in "The Sonne" in particular: "If a word has several meanings they are shown, through the serious punning which so exasperated a later generation, to bear a kind of transcendental relationship to one another."3 Not all of Herbert's wordplay draws attention to itself with the fanfare of "The Sonne" however. Over the last twenty-five years, Herbert criticism has done much to reveal the wealth of puns Herbert's Divine Wordplay23 throughout The Temple and to help readers recognize the considerable importance ofwordplay throughout Herbert's writing. In UtmostArt Mary Ellen Rickey presents a thorough discussion of Herbert's use of the "serious pun" and rightly maintains that for Herbert the making of puns was an activity that sought to "fuse together in the multiple meanings of a single word the important elements of a poem."4 Rickey points out that unlike other "metaphysical poets" who tended to use metaphors and images in succession, Herbert developed the "highly unusual custom of sustaining two or more families of metaphor throughout a poem and thereby giving multidimensional treatment to his theme."5 In Equivocal Predication: George Herbert's Way to God, Heather Asals takes the issue of Herbert's wordplay a step further and maintains that punning expresses Herbert's "vision of the universe."6 According to Asals, the "basic difficulty" of Herbert's language is that "it defies arithmetic and says that one thing equals two, or, ? sonne is light and fruit.' "7 Asals' main point is that although Herbert makes propositions that are mathematically impossible, he makes statements that grasp a religious truth and create a bridge between our own fallen and fragmented world and the perfect and infinite "oneness which is in God."8 For Herbert punning is "the many and the one of language itself,"9 and puns reflect the pattern of the Many and the One of God. Asals is, in fact, the first critic to take significant notice of one of Herbert's most important puns, that on "measure," and a variety of other significantly relatedterms like "number," "count," and "score" that concern, in at least one of their meanings, the art of writing poetry: Some of Herbert's most important equivocations are terms for his poetry itself. 'How shall I measure out thy bloud?' he asks...