Speakers and Hearers in The Temple

Abstract

Speakers and Hearers in The Temple by Marion Meilaender George Herbert built his Temple out of three general categories of sacred poetry. The hortatory didacticism of "The Church-porch" expands through seventy-seven stanzas outlining a strenuous moral code of self-discipline. The quasiepic narrative of "The Church Militant," written in heroic couplets, traces the providentially plotted course of Religion from the beginning to the end of time. Between these poems are the more than 1 50 lyrics of "The Church." Their subjective focus stands out in sharp relief, framed between the Churchporch Verser's impersonal catalogue of rules for conduct and the omniscient detachment of the Church Militant's chronicler, writing from the secure vantage point of "Almightie Lord, who from thy glorious throne / Seest and rulest all things ev'n as one" (II. 1-2).' While Herbert made religious lyrics the heart of his poetic structure, within "The Church" he registers his full awareness that the lyric's personal expressiveness is both its strength and its potential limitation. The lyric poet's concentration on rendering individual experience and emotion can tapa special intensity, but it can also breed self-serving thoughts that sabotage the devotional impulse. The difficulty springs from the devotional poet's need to mediate simultaneously between God and his soul and between himself and his readers.2 The seeming soliloquy has God as its witness, and the act of capturing the moment in a lyric invites an audience of readers to eavesdrop as well. Again, where the poem is explicitly a colloquy with God, the decision to give it written form courts a human audience. Herbert responds by exploiting these entangling relationships as a test case for the way human pride and weakness infect or obstruct the individual Christian's relationship with God. This is not to say that negation is Herbert's message, for his poetry 31 Marion Meilaender ends not in silence and annihilation, but in communion and acceptance, just as Love accepts the admittedly faulty guest to the banquet in the final poem of "The Church." Herbert's theological awareness of the gulf between what his relationship to God should be and what his fallen nature makes it informs his poetic theory: a poetry of simplicity is the ideal to be sought, but a poetry of complexity reflects the real struggle of the spiritual life. With this understanding, Herbert can consistently champion simple, straightforward poetry yet be willing to complicate the interplay of poet, speaker, and audience by multiplying speakers and hearers in The Temple. Like Donne, Herbert creates a poetic style that mediates between the poet and reader by conveying a thought process, thereby allowing the reader to share the devotional experience step by step. It is instructive to note that over the yearsa variety of critics using a variety of approaches have all discovered, within their particular frame of reference, that Herbert's poetry embodies an experiential process. Joseph Summers, analyzing Herbert's hieroglyphic or emblematic technique, speaks of a progressive unfolding of meanings as characteristic of Herbert.3 In Self-Consuming Artifacts, Stanley Fish characterizes Herbert's poetry as a series of undoings, a process of "letting go," and he reiterates his emphasis on Herbert's strategy of continuously correcting mistaken responses in The Living Temple.* According to Helen Vendler, "no matter how exquisitely written a poem by Herbert is in its final form, it seems usually to have begun in experience, and aims at recreating or recalling that experience "; his self-critical awareness produces poems that change or modify their direction from moment to moment.5 Harold Fisch places Herbert's poems in the Psalm tradition of active rather than contemplative lyrics, encompassing movement through dialogue.6 Distinguishing Herbert's typological method from Donne's, Barbara Kiefer Lewalski writes that Herbert "characteristically presents his speaker's uneven, anxious, vicissitude-filled progress from an identification with the various Old Testament types he finds himself recapitulating ... to a recognition within himself of the Christie fulfillment of those types.'" These critics may, and do, differ about the implications of the process they discern, but one and all they agree on the experiential immediacy of Herbert's style. 32 HERBERTS SPEAKERS AND...