“Thy Words Do Finde Me Out”: Aaron Kunin’s Love Three

Abstract

This is a remarkable book. It is the best example I have encountered of what it means really to live with a great poem. Aaron Kunin not only reads the poem in a serious way but allows the poem to read him. He sees George Herbert’s great lyric “Love” (always known, through editorial convention, as “Love” [3], the final lyric in The Temple) as having the kind of life-revealing power that Herbert saw as special to the words of the Bible. Of the ways that scattered verses in the Bible could, unexpectedly, combine into “constellations,” which work astrologically rather than astronomically to “make up some Christian’s destinie,” Herbert asserted: Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good,And comments on thee: for in ev’ry thingThy words do finde me out, & parallels bring,And in another make me understood.1Herbert, of course, saw “The H. Scriptures” as doing more than this, much more, bringing the proper reader to “eternall blisse.”2 Kunin leaves the matter at self-revelation, which may or may not bring “blisse” but does enable self-knowledge and candor through the ability that comes, as Kunin rightly says about himself, of being “a good reader of poetry” (#159). This is what allows him to be “found out” by the poem.The book may seem to be of interest only to those who already know or at least know of Herbert’s poem (or who know Kunin, which I take to be a smaller group). This is a shame, because while the book is about the poem, often brilliantly so, it is actually a book about what, according to Kunin, the poem is about. And I assume that to be of interest to a larger group. If Kunin had advertised this in his title, he would probably have more readers, but it is part of his commitment to the greatness of the poem and to what a poem can do that the main title of his book is merely the (edited) title of the poem. One of Kunin’s daring features as a reader is his willingness to consider, as part of the poem’s content, material that the poem does not, at least not explicitly, provide. So in this spirit I will answer the question of what a less austere, more generally intriguing title of the book might be, and it is this: “Love” (3) and the Happiness of Bondage. As Herbert says, “Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good.”Kunin’s book consists of 166 numbered sections, corresponding to the number of poems in The Temple; the sections consist of aphoristic assertions, short observations, abrupt questions, and brief paragraphs.3 These items are presented as self-contained, without, for the most part, explicit connection to one another. This is emphasized by blank space around each item in the sections. The aim is not (I think) to simulate lines of poetry but to allow for meditation on each utterance and for the items to seem like actual thoughts. One might say that it is a book of pensées. But it is not at all a miscellany. The items are virtually always coherent, and aside from being a prolonged explication of the poem, the volume is intently focused on its topic. As Herbert says of scripture, different parts of the text “make a motion” to each other that may be separated by “ten leaves” or more and can form, in his brilliant metaphor, “constellations of the storie” (“Holy Scriptures” (2), line 4) In this sense, too, Kunin’s volume formally echoes Herbert’s; many of the numbered units “talk to” (“make a motion to”) each other. As in Herbert’s collection, one finds oneself putting the individual pieces together in various ways. But Kunin’s contains material more apparently disparate than Herbert’s does. Whether Kunin’s sections on the poem—which constitute the majority of the volume—fully support the sections of autobiography and self-description is a question about the tactfulness with which Kunin carries out his experiment in being read by the poem. Occasionally it seems as if the poem were being left behind. But there is no doubt about the topic that brings the self-analysis and the literary analysis together.Section #1 provides the Herbert poem, but it prefaces the text with a joke about the way most readers encounter the poem’s title: as if it were “Love 3.”4 Kunin advises: “Try to think of it as a third kind of love. The first kind is nice. The second is nasty. Another kind is nice because it’s nasty. Love three.” This gives a fine introduction to the telegraphic style of the book’s prose and also to its content.Right off the bat, one is led to see the poem in the particular way that Kunin does. He thinks that what he has to offer readers of the poem and of himself is that he knows with special clarity what the poem is about. Every reader of the poem, however casual, will say that it is about the (eventual) acceptance of a gracious invitation. This is simply the “story” of the thing, which is, after all, a narrative, and begins “Love bade me welcome.” But Kunin insists that if one sees only conventional graciousness, one is not really reading the poem. He imagines himself as the “I” in the poem and immediately emphasizes the power of the Love figure within the intimacy, the privacy, of the relationship depicted. He speaks of Love’s “power over me, knowledge of me”; Love “forces me to eat the food that is served”; “Love knows what I am thinking”; Love “always has the last word” (#2). This is in answer to the question “What makes Love so attractive?”Kunin is interested in the questions in the poem, noting (as few if any critics have) that there are three, “maybe four” of them (#106; he hesitates because only three of them have the grammatical form of questions; one is narrated). He sees all the questions as potentially rude. About the first—whether the first-person interlocutor “lack’d anything”—Kunin suggests that this can be seen as aggressive, observing that “Do you have a problem?” is the kind of question that can start a fight (#3). This captures something that is lost if one hears the question only as either routine or polite. Similarly, he remarks that the penultimate line, Love’s command that “You must sit down,” could hardly be “less polite” (#4) and that the smoothness (“coolness” [#125] or “consistency” [#131]) of Herbert’s style covers the aggression of the line and has the documentable but lamentable effect that “many otherwise careful readers hear only the sweet tone” (#4).In this regard Kunin confesses disappointment that a student whom he has taught and respects ended up seeing the poem only in terms of “sweetness and patient understanding” (#137)—“the first kind” of love, in Kunin’s initial typology: “Nothing but nice.” Kunin finds the same problem in a major critic. One of his virtues is that he is not afraid to contend with such. He believes that Helen Vendler mistakes the nature of the intimacy evoked in the poem. She sees the poem as modeling the dialogue of friendship (Vendler 2005). Kunin concedes that the friendship model can be placed within the obviously dominant hospitality model, but he thinks that Vendler misses the hierarchical dimension of the dialogue. He asks, snarkily but pertinently, of Vendler, “Does she call her friends Lord?” (#142). Herbert’s speaker, in responding to the interlocutor’s assertion of divine power (“Who made the eyes but I?”), acknowledges this power (“Truth[,] Lord”) before persisting in his refusal of the offered hospitality. This difference in power is the crucial point for Kunin. Friendship is, Kunin rightly says (echoing the theorists of it from Aristotle on), “mutual and symmetrical” (#144). But that is not what the poem gives us.The eros of the poem, for Kunin, is in the difference in power. Love triumphs, as Kunin repeatedly points out, by silencing the speaker. At the end, the narrating “I” stops talking and simply does what he is told, using his mouth for eating rather than for speaking. Kunin is surprised that Vendler does not see this hierarchical dimension; he considers the mutuality reading “so wrong” that he wonders “how a reader as sensitive as Vendler could maintain it” (#144). He probes her reading of a line in another poem that she regards as strongly supporting her general view. When Herbert presents, in a single line, God’s “power and love” and his own “love and trust,” Vendler sees the two instances of love that occupy the center of the line as identical.5 Kunin insists that there are “two loves, not one.” He paraphrases the line accurately as “You bring power to the relationship and I bring trust,” with the implication that “there is a difference between our loves, and the difference on which our loves depend is a vertical one” (#144).The failure to recognize verticality and difference is something that Kunin detects in other major critics. He (again accurately) sees Stanley Fish as presenting Herbert as an ontological monist, so that it is wrong to think that anything truly exists but God (#110). Fish (1972: 156–73) takes “Thy word is all, if we could spell” (“The Flower,” line 21) to declare all ontological distinctions misguided.6 Kunin thinks that Herbert is “criticizing a different distinction” (#72), meaning a different assertion of distinction. To Kunin, Herbert is talking about power. The stanza that ends with the claim about imperfect “spelling” begins, “These are thy wonders, Lord of power” (line 15). The final stanza begins, “These are thy wonders, Lord of love” (line 43). The assertion of distinction that Kunin sees Herbert as actually criticizing is between these two ways of addressing God: “We call you by two names, power and love, and we say amiss. They are the same thing” (#72). This is surely much closer to Herbert’s actual meaning than is a claim about ontology.With regard to “Love” (3), Kunin criticizes Fish’s similar reading of Love’s response to the narrator’s professed unwillingness or inability to “look on” Love (suggesting a less forceful activity than looking at?). Kunin (#110) quotes Fish’s (1978: 133) paraphrase of “Who made the eyes but I?”: “You cannot escape me because you are of my substance.” But Kunin protests: “That is not what the line says!” It is an assertion of historical power and activity, which “doesn’t mean we are the same substance.” Again, substance (like equality) is not the issue. Whatever Love is doing in asserting its status as the creator of the other, the point has to be about the interpersonal relationship—the status, that is—of the confessedly flawed other within the love relationship (the lines about the inability to look begin, “I the unkinde, ungratefull?”).Kunin similarly criticizes the courtesy-contest model for reading the poem. This clearly gets much closer to the heart of the poem than the ontology model, since the overall framework of the poem is of hospitality, a realm where courtesy operates (or fails to). Kunin considers this early on (in #5), thinking about different things that courtesy (“politeness”) can mean. After listing three possibilities—a set of conventions, an improvisatory ability, an attitude of attentiveness—Kunin concludes that what is most important “is often just the visible fact that you are making an effort to be polite.” This is not only (I think) true to life but also deeply relevant to the poem, where, as Kunin repeatedly points out, actions rather than words are paramount (see #18). Love acts; finally the narrator does something (or rather, two things: sits and eats [see, e.g., #114 and #115]). But the issue of hospitality raises the issue of competition and strategizing.Michael C. Schoenfeldt (1991) proposes that “Love” (3) and many other lyrics in Herbert’s volume employ assertions of humility as a strategy for secretly promoting oneself and outdoing the other. Kunin cites a long quotation from one of the courtesy books that Schoenfeldt excavated and cleverly deploys, a book in which host and guest “are competing to outdo each other in feats of modesty” (#85). In a strong phrase (comparable to declaring Vendler “so wrong”), Kunin states that what is going on in the courtesy book and what is going on in the poem “are not remotely similar” (#86). His reasons for saying this have to do, again, with hierarchy and with power. He denies that the narrator is being strategic, because we know that the (purely) human speaker is sincere in his humility (which is narrated before being asserted), and we know that Love is able, as Kunin says, to read the speaker’s mind (seeing, in the opening lines, a movement within the speaker’s soul). Perhaps most important, as Kunin asserts in occupying the position of “I” in the poem, “You never try to outdo me in modesty. Never question being in the position of the Lord or Love” (#86). There is no contest. The host is always the host and is always straightforward, and sometimes rude.This mention of “the host” immediately brings up two issues: one literary-critical, one religious and historical. The literary-critical issue is whether at the center of the poem, or as its motivation, there is an unstated pun on the word host, meaning both the provider of hospitality and the material bread used—that is, consumed—in the sacrament of the Eucharist (happily, in English, called “communion”). Kunin terms this “a beautiful idea”—a “bomb” planted in the poem, to be detonated only in the reader’s mind—and attributes it (in #94) to the figure he has just presented (#93) as an ideal or model reader (Stephen Booth). But Kunin, again, doesn’t buy it. He makes his objection initially on literary-critical grounds. Herbert could easily have used the word host, but he didn’t. He cannot have been unaware of the pun’s availability, but Kunin imagines Herbert rejecting it as “a cheap trick.” Here I think that Kunin may go too far. The pun must be at work somewhere in the background of the poem. But Kunin is right that it is not in the foreground—that is, in the text.And Kunin has “a better reason” why the pun cannot be central to the poem (even if, in some sense, it is there—as a rejected possibility, like what Galileo “never saw” in Paradise Lost [Milton 1957, 3.588–90]). Kunin joins me (Strier 1983: 78) as one of the few critics who think that the poem “is not about Communion” (#95). His argument is not historical (as mine partly is), though he does note that Herbert rejects transubstantiation. Kunin’s major point is that the hospitality framework makes the Eucharistic framework unnecessary. He sees the poem as cruder than the ritual: “Why would I care about real presence when I have your meat?” (#95). He insists on the crudeness and the culinary context of meat (already adumbrated in #16). As Kunin says, it isn’t a word “used in the ceremony” (#95). He knows that the hospitality context already provides for the guest eating the host’s “own meat.”7 If Kunin wanted to, he could say that the poem runs the pun backward, from the Eucharistic context back to the hospitality one (see Smith 2003).This brings me to the question of Kunin’s treatment of the poem’s religious content. He knows that it is a devotional poem, and a specifically Christian one. He may even know that it is a Protestant one. But he is not interested in this aspect of it. He is interested in the interpersonal dynamics of the piece. I would say (and have said [Strier 1983]) that these are provided by, constituted by, the Reformation theology of the poem—grace as entirely unearned; faith as personal, not generic; grace as irresistible—but the dynamic stays the same whether it is put in this context or not. Kunin is right that the poem treats its biblical materials, Old and New Testament, very lightly. God as Creator is highly personalized; there is no heaven and earth, no Leviathan. There is only the creator of the eyes of the “I”—the spectacular wordplay (unusual in Herbert) adding complexity and calling attention to the poem’s verbal surface rather than to its sources. Both assertions of divine power in the poem take the form of questions; they are lightly touched on, especially the definitive Christian one. “And know you not . . . who bore the blame?” is, as Kunin suggests, as polite and almost euphemistic a way of referring to the Crucifixion as could be imagined (#99). Christ’s suffering body—so present elsewhere in Herbert’s volume—is not evoked here. The poem really is about loving power—in both senses. It imagines what it would be like to be forced to have one’s deepest, perhaps unstatable secret wish come true.Kunin’s book would be remarkable if it were “just” a reading of the poem. It contains many observations about the poem that are original and that any lover of the poem will want to meditate on. For instance: the poem’s social world, while highly aware of conventions, is strikingly empty—there are only the two participants—and tense as well as hierarchical; the contrast with the hospitable conversation of Adam and Eve with Raphael, “the affable archangel,” is truly illuminating (#14).8 More technical observations include noticing (in #25) how many times the designation my appears (“my soul . . . my first entrance . . . my deare . . . my hand . . . my shame . . . my deare (again) . . . my meat”), noticing the sudden appearance of un words in the middle of the poem (“I the unkind, ungrateful”), and noticing the presence of “helping verbs” in the poem (“did reply . . . doth deserve . . . did sit” [#115]). These are all, as I said, matters to meditate on, as is, to take the final point of the book, the fact that the word love and the phrase I love you appear nowhere in the body of the poem. Unsurprisingly, given the meditative nature of the whole endeavor, Kunin asks as well as analyzes questions. He asks some good ones, some never asked before: Does Love continue talking after the narrator stops (see # 83, #116, #161)? What does Love’s “meat” taste like (see #16–#17 and #147)? Is it sweet? The word is ubiquitous in the poetry; it is probably Herbert’s favorite word for positive experiences, whether Eucharistic, musical, or otherwise.9 But in the poem it is used to describe Love’s initial verbal action, and only that; the obvious rhyme with meat does not occur. These are matters that matter.But what makes Kunin’s volume daring is not the freedom of its critical mode—or not only and primarily this. Much as I admire his critical freedom, Kunin’s willingness to discuss his own sexuality is what makes the book truly distinctive and brings it closer to his status as a poet as well as a critic.10 I think that this aspect of the book works best when the personal material is explicitly related to Herbert’s poem. In the context of BDSM (#148), Kunin presents himself as a “submissive” who sometimes acts like a “masochist” (#151–#152); for him, Herbert’s poem offers insights into these states of being. Kunin clarifies what he sees as the relation between Herbert (in this poem) and himself in #57, where Kunin says that he learned from the Herbert poem that “a love relationship can be founded on inequality,” and in #156 and #159, which directly address the question of what Kunin is claiming about his relation to Herbert. Kunin wants to be clear about this. He is saying not that “Herbert was a masochist” (#159) but that Herbert knew “some things” about “eroticizing power”—meaning the power of another—and also (therefore?) about masochism. Although Herbert and he “do not put power in the same place” (#156), Kunin finds that his own “human possibility” is clarified through juxtaposition with that of Herbert in the poem. Building on many of his excellent remarks on the ending of Herbert’s poem, Kunin says that one of the deep things that they have in common is that “we like to give power to someone who takes our voices away” (#156).Such moments of psychological identity with the poem illuminate both the poem and the psychological states in question. Along with his treatment of the cessation of dialogue in the poem, Kunin’s comments on “Ah my deare, / I cannot look on thee” are another case of such identity. The lines are puzzling in that the exclamatory beginning of the sentence—before the enjambment—seems to require that the speaker be doing what he then says that he is unable or unwilling to do. “Ah my deare” seems as if it could be said only face-to-face. The narrator “cannot look” yet seems to turn away.11 Clearly something complex and important is going on. Kunin writes: “I associate this line with a particular desire. The desire, my most perverse, inexplicable desire, to be forbidden the sight of your face, the face I most want to see” (#137). In a later entry Kunin picks up on this, noting that “the restrictions in the poem come from the speaker” and are “part of the fantasy that he brings to the scene.” He repeats the point he made earlier: “He [the narrator] wants to look at Love. Even more than that he wants a rule that will prohibit looking at Love.” The triumph of the poem is that this desire is overridden. The speaker is forbidden to be abject and happily humiliated; he is bullied out of that state: “Love forces him to sit at the table like a member of the human race” (#160). Kunin is speaking with a double voice here—as both himself and the narrator of the poem—but the weight of personal experience comes through. It is explicit in his discussion of bondage as freedom (#150). Here the metaphorical bondage that is a constant in the religious tradition and the actual practices of sexual bondage come together perfectly. Kunin explains that when he is most thoroughly bound—“immobilized, sacked, hooded”—he experiences freedom from both the self and the body.The book is not always this successful in its juxtapositions. The childhood memories that Kunin presents (#102–#104, #112–#113, #134–#135) are not, for the most part, connected to the adult consciousness that connects him to the “I” of the poem. These episodes seem too innocuous to be of any help with the complexities considered in the sequence as a whole. They might be “screen memories,” but—with the exception of the memory of the bean-bag chair game (#29)—the screen is not lifted, so we cannot see their significance, any more than we can see how the discussion of Donald Rumsfeld (#120) follows from the lovely sequence on religious silence (#116–#119). Sometimes Kunin is unsure whether his own experience and that narrated and dramatized in the poem coincide.This happens in his treatment of gender in the poem. With regard to this, there is perhaps a failure of nerve. Kunin recognizes early on (#6) that the only explicit marker of gender in the poem (“Lord” at the beginning of the third stanza) defines Love as masculine. But he soon says that “Herbert is unclear about the gender of Love” (#19) and suggests that Love seems to have some qualities traditionally thought of as feminine—which Kunin then apparently denies. But in the next pensée, he notes, interestingly, Herbert’s portrayal of his mother in his Latin and Greek elegy for her as both feminine and masculine, having “stern winsomeness” or “sharp charm” (Lepos severus) in her speech and challenging Catos (sic) with her maxims. In a line that, unfortunately, Kunin does not seem (through the translation he used) to have had access to, Herbert writes that “her speech fetters and shackles you, binding you in nets.”12 Kunin returns to Magdalen Herbert as “a human model for divine love” in #53 and picks up on Elias Canetti’s portrayal of motherhood as “a condition of absolute power over another” in #54. But Kunin backs away from this (he did not experience his own mother, he claims, as powerful). Yet he returns to Canetti in #64–#67, concluding #66 with the observation that, like Love in “Love” (3), a mother is, to an infant, “the source of both commands and food.”But Kunin notes that he is not interested in food (#160). This means that he misses part of the fantasy content of the poem, the experience of being infantilized, of eating food that is part of the substance of another (“my meat”). It also means that he cannot consider the way that the insistence on the guest sitting (“You must sit down . . . So I did sit”) crosses this fantasy with another one, related to parents: that of being The Perfectly Obedient Child (at the end of a poem in the volume explicitly about the paradoxes of “freedom,” Herbert’s speaker finds himself happy only when addressed as “Child”).13 The parental aspect of the poem drops away, in all its dimensions. It is not only infantilization and childish obedience that are ignored or downplayed. The androgynous quality of Love gets lost. Kunin tries to accept this (see #21), but he really only wants to imagine Love as female. He is a “submissive,” but he is also very committedly heterosexual. And he wants the “I” of the poem to be so, too. In not putting power “in the same place” that Herbert does, Kunin acknowledges that he looks to a woman of a certain kind, while Herbert (or the narrator) looks to God. But Kunin is not happy with this difference. He notes that despite the gender status of Lord, he will rely on “a commonplace of the critical tradition” and, as most students do, turn the host into a hostess (#160).14 So again, some of the complexity of the poem’s fantasy content is lost. One might say that its polymorphous perversity is lost, exchanged for a “perversity” of a more structured sort.This relates as well to Kunin’s downplaying of the poem’s sexuality, meaning references to intercourse and genitalia. As a reader of the criticism, Kunin knows that “some readers look for sexual meanings in Herbert’s language” in the poem (#100). But he thinks that this sort of reading (rather like the host-host pun) cheapens the poem. Kunin knows that the argument that Herbert “could not possibly intend” such meanings is absurd and could, in any case, be trumped (if necessary) by an Empsonian reading that sees part of Herbert’s greatness as a poet in “how he lets in the unconscious” (#100).15 Yet Kunin nevertheless insists that “the excavation of these sexual meanings is weak.” He is insistent, almost strident, in his rejection of them: “I don’t need them” (#100). He does not, for instance, want “My deare, then I will serve” to have a sexual meaning (although such a meaning is, as I am sure he knows, well established in the period).16Here again, as with the issue of food, Kunin’s own lack of interest in the topic keeps him from responding to some dimensions of resonance in the poem. He clearly feels that too much exploration of the range of sexual possibilities evoked by the poem’s language would detract from the focus on power. That is the only dimension he is interested in. His personal conception of sexuality does not have a genital focus: “Power, humiliation, objectification, pain and bondage. That’s the meaning of sex for me now” (#153). But the poem’s evocation of sexual possibilities is not so narrow. It includes, along with infantile and childhood experience, impotence, restored potency, fellatio, and cunnilingus. Kunin is certainly right that the poem is not about any of these, but that does not mean that it does not draw on or tap into resonances of them. It may, in some sense, be true that “the whole point of Herbert’s poem is to define love as domination and submission” (#100). But it does this without objectification, pain, or (literal) bondage. One thing that gives the poem its legendary “sweetness” is that it imagines erotic domination and submission without imagining violence. The narrator’s heart is not battered but cajoled.17 When Love “took my hand,” surely no bruising ensued. The only pain (so to speak) imagined in the poem is that of having one’s resistance to pleasure overcome.Nonetheless, whatever psychological adjustments a really full reading of the poem would require, there is no doubt that Kunin’s book advances the discussion of the poem in many ways. And it serves—to end where I began—as a wonderful example of what it means really to live with a poem, to allow it to read you.