Chapter 5 - ‘Because this box we know’

Summary

Explores imaginative connections between boxes and selves, especially bodies. In George Herbert’s poem ‘Ungratefulness’, humanity’s relationship with God is figured by some of the many bodily boxes that strew The Temple, with their associations of intimacy, and interrogation of openness and closure. Herbert hints at the material similarities between the boxes of the household and those ‘of bone’. The noun ‘chest’ can refer to both, and as early modern poets recognised, there is a striking physical resemblance between the anatomy of a human chest with its enclosing ribcage, and that of a wooden chest framed by iron bars. The chapter offers close readings of sermons by John Donne, poems by George Herbert, and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Drawing together the pervasive material and imaginative interactions between boxes and bodies, these texts show how thinking inside the box is rooted in the materiality of bodily experience. Boxes of all kinds become transformative objects to think with, but writers reveal that although boxes point towards order, and the neatness of containment, they also constantly push at their own boundaries.