George Herbert’s Incarnational Poetics

Summary

This essay is about some poems by George Herbert, and especially about how the process of reading these poems offers us the opportunity to see the world as opening to us afresh, the closed text opening to new possibilities of meaning both within the text and in the world that surrounds us as we read. These are poems, mostly among those of Herbert’s poems called “shaped verse,” in which the form of the poem is in conversation with the experience of the text as it unfolds in the process of reading. These poems provide a distinctive reading experience, an experience different from the conventional experience of proceeding from letter to word and from word to line, as the poem unfolds from the upper left to the lower right of the poetic form. In these poems, form, visual appearance, and association inform, complicate, and enrich, even transfigure, our meaning-making engagement with the text.

To get to Herbert’s use of language and form in these poems, however, I need to start with bodies, in Latin, with carne, and thus with bodies in Christian doctrine, especially the doctrine of incarnation, or as the Church has put it ever since the Council of Nicaea met in 325 AD, that Jesus Christ, who is “of one substance wyth the Father,” was “incarnate by the Holy Ghoste of the Virgin Mary, And was made man.” This statement describes the figure of Jesus Christ as the embodiment of a bringing together, initiated by God, of two clusters of ideas, of concepts, of conditions, of words, of things. On the one hand there is the divine cluster, associated with the invisible, with spirit, life, breath, creativity, motion, and especially, language, for, in John’s Gospel, it is of course the Word by whom all things were made that “was made flesh, and dwelt among us.” On the other hand there is the human cluster, associated with the visible, with flesh, matter, form, finitude, mortality, and creatureliness. Christ as fully human and fully divine combines these two clusters; as the culmination of a narrative in which God becomes flesh, the invisible now becomes visible, the “unmade” Son becomes incarnate from the Virgin Mary his mother, assumes a human nature, the “unmade” now “made” a man in the person of Jesus, both the biological Son of God and the second person of the Trinity.