![]() ![]() This is, to use Herbert's own categories, clearly the refrain of a sacred poem, whereas the first line of "Heaven" sounds more like a private ejaculation. Jesus Christ is the only mediator between him and God, and he has asked him, for instance, in "Home," O show thyself to me, The initial question, "O who will show me those delights on high?", points out a deficit that has been discussed before in "To all Angels and Saints." There Herbert, the Anglican pastor, expressed his regrets that he must not appeal to either Angels or Saints or the Virgin Mary. ![]() In "Heaven," the last poem in The Temple spoken by a man living on this earth, it is again the music of poetry that keeps him company on "the way to heavens doore." Herbert said so, very early in The Temple, in "Church−musick": Comfort, I'le die: for if you poste from me, Thanks to his cross that teaches "all wood to resound his name" ("Easter"), the music heard in this world, too, restores the hearer to life by making him die. Christ crucified is Herbert's divine Orpheus, his poetry and music. 43) This is clearly expressed, for instance, in Herbert's most rigorously formalized poem, "Aaron," where Christ is apostrophized as "My onely musick, striking me ev'n dead." Herbert obviously takes up Sir Philip Sidney's aesthetic formula "music, the most divine striker of the senses" 3) and transforms it into a religious confession, which does not cease, however, to be a confession to poetry and music. Death, restoration from death, spiritual vision, and the music of poetry are personally united in the iconographical pattern of Christ crucified regarded as a stringed instrument. ![]() 2) Like many another baroque conceit, this combination of themes, which may seem highly individual and abstruse, is in fact traditional and typical. In Herbert the three themes of death, being restored from death, and spiritual vision are closely bound up with music and poetry (which to Herbert are one and the same). Nearing death, he refers to the poet's art in titles like "The Posie" and "A Parodie," and when he reaches "Death" and "Dooms−day" he urges us to realize that, thanks to Christ's crucifixion, death has learned to sing, and he urges God to "Come away" and restore the dust of mortality to its pristine condition of musica humana: "Lord, thy broken consort raise, ⁄ And the musick shall be praise." Focusing, in this final sequence, on death, resurrection, and spiritual vision, the poet weaves into this religious triad of themes a fourth, to which he has confessed from the very first stanza of "The Church−porch," i.e., the art of poetry and its devotional value. The speaker's "answer" to physical decay is "a rose," for Christ the Lord is arisen, and in "The Banquet" death and resurrection are blended with each other and with the transformation of blindness into seeing: " I wipe mine eyes, and see. "The Forerunners" of death have come, but "The Rose" follows at once. It now appeared in the widened perspective of death and being restored from death, which is exactly Herbert's perspective. ![]() When we began to discuss the theme of the Connotations Symposium, "Restored from Death," I again felt drawn to my old cluster of questions and to that last sequence of poems in The Temple. This is clearly shown by titles like "The Forerunners," "Death," "Dooms−day," "Judgement," and "Heaven." While the whole cycle of poems is not a progress from childhood through life to old age but a grown man's Augustinian monologue, the last part is dominated by the nearness of death. An awareness of death is clearly displayed in The Temple. Herbert did not live to have an old man's outlook on death, but he suffered from a mortal disease and knew that he had not long to live. While I was still discussing this question with myself I was asked to give a lecture on Herbert, and thus I had found a text in which death and spiritual insight go together. The question that most intrigued him was (as it seemed to me), did the poets attribute to young children a special re−view of the eternity they have only just left to live in the world of space and time? This theme made me think of the complementary one: do the poets attribute a special pre−view of eternity to old men who are soon to leave the world of space and time? The history of this talk began with Matthias Bauer telling me, some time ago, about a lecture of his on the discovery of childhood in English seventeenth−century literature. ![]()
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