Time and Liturgy in Herbert's Poetry

Time and Liturgy in Herbert's Poetry by P.G. Stanwood Liturgy in its narrow or ordinary sense has an ecclesiastical significance, with reference principally to the Eucharistie rite, especially of the Eastern churches. Originally, in Greek, the term was applied to a public duty of any sort, not exclusively religious, then later it came to be applied to the services of the Temple. In English, the term is used to describe all the services of the Church, not necessarily (though frequently) the Eucharist or Holy Communion. But I apply liturgy in a further, metaphorical sense to describe a way of seeing and ordering experience. Liturgy, of course, makes use of time; for it is within time that all of our actions take place. Yet the end of liturgy is to fix time in an everlasting present, to rescue time from mutability, to redeem the present moment by conquering the threat of loss and triumphing over decay — even the dissolution of mortality itself. Liturgy always implies patterns of action which recall us to a time that is past, but continuing and also instantaneous. These external forms of worship consecrate and perpetuate our desire not merely to remember or memorialize the past, but really to transcend the physical confinements of time and space; thus, in the Eucharist there is the living presence of Christ's Incarnation. Now it may be possible to understand the wider significance of liturgy in literature, notably of poetry which consciously attempts to organize past actions and movements into a framework that celebrates an unending present and looks forward implicitly to the future. Poetry in the liturgical mode depends upon an atmosphere where time and space mingle ceremoniously, and where the literary creation asks to be taken as self-sufficient and complete. This kind of poetry is distinctive because the liturgical text is or aims to be a ritual 19 P.G. Stanwood that, in playing with time and redefining space, directly asks for independence. We are able to enter a new and perfect world — "a little world made cunningly" — and find in it the timelessness of compacted space. The desire to make poems out of particular moments made imaginatively present rather than merely remembered is a quality of the liturgical mode; there is spatial and temporal collapse, where everything pivots on one point, past and future become single in the present, infinity is finite, and the sphere and the circle provide natural figures of description. I have discussed elsewhere the usefulness of this description in better understanding many of Donne's poems, particularly "A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day, being the shortest day," "The Ecstasie," and the Anniversaries.' In these and in other poems, Donne offers a performance through recourse to a completed circle of experience; he offers upan object dedicated to a higher end, and by this action lifts up the past into a single and everlasting time. Where there is an effort to reduce all time to one time, to one point of convergence which has a transcendent or spiritual end, we find a liturgical work. The ideal liturgical text describes action that really occurs in an instant, in that "Bright effluence of bright essence increate" (Paradise Lost, III, 6), or where, as another and later poet would write, "the fire and the rose are one" (T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding," V, last line). My principal purpose here is to describe George Herbert's use of time and liturgy in The Temple; my hope is thus to show another way of understanding and responding to this remarkable book. Herbert was careful to plan his whole work in order to unfold the theme of worship, or, in the words intended for Nicholas Ferrar (as reported by Walton), to present "a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul." Such conflicts are a part of worship; they always imply the two sides of effort and the resistance or discouragement that effort often provokes, as if an outer design impinges on an inner desire. The implicit connection between these two movements makes worship itself effective; and while the "conflicts" of hope and action face each other, they also contain the fundamental...