God and the Poet Transposed: The Thou-I Chiasmus in George Herbert’s Poetry

Of the many intriguing features of Herbert’s poetry, one we immediately notice is how often the relationship between the speaker and God is couched in dialogical terms, that is on a thou-I basis. From “thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine / And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine,” of “The Altar” to “You must sit down . . . and taste my meat” of “Love” (III), Herbert’s poems are marked by the presence of the first- and second-person singular pronouns.¹ According to James Boyd White, these two words, “as radically necessary to speech of any kind . . . as any we could name [are] made essential throughout ‘The Church.’”² More specifically, of their possessive forms mine and thine, William Nestrick writes that they are “the formula of formulas” and “the central rhetorical topos of Herbert’s poetry.”³ As long as religious faith can be regarded as love between a believer and God and as such it is little different from any intimate relationship, we need not be surprised at the frequent appearances of thou (or you) and I in his poems, but what strikes me as remarkably Herbertian is the skillful way he places those pronouns notably in chiasmus, with the effect of making that thou-I relationship into a hieroglyphic structure. That chiastic pattern is what I would like to explore in this essay.

In considering the attractions chiasmus offered to the poet, it may be useful to confirm some of the names under which this ABBA figure has been known, together with their etymologies. The word chiasmus originally meant in Greek the arrangement of words in the form of χ (chi), the letter in the Greek alphabet having the shape of a cross as well as being Christ’s monogram.⁴ The significance of this cannot be missed by any Christian writer, including Herbert, given that the Cross is at the center of the salvific relationship between God and a believer. No less worthy of note for the present discussion is the term antimetabole, which Herbert would have been familiar with for this figure.⁵ Consisting of the Greek anti (άνγί) and metabole (μ∈ταβख़λή), the word literally means “turning around in the opposite direction.” This notion was well conveyed when George Puttenham in The Art of English Poesy (1589) applied the word “counterchange” in anglicizing the term.⁶ Thus, chiasmus was understood to be a device that involved the sense of reciprocation, or re-turning or re-versing.

It is this sense of reciprocation, or to use Max Nänny’s words, the figure’s usability as an “ ‘emblem’ or icon of reversal or inversion,” that must have attracted Herbert to chiasmus.⁷ If Herbert’s spirituality is characterized by reciprocity, where his speaker as I calls out to God as thee and God responds to him in return, it was only natural for the poet to use the figure capable of suggesting such mutuality. Moreover, as a Christian poet Herbert had his texts “readie-penn’d” (“Jordan” [II], l. 17) in the Bible from which he could “copie” and learn how to use the figure. According to Ruth apRoberts, chiasmi offer the “commonest example of reversibility” in Hebrew poetry, and Psalms are no exception.⁸ Moreover, since many of them address God directly in the second person, Psalms often contain chiasmi involving thou and I. To list but a few examples: “I have called upon thee, O God, for thou shalt hear me” (Psalm 17:6); “O Lord my God, I cryed unto thee: and thou hast healed me” (Psalm 30:2); and “Thou shalt open my lips, O Lord; and my mouth shall shew thy praise” (Psalm 51:15). Those and other Psalms must have served as a model for Herbert as he sought to translate the divine-human intimacy into a poetical structure. In this connection one may remember that in his version of the 23rd Psalm the poet has added a chiastic line that is not in the original (“he is mine and I am his” [l. 3]): though God is referred to in the third, not in...