The Pulse of Praise: Form as a Second Self in the Poetry of George Herbert (review)

Reviews Julia Carolyn Guernsey, The Pulse ofPraise: Form as a Second Self in the Poetry of George Herbert. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. 270 pp. $46.50. by John Ottenhoff Julia Guernsey's The Pulse ofPraise: Form as a Second Selfin the Poetry of George Herbert sets an ambitious course, navigating an interdisciplinary path into formalist readings that find grounding in Renaissance contexts and child-rearing theories and find psychoanalytic resonance in D.W. Winnicott's object relations theory. Guernsey says she addresses "the meaning and function of George Herbert's poetic form from a psycho-historical perspective" and argues "close attention to prosody can contribute to critical discussions about the devices of self-representation" (p. 11). If that all sounds a bit too opaque, in simpler terms, this book seeks to "connect Herbert's prosody" with "the domain oflived human experience" (p. 12). It is an unusual, ambitious, and often exciting venture. Guernsey uses Winnicott throughout her analysis, finding his work a positive and refreshing alternative to Lacanian and Freudian analyses. While the last chapter of The Pulse of Praise pursues the comparison of Winnicott to Lacan and Freud most clearly, Guernsey keeps the argument foregrounded throughout. She maintains that Winnicott allows her to keep Herbert embedded in seventeenthcentury contexts but also mirrors him "in empathie twentiethcentury terms" (p. 13). Defending herself against Frederick Crews's wholesale assaults on psychoanalytic readings of literary works, Guernsey demonstrates that Winnicottian concepts can illuminate seventeenth-century texts in often surprising and helpful ways. At the center of Guernsey's reading is the claim that "the gracious, selfsacrificing nature of Herbert's Christ in relation to the human believer is analogous to Winnicott's idea of the mother-child relationship"(p. 15), but the connections go well beyond that commonplace. At times, however, Guernsey's efforts to link Winnicott, Herbert, and prosody seem more forced and problematic. 66Book Reviews Chapter 1, "Notes Toward Another Music: Prosody as Self, Body, and Heart in The Temple," is Guernsey's most rigorous attempt to demonstrate that prosody "matters," beyond traditional formalist terms. For Guernsey, prosody becomes almost another speaker — as I understand it, almost like a camera becoming a character in a film: "Prosody in The Temple repeatedly figures the poet's capacity to make death, but it also as often figures God's capacity to make life — and I do mean bodily as well as affective and spiritual life. We may oppose to Herbert's poetics of mortification a poetics of quickening in The Temple" (p. 37). Guernsey presses this point most clearly in her reading of "Easter-wings," finding it to be a "doubly anamorphic" poem. It displays not just wings but also an hourglass and two capital I's — "two selves who come together in the global wings image" (p. 31): The salient difference between the two poetics I have outlined is not that one is corporeal while the other is not; it is that Herbert's poetics of mortification uses form to signify the mortal body, alienated from the soul, while his poetics of quickening uses form to signify the unification of soul and body in the body of Christ. As "Easter-wings" suggests, both poetics may be present in a single poem. But while one marks the poet's signature, the other copies Christ's "fair and bloudie hand" ("The Thanksgiving," 1. 16). (p. 39) Guernsey focuses on poems where prosody seems "flatly contradictory to the speaker's meaning or tone" (p. 28). Theology isn't highlighted in this approach, but it is not irrelevant either; hers is a Herbert who is in the world, not escaping the bodily or poetic form but struggling with and using it. Guernsey is most persuasive in reading "The Altar" as she argues for a unified conception of Herbert's poetry and prosody. Arguing against Richard Strier, she reads the ending of "The Altar" as not so much demanding a separation of the altar from the heart but as separating the "old man" and the new. Likewise, she argues that the "heart" for Herbert was "understood to encompass both the physical and the psychological dimensions" she finds in Herbert's form (p. 46). But...