Self-Parody and Pastoral Praise: George Herbert's Memoriae Matris Sacrum

Self-Parody and Pastoral Praise: George Herbert's Memoriae Matris Sacrum by Greg Miller George Herbert's MemoriaeMains Sacrum has been consistently misinterpreted because of mistranslations, a commonly accepted but misleading editorial emendation at a key point in the text, psychological readings based on errors in literal meaning, and inadequate attention to the poems' historical context. The poems present themselves as having no value in themselves — as "foolish things" (stulta). The poet speaks through voices, characters, and dramatic situations that allow expression and yet also imply self-distance and judgment. Making use of classical literary models and mythology, and traditional Christian imagery of a parental God, Herbert calls his own language and self into question as a means of affirming, ultimately, a reality beyond representation. The pastoral tradition allows for praise of the dead shepherd, and praise for his dead mother parallels, and comments on, pastoral praise in Theocritus. The poet evaluates speech in the process of writing it, much as he does in his English verse, within the framework of a God who becomes to him all grief and all comfort. Herbert differs from Ben Jonson, his contemporaries at Little Gidding, and his younger self in resolutely rejecting stoicism in favor of compassionate, expressive healing. Paradoxically, Herbert's rhetorical strategy of self-parody allows the self an expressive voice. Memoriae Matris Sacrum, a series of commemorative poems in Latin and Greek, was published shortly after the death of Herbert's mother Magdalen Danvers (June 8, 1627) and entered in the Stationer's Register with a sermon by John Donne (fuly 7, 1627).1 Donne and Magdalen corresponded throughout their lives, Magdalen acting as a generous patron to Donne and his family at least as early as 1607, when Donne's family was poor and often not in good health.2 Donne probably dedicated his devotional "Corona" sonnet sequence to Herbert's mother, as well as the secular poems "The Relic" and "The Primrose." Donne is also thought to have composed some of his major lyrics, including "Good Friday, Riding Westward, 1613," with Lady Magdalen in mind, and he preached a commemorative sermon following her death.3 George Herbert's poems were published in concert with Donne's sermon of praise for his patron and friend. 16Greg Miller Deborah Rubin argues that in Memoriae Matris Sacrum George Herbert undertakes a "private, subversive exploration of experience and feeling."4 Given the poems' context, however, their joint publication with a sermon by the Dean of Saint Paul's Cathedral, it is unlikely that they were conceived as either private or secular. In the end of the last poem in the sequence, Herbert self-consciously deconstructs the whole elaborate project of compensation through language while nevertheless asserting the healing effects of expressive grief (VI, 11. 23-24). The sequence Memoriae Matris Sacrum has often been read as pathological and inferior to the English poems. Amy Charles calls the poems "fulsome," a fitting term, perhaps, were his mother still alive and were the poems' rhetorical hyperbole to be taken as simply or merely expressive or declarative.5 Critics who use the poems to gain psychological insights into the psyche of the historical George Herbert often depend, not surprisingly, on Freud as their master text. According to E. Pearlman's account, for example, George Herbert was insufficiently differentiated from his mother and was prevented from full male adulthood and parenthood because of his oedipal drama, only resolved late (and incompletely) at his mother's death, shortly after which he took holy orders and was married. Since Herbert's wife conceived no children, the suspicion is that the couple, because of George's psychic conflicts, was not sexually intimate. (George Herbert's wife conceived quickly upon remarrying after her first husband's death.)6 Such assertions are not (and cannot be) proven, and Herbert's life seems at odds with Pearlman's conclusions. Before entering the priesthood , Herbert held more positions of authority than many younger sons of his rank, serving as Orator at Cambridge and for a while as an elected member of Parliament.7 As for Herbert's sexual life with his wife, there are many plausible explanations for the couple's infertility; abstinence...