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George Herbert and the Image of Violent Containment by Frank L. Huntley More years ago than I care to remember I was in Bemerton, and having examined everything in the little church, knocked on the door of a house that I thought must be the rectory. A very pleasant lady opened the door, and I said, "Excuse me, is this the rectory where the poet George Herbert once lived?" She said, "Yes, come in. You must be one of those American English professors." She showed me all over the house. I don't remember its floor-plan, but in the intervening years, sustained by his poems, I have imagined Herbert with keys in hand going from a large room into a smaller room and then into a closet off that and standing before a chest or cabinet inside that which contains something of so great value in so small a space that it is bound to burst forth. It has long been noted that part of the tension we so much admire in metaphysical poetry arises from the micro-macrocosm concept by which the poet and his reader are alternately stretched out to the farthest poles and then suddenly shrunk down into the tiniest atom. Herbert himself has much of this, and yet far more numerous and telling than the images of expansion are those of collapse, like Marvell's "world enough and Time" wherein eons turn into one violent second and the whole world into a space under ground six feet by two feet by two. The classical images of compaction are more mild than those of the Christian and metaphysical strain. Such is Herrick's adaptation of Martial's bee in amber: I saw a FNe within a Beade Of amber cleanly buried: 17 Frank L. Huntley The Urne was little, but the room More rich than Cleopatra's Tombe; orWilliam Browne's 1621 epitaph forthe Countess of Pembroke: Underneath this sable hearse Lies the subject of all verse. Dr. Johnson chose his adverbial phrase well when censoring Cowley's yoking disparates "by violence" together, and there are few more violent verbs in a metaphysical image of compaction than Marvell's Annihilating all that's made To a green Thought in a green Shade. Let us look, then, at a few of Herbert's images of compendium , starting with things, like boxes filled to overflowing, proceeding through drops of tears that contain all the grief of mankind, and ending with the passion of Christ. Professor Robert Higbie has anticipated the citation of many of my images from Herbert.1 Mr. Higbie concentrates on what is enclosed (for example, man's spirit within his own limitations); I try to perceive what emerges (those "sweets" are finally sweeter that have been "compacted" within a box). Mr. Higbie, moreover, is interested in enclosure as one of several determinants of the structure of The Temple, from "The Altar" to "Love" (III). What interests me is not architectonic but the metaphysical poetic in the containment-pattern of separate images. Then, too, I differ from Mr. Higbie in noting a kind of violence in such images, first as straining our credulity in the capacity of the container to contain, and then as challenging our faith in the power that is released. The violence of the containment increases as we pass from the concrete, through the metaphorical, into, finally, the mystical, although in Herbert's poetry such categories are hardly discrete. 18 HERBERT AND VIOLENT CONTAINMENT A box, for example, is an ordinary enough container. In addition to its most famous instance in "Vertue," already alluded to, Herbert, in "Even-song," calls night an "ebony box": Thus in thy ebony box Thou dost inclose us, till the day Put our amendment in our way, And give new wheels to our disorder'd clocks. (II. 21-24)2 Prior to original sin Indeed at first Man was a treasure, A box of jewels, shop of rarities, A ring, whose posie was, My pleasure. ("Miserie," II. 67-69) But that precious jewel-case is now no more. Boxes, especially those that contain something really precious, are meant to be opened. Surely Herbert knew about the woman in...

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