Staking his Heart: Herbert's Use of Gambling Imagery in The Temple

Staking his Heart: Herbert's Use of Gambling Imagery in The Temple by Michael Clifton The act of worship, the writing of poetry, and the art of gambling are all very much alike in one essential respect: each demands the surrender of the conscious will and understanding to whatever power one wishes to intervene in one's behalf. Whether one calls those powers Lady Luck, the Muse, or even Almighty God, the giving over of rational categories or expectations is crucial, in order that not one's own but the will of the spirit or deity addressed may be done. Given this similarity, it is not altogether surprising that among all the other systems of repeated imagery employed in The Temple, Herbert also uses a system of gambling, or gaming, imagery. Expressed largely in terms of the card game primero, though also in those of an unknown dicing game, this imagery not only illuminates a fresh dimension of the poems' sacred parody, but unifies their playful spirit under the single concept of play, which, as Johan Huizinga observes, "always tendfs] to overlap" with "Holiness."1 Because of this overlap, The Temple is necessarily a place to play; as Huizinga also observes, "the card-table, the magic circle, [and] the temple are all in form and function playgrounds ."2 According to Joseph Campbell, when we enter such a place, we enter a sphere of action in which "there has been a shift of view from the logic of the normal secular sphere, where things are understood to be distinct from one another, to a theatrical or play sphere, where they are accepted for what they are experienced as being and the logic is that of 'makebelieve ' — 'as if.' "3 It is this quality that lends The Temple its special reality, aiming constantly, as Robert Hinman has it, "toward a condition in which this is almost that, almost the wholly other."4 It is the spirit of play itself that lends the poems that "decorous playfulness" that Louis Martz observes, or that 43 Michael Clifton tendency toward transformation and discovery — a "miraculously fresh perspective that jolts poet and speaker alike" — noted by Ilona Bell.5 To embody this spirit of play, Herbert employs a gambling metaphor, intuiting for himself modern psychology's conclusion that "gambling is a secular counterpart of that 'universal obsessional neurosis' called religion."· However, there are at least two historical precedents that might have guided his intuition, the first of which is Bishop Latimer's use of the terms of primero in two famous Christmas sermons of 1 592. In one of these, the Bishop declared to his listeners that he intended to deal unto you Christ's Cards, wherein you shall perceive Christ's rule. The game that we will play at shall be called The Triumph, which, if it be well played at, he that dealeth shall win; and the Standers and lookers on shall do the same; insomuch that no man that is willing to play at this Triumph with these cards, but they shall be all winners and no losers.7 With the major exception that lookers on lose, as we shall see, Herbert's card game works in much the same fashion as the Bishop's. The source of the poet's dicing metaphor, on the other hand, is probably Proverbs 16:33: "The Lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord" (King James Version). The player Herbert devises to play his game is, as Hinman observes, the Verser, that second-rate poet and middleman between victim and swindler, who may nevertheless "Rhyme thee to good" ("The Church-porch," 1. 4)t* Indeed, because he sees that "All things are bigge with jest" ("The Church-porch," 1. 239), he becomes the perfect agent of transformation, since "the player participates in metamorphosis," according to David Miller, "by the very action of seeing the world as play."* And, as Huizinga phrases what every sports fan already knows, any success the player wins for himself "readily passes from the individual to the group."10 44 HERBERT'S GAMBLING IMAGERY The specific game at which the poet/player/parson often plays...