Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (review)

Reviews Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985. xiv + 324 pp. $29. by Coburn Freer While it is impossible to think of a book on Herbert that does not refer at some point to the importance of Scripture for an understanding of The Temple, no one before Chana Bloch has traced so assiduously the influence of the Bible upon Herbert's thought and craft. Not a source-study in the usual sense of the term. Spelling the Word uses Biblical texts to grasp the imaginative connections between psychological situations, as well as to sound the implications of verbal echoes, borrowings , and parodies. Although portions of Chapter One and Two had appeared in (respectively) Claude Summers' and TedLarry Pebworth's 'Too Rich to Clothe tho Sunne" and ELR, these preliminary accounts did not suggest the resonances that the longer study would call forth. After a brief Introduction, Chapter One describes the place of the Bible in Herbert's life, or more properly, the life of his poetry, as the focus throughout is more on the literature than the man, and such biographical speculation as there is in the book is invariably brief and tactful. The argument makes immediately evident that Bloch is interested less in Biblical allusion porse than in the poetic uses to which allusions can be put, and she traces what could be called Herbert's opposition through quotation in "The Quip," "The Posie," "Divinitie," "Jordan" (I), and "The Forerunners." These poems all share a rhetoric whose momentum is opposed to the Scriptural texts they invoke, while the next poems take passages from Scripture as their explicit lesson ("Ephesians 4.30," "Coloss. 3.3," "The Odour," "The Pearl," and "The Crosse"). The logic of the distinction is typical of Bloch's critical method throughout the 34BOOK REVIEWS book; this is practical criticism that emphasizes the personal history of words, and one never has the sense that a turn in the interpretation is being made for the sake of the thesis. Chapter Two considers a different set of problems in tracing Herbert's use of Biblical allusion. What is attempted here is the discovery of "constellations" of terms, each pointing toward the other; these key words may or may not be images, and thus the method is more open-ended than that employed in Fredson Bowers' important article. The principal words under consideration are "dust," "rest," "lamb," and "thorn," the last being verbally a "hive of beams." The mapping of these particular constellations is suggestive rather than exhaustive, and the same kind of allusion-charting could be done with other words; Bloch's approach here is worth study, for with it such maps might be drawn for other poets as well. The next section of the argument expands the perspective by showing, in several neatly-argued examples, that Herbert's metaphoric connections often have their source in the marginal collations offered by the Geneva Bible. Here as in the preceding pages, Bloch occasionally starts echoes that bounce off each other, as in her reading of "Sepulchre"; and one may also be momentarily alarmed to learn that a sequence of terms in a Herbert poem may be linked by a common word that does not itself appear in the poem (p. 65). But on the whole, the readings are persuasive and more: they should also prove useful to those wishing to read Herbert from other quite different standpoints. The major exhibits in this chapter are "Prayer" (I) and "Affliction" (I), in which Herbert is using the Bible as a mirror to view his own state. The chapter concludes with a close reading of "Love" (III), an analysis that shows how deeply Herbert has drawn material from the Gospels and the Book of Common Prayer and how thoroughly he has made them his own. In the third chapter, "From Old to New," Bloch tries a rather different critical tack. The idea here is that the juncture between the Old and New Testaments is analogous to a tension that Herbert repeatedly encounters in his own experience. The topos of the temple, with all its imaginative implications, can sum up the movement from one text...