The Fountain of Living Waters: The Typology of the Waters of Life in Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne (review)

Reviews Donald R. Dickson, The Fountain of Living Waters: The Typology of the Waters of Life in Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne. Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1987. 218 pp. $26. by Cristina Malcolmson The "religious wars," as Gene E. Veith, Jr., calls the current debate over the nature of Herbert's religious beliefs (see GHJ, Xl, No. 2), have resulted in valuable scholarly discoveries about seventeenth-century theology and liturgy, but few good critical readings of the poems. New Criticism may be out of fashion, but the "newer" methods, like deconstruction, new historicism, feminism, and cultural materialism, still measure the validity of their interpretive procedures by the success of readings which attend to the verbal or cultural complexities within the text. Not so with what is essentially the old historicism of the dispute over Herbert's religious persuasion. In these studies, poems are evoked simply as evidence for Protestant or Catholic beliefs, and therefore the poems lose their status as dynamic literary works or cultural documents. The poetry in fact becomes the background used to illuminate the foreground, which in this case is seventeenth-century attitudes toward theology, liturgy, and biblical interpretation. Donald R. Dickson's book The Fountain of Living Waters: The Typology of the Waters of Life in Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne shares in the virtues and vices of this brand of old historicism. Dickson demonstrates that seventeenth-century poets used the typology of the waters of life to illustrate the Protestant model of salvation and "to present the descent of grace and regeneration of the soul and the consequent ascent, or reintegration of the soul with its heavenly source." The biblical typology evoked by this image of circulation connects the redemptive shedding of Christ's blood in the New BOOK REVIEWS49 Testament with Old Testament stories of the flood in Genesis and the water that flows from the riven rock in Exodus, and, consequently, with the supply of grace and the purification of sin in the individual soul. Dickson's study is enlightening and crucial in its analysis of the image of the hard heart which is riven and made supple by divine grace, an image fundamental to the poetry of Herbert and Vaughan. Critics cannot ignore Dickson's convincing demonstrations that the Protestant emphasis on the individual in Biblical typological interpretations orders the poetic sequences of all three of the poets he considers. Nevertheless, the book is marred by incomplete or unpersuasive critical readings and a tendency to ignore complexities of language and reference. It is clear from much of Dickson's book that theological scholarship can result in keen interpretations of poetry. Dickson himself urges us "to respect the complexity of the figuralism in Protestant devotional poetry . . . [and] the complex typological wit of devotional poets such as Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne," and his analysis of Herbert's opening poems in The Temple do full justice to this agenda. The book's system for classifying different modes of typology — Christological , sacramental, eschatological, roughly equivalent to the medieval terms allegorical, moral, and anagogical — is used pointedly and powerfully on this sequence of poems. For instance, Dickson argues that "The Altar" should be read as an intentional theological failure because it privileges individual or sacramental typology at the cost of Christological typology, or that which emphasizes man's dependence on Christ's sacrifice. The misguided sense of personal typology in "The Altar" is corrected by "The Sacrifice" and the poems which follow it, all of which emphasize Christ's passion as the source of grace and the necessity of the speaker's hard heart to yield to Christ's suppling and purifying influence. This precise and complex attention to the "interplay" of different levels of typology in the poetry, arid the way these levels illuminate individual poems as well as the structure of The Temple would not be possible without Dickson's fascinating and learned scholarship, supplementing the previous work done by William Halewood, Barbara Lewalski, and Richard Strier. Nevertheless, and regrettably, this combination of precise scholarship and alert reading is not consistently achieved throughout the book. Dickson argues that The Temple enacts "the speaker's 50BOOK REVIEWS initiation into the church" through the opening poems which evoke...