“A More Singular Mirror”: Herbert, Acrostics, and the Biblical Psalms

If one thinks of the qualities that define a successful pastor or priest, the ability to compose anagrams is perhaps not the first thing that comes to mind. Nevertheless, in colonial America, Cotton Mather eulogized the seventeenth-century preacher and poet John Wilson, who baptized him, by noting that Wilson’s “care to guide his flock and feed his lambs” was shown in “words, works, prayers, psalms, alms, and anagrams”:

Those Anagrams, in which he made to startOut of meer nothings, by creating Art,Whole words of counsel; did to motes unfoldNames, till they Lessons gave richer than gold.”¹

Seventeenth-century writers expended great effort and ingenuity on anagrams and acrostics. One extreme example by a poetic descendant of George Herbert, Edward Taylor, memorializes the second president of Harvard, Charles Chauncy, with “A Quadruble Acrostick whose Trible is an anagram.”² Chauncy died in 1671, but in his youth attended both the Westminster School in London and Trinity College, Cambridge contemporaneously with Herbert. Both men had Latin orations published in a volume commemorating the visit of the Spanish ambassadors to Cambridge in 1622.³ This popular form of early modern writing pervades Herbert’s devotional poetry. Like Herbert’s puns and pattern poems, acrostics in The Temple generate a material yet mystical surplus symbolizing divine bounty through an overdetermined and palimpsestic layering of plural signification.

Acrostics and Anagrams “Drawn from the Text”

In The Country Parson Herbert encourages the interpretation of biblical passages through “choyce Observations drawn from the text.”⁴ An acrostic or anagram offers a special instance of this process: it literally draws observations from the same text or group of letters. Acrostics and anagrams provide, in Andrea Bachner’s phrase, “a latent text within a manifest text,” and in Herbert’s poetry these multiple and layered meanings highlight processes of reading, interpretation, and authorship, especially in relation to biblical and sacred language.⁵ As Bachner observes, “ultimately, the work of interpretation is highly anagrammatical. It is a work of bricolage, of disassembling and recombination.”⁶ In The Temple, disassembling the word is associated with breaking the body of Christ in the Eucharist.⁷ The poem “Jesu” invites the reader to look into the corners and edges of Herbert’s verses for insight into the whole; “Jesu” is classified as an “Anagram” in an alphabetical index appended to the eighth edition of Herbert’s works.⁸ “Paradise,” with its unusual rhymes, celebrates the meanings that emerge from words hidden within other words: in the poem “Beginnings touch their END” (l. 15), and this reversal of first and last evokes the verbal restructuring found in anagrams. The term “acrostic” is also sometimes applied to “Coloss. 3.3.,” where the “latent text within the manifest text” provides a figure of human life “hid with Christ in God.”⁹

In The Art of English Poesy, George Puttenham defines the anagram as a “pretie conceit … to breed one word out of another,” and Herbert associates acrostics and anagrams with breeding words from other words.¹⁰ Herbert’s first Latin poem on the death of his mother, Magdalene Herbert, includes an anagram on mater and metra (mother and meter or measure), and his Latin poetry includes a six-fold anagram on Roma and Maro (the poet Virgil).¹¹ These anagrammatic allusions breed poetic increase out of literal and figurative ancestors. The shortest poem in The Temple – two lines – emphasizes poetic and genealogical lineage: its title, “The Anagram of the Virgin Mary,” resolves into An[n]a (mother of Mary), Mary, and gram (Greek for word), that is, Christ, the incarnate word, the divine logos.¹² This couplet, described by Martin Elsky as a “linguistic hieroglyph,” puns on the anagram “MARY” and “ARMY” to invoke the Incarnation: “How well her name an army doth present, / In whom the Lord of Hosts doth pitch his tent.”¹³ Intimating Marian and maternal devotion, this poem contains the only explicit reference to the word anagram in Herbert’s English poetry.

Herbert apparently relished the formal intricacy of this mode of writing: his anagrams and acrostics reveal...