Mine Then Thine: Rhyme, Exchange, and the Economy of the Gimmick in The Temple

… as one Countrey doth not bear all things, that there may be a Commerce; so neither hath God opened, or will open all to one, that there may be a traffick in knowledg between the servants of God, for the planting both of love, and humility.

– George Herbert, Chapter IV, "The Parsons Knowledg," A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson¹

I

When Herbert uses commerce as an analogy for the parson's activity, he emphasizes that the swapping of desired goods isn't all there is to trade. The trade in knowledge leads to love, in addition to a humble recognition of one's own limitations. Similarly, his equation of parson and "market man" turns on the disciplined preparation that each exhibits:

The Country Parson, as soon as he awakes on Sunday morning, presently falls to work, and seems to himselfe so as a Market-man is, when the Market day comes, or a shopkeeper, when customers use to come in. His thoughts are full of making the best of the day, and contriving it to his best gaines.

(p. 235)

In this passage, a trade doesn't need to happen at all for the benefit to actually accrue to the parson. That's a matter best left to chance and luck. What really matters is that he act as if such an exchange will occur and that his preparatory work has some bearing on it. At one level, these formulations are a reflection of Reformed theology's decoupling of work and salvational reward. Yet Herbert's verse is also keen to explore the ways in which labor still haunts human conceptual models of freely given gifts and effortless, transformative exchanges.

Sometimes, the devotee in The Temple occupies a similar position to the country parson: enjoined to prepare for or act as if a redeeming or recompensing trade will occur. That seems largely the point of the moral advice and potential ethical development promised in the first stanza of "The Church-porch": "Thou, whose sweet youth and early hopes inhance / Thy rate and price, and mark thee for a treasure" (ll. 1-2). Yet throughout the collection, readers also witness and participate in exchanges that occur instantaneously, without any preparatory labor. After all, poems, even ones that decry metaphorical invention, show just how easy it is to trade properties. One need only recall the speedy rejoinder that closes "Redemption": "Your suit is granted" (l. 14) appears before the speaker has even made his case to Christ. An actual discursive exchange, whatever that might be, is unnecessary.

A survey of Herbert's verse certainly reveals the centrality of contract, ownership, and trade to his understanding of devotion and salvation. In this essay, I am interested less in these ubiquitous metaphorics than in the rhetorical and prosodic dynamics, especially the pace, of exchange within The Temple itself – so not just the representation of exchanges, but the trade in words and sounds within a poem and between poem and reader. I wonder, in short, whether we know what we're talking about when we talk about the act and event of exchange, especially whether the representation of an exchange in a lyric poem is itself an exchange. My argument here is that Herbert depicts trade itself as so effortless that it separates that realm of devotional activity from the overt praise for self-discipline, even busyness that we see both in The Temple and in The Countrey Parson.² That ease, the fact that exchanges and even transformations happen immediately, with the wave of a wand or the writing of a poem, poses a challenge to labor's value as a conceptual analogue for devotion, even when we imagine work as a fruitless frustration that teaches devotees to acknowledge God's ineffable power. Ultimately, Herbert's poems, as poems, attempt to disavow work's persistence within human conceptions of revaluing, repurposing, and redeeming transformation, even those effected by little more than a change in thinking. Thinking differently might sometimes be difficult, but it is not, for that reason, work.

Herbert's...