"Show that thy brests can not be dry": Unsatisfied Longing in George Herbert's Nursing Mother and Child Imagery

Unlike Richard Crashaw, whose poem "Blessed be the Paps which Thou hast sucked," referring to the nursing breasts of the Virgin Mary, is indicative of a tendency toward fleshly, and female, imagery, George Herbert is not typically associated with poetry dwelling on the flesh or the feminine - and certainly not with breastfeeding.¹ Yet we do see a few references to feminine flesh and specifically nursing mother imagery scattered among Herbert's English and Latin poems.² In Herbert's Memoriae Matris Sacrum 7, for instance, the speaker complains that the "bared breasts" of the ghost replacing his mother are "made of air to fool" him (l. 4).³ Similarly, the speaker in the Williams manuscript version of "Whitsunday" pleads with his Lord to "Show that thy brests can not be dry," but still provide "blessings" (11. 21, 23).⁴ Herbert in "Longing" again applies to God the imagery of infants receiving nourishment from their mothers - "they suck thee" (l. 17) - while in "To John, leaning on the Lord's breast," a Latin poem from Lucus, Herbert's speaker vies with the Apostle John to gain access to the breast of Christ.⁵ Even though the images are found in disparate poems, Herbert's nursing mother and child images are thematically related in that they are associated with no provision of nourishment.

The development of feminist and New Historical approaches to texts in recent decades has resulted in an interest in maternal imagery, including breastfeeding. The imagery (such as the "nursing father" analogy of King James)⁶ has been explored in regards to the early modern political landscape in such works as Debora Kuller Shuger's Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance and Rachel Trubowitz's more recent Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century English Literature.⁷ Another popular approach to early modern breastfeeding imagery has been a psychoanalytical one, of which Robert N. Watson's Rest Is Silence is a prime example.⁸ As these and other scholars have pointed out, nursing mother analogies and a concern for the reality of breastfeeding infants can be seen in sermons, treatises, and other texts of the period. When studies of the early modern period in England reference Herbert's use of nursing mother imagery (typically citing the stanza from "Longing"), it is as a conventional use of the image. However, an overview comparison of contemporary uses with each of Herbert's nursing images reveals a key difference. Whereas other texts in England's Christian tradition generally depict the true nursing mother figure (whether God or church leaders or actual birth mothers) as providing both nourishment and comfort for the Christian, congregation, or infant child, Herbert's metaphors depict the opposite: a maternal figure who does not provide and a child who therefore longs to be nourished and cherished.

Non lacte: No Provision from an Unnatural Mother

A striking instance of this nursing metaphor is Herbert's complaint regarding the deceptive "bared breasts made of air" belonging to an apparition that has replaced his mother in Memoriae Matris Sacrum 7. As Herbert addresses this "Pallid, bloodless semblance of a motherly Guardian Spirit" (l. 1), he accuses her of not providing the nourishment that he craves:

    & pro matre mihi phantasma dolosumVberáque aerea hiscentum fallentia natum?Vae nubi pluuiâ grauidae, non lacte, meásqueRidenti lacrymas quibus vnis concolor vnda est.

(ll. 3-6)

[And my mother replaced by a misleading chimeraAnd bared breasts made of air to fool, open-mouthed, a son?Hang you, cloud, laden with rain and no milk, andJeering my tears, with which your water shares merely the color.]

In this vivid metaphor, instead of milk from her breasts, this counterfeit of Magdalene Herbert showers down a disappointing rain. Since breastfeeding is an intimate action shared solely by mother and child, through using this image, Herbert's grieving speaker reveals his longing for the nurturing intimacy he once enjoyed.

A popular approach to this poem, and others from Memoriae Matris Sacrum, has been to look through a...