As we have seen, “The Church-porch” prescribes a spiritually healthy vanity, a pleasure in regarding how one’s soul is dressed. Herbert develops this clothing leitmotif adumbrated in “The Church-porch” in the lyrics of The Church. Alongside the architectural metaphors that describe productive spiritual processes through the breaking-down or collapse of physical structures, Herbert’s lyrics develop a parallel argument through metaphors of shedding clothes. In The Temple, to disassemble is almost always a beneficial activity: spiritual edification must sometimes proceed first through tearing-down, and likewise, to put on the proper spiritual
habit(s) can require undressing. Herbert thus uses clothing in analogies for decay or mortality.63 Acts of dressing and undressing can help us understand our own composition, set up in
opposition to God’s creative agency, and in this way, metaphors of clothing operate in concert with those of architectural and biological vulnerability to transform the pride encouraged by “The Church-porch” into humility. Crucially, undressing in The Temple is not simply about shedding superficialities in order to reveal or liberate something more essential, whether
Christian soul or poetic spirit.64 Rather, for Herbert, undressing establishes relationships. Just as
63 Herbert sometimes employs literal clothing as a way of describing a quality of fallen
humanity. In “Providence,” for example, clothing sets humanity apart from the ways nature is in harmony with itself: “Nothing wears clothes, but Man; nothing doth need / But he to wear them” (109-10). The odd but exalted model of integration and purpose in this poem is the coconut, which “Is clothing, meat and trencher, drink and kan, / Boat, cable, sail and needle, all in one” (127-28).
64 A comparatively stark duality between superficial embodiment and a deep, essential nature is perceptible in many other Renaissance authors’ clothing metaphors. In the Garden of Adonis in The Faerie Queene, for example, infant spirits waiting to go into the world require “fleshly
weedes” from Genius, and Spenser is particular that “The[ir] substance is not chaunged, nor altered, / But th’only forme and outward fashion” (III.vi.32, 38). Ben Jonson, in “To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare,” describes verse as a
beautifying garment for Nature, which is grateful to wear Shakespeare’s creation: she “joyed to wear the dressing of his lines” (48). In John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 11 (“Spit in my face yee Jews”), clothing is not glorious but rather the debased aspect of the incarnation; Donne
the Verser enjoins his reader to “Dresse and undresse thy soul,” a composite action that describes both construction and disintegration, the varied voices of The Temple evoke creation and
collapse together, the spiritual productivity of clothes removed or in ruin. Of the poems that employ clothing metaphors, “Mans Medley” and “Mortification” most conspicuously emphasize the paradoxical constructiveness of the removal of clothing. These poems show that the motions of disintegration or doffing can simultaneously enact spiritual edification.
“Mans medley” describes the human state, straddling earthly experiences both good and bad and the hopes and fears projected into the future, at death and beyond. Amid dominantly seasonal metaphors—e.g., humankind’s ability to double both its joys and trouble, to “ha[ve] two winters” by “fear[ing] two deaths” (27, 30), unlike any other creature—Herbert describes the soul and body united as if in a garment:
In soul he [man] mounts and flies, In flesh he dies.
He wears a stuffe whose thread is course and round, But trimm’d with curious lace,
describes Christ assuming humanity as if it were shabby clothes (“God cloth’d himself in vile mans flesh” [13]), a conception of composite divine and human nature that curiously reverses Herbert’s description in “The Bag,” in which Christ instead doffs divinity first, descending from heaven and “undressing all the way” (12). In the generation after Herbert, Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” imagines the soul freeing itself: “Here at the fountain’s sliding foot, / Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root, / Casting the body’s vest aside, / My soul into the boughs doth glide” (49-52).
And should take place [i.e., assume its proper station] After the trimming, not the stuffe and ground. (13-18)
The stanza describes finery, but unlike the textile beauty suggested in “The Church-porch,” the homiletic point leads off this stanza, preventing any undue admiration of the human “garment.” The preemptive reminder of mortality, “In flesh he dies,” creates the possibility of unraveling or decay in the coarse mortal “stuffe” as well as drawing a clear separation between the
unembellished “ground,” a plain fabric used as the base for embroidery (“Ground”), and the fine soul-lace that decorates it. The poem links the mortal flesh and coarse fabric and opposes them to the “mount[ing] and fl[ying]” soul that flutters aloft like an elaborate lace border affixed to its mortal garment but, if we follow the suggestion of a soul mounting heavenward away from the body, perhaps already half-detached.65 The unusual stanza form of “Mans medley” evokes this act of coming apart at the seams: a three-line metrical pattern consisting of a trimeter line, a dimeter line, and a pentameter line repeats twice in each stanza. The three-line grouping forms a seam in each stanza, and the trimeter and dimeter lines together form an unraveled pentameter line.66 The verse, in short, lies somewhat unraveled on the page; even the term “trimming” may
65 Julia Carolyn Guernsey draws attention to the stanza quoted above as evidence for the ability of the soul to rise “to the exclusion of the body,” and points out several other instances of poems in The Temple that use images of the soul’s disembodied flight toward God (29). 66 Herbert employs a similar strategy in “Church-monuments,” etching a crack down the center
of each stanza through a repeating but non-interlocking rhyme scheme abcabc. In this poem, too, the crack is significant to Herbert’s point about the shared dusty substance of humans
glance at the process of undoing through its self-contradictory senses of both adding and removing a decorative edge.
This metaphor for the human state, plain mortal cloth with soul-trimming, offers a resource that the poem’s naturalistic and seasonal metaphors do not. The latter offer only oppositions: present and future, human and angel, mundane discomfort and the dread of “two deaths” to come. The poem’s title also evokes musical art, which may suggest that the human “thread” acts like a taut string on a musical instrument, strung between “things of sense” (7) in mortal life and heaven: “Man ties them both alone, / And makes them one” (10-11). In both the textile and musical metaphorical schemes, the earthly “thread” of human life is tied to the celestial; the musical overtones suggest that this mingled divine and earthly nature renders humankind an instrument on which God can play.67 The garment metaphor offers an important supplementary insight: to meditate on one’s own mingled nature—a process of active
engagement that the metaphor of man-as-taut-musical-string does not necessarily imply—helps direct one’s attention toward the divine element, “th’ . . . hand touching heav’n” (12) and the soul that “mounts and flies.” Even as we imagine the garment of humanity fully assembled, we see the separation of rising soul and sinking flesh through the image of half-detachment,
trimming affixed to its “stuffe and ground” but fluttering loose. The soul “should take place” after this lace trimming which is ultimately, we find, the essential rather than the superfluous
and their stone memorials. Herbert uses the same rhyming pattern, although with different meter, in “Mortification.”
element. The image clarifies the part that we should emulate through rising aspiration and the part we should cast off as the textile and earthly “ground” it is.
The precept of quitting one’s state finds particularly solemn manifestation in
“Mortification,” in which Herbert strengthens the commonplace association between the bed and the grave through the additional analogy of clothing. Herbert’s point is to show that the motions of our acts of creation are also equally preparations for dissolution. The lyric opens with the act of dressing an infant doubling as the dressing of the corpse it will prospectively become:
How soon doth man decay! When clothes are taken from a chest of sweets
To swaddle infants, whose young breath Scarce knows the way; Those clouts are little winding sheets, Which do consigne and send them unto death. (1-6)
A protective swaddling-cloth does not actually swaddle an infant here: the garment is taken from its chest with the evident intention to wrap around the baby, but transforms mid-stanza into a winding-sheet that becomes a veritable agent of mortality itself, “consign[ing]” and “sending . . . unto death.” Mortality hijacks the act of putting on a garment, contracting the span of an entire human life into the space of a stanza and converting the fabric intended to protect a vulnerable infant into the winding-sheet for a corpse. Crucially, the image collapses early infancy and death into one composite mortal state, a foreshortening of perspective that encloses the step-by-step procession of the poem’s remaining stanzas, each of which imagines the advancing stages of life that the first stanza has already rendered foregone. Each stanza also ends with the word “death,”
and its corresponding rhyme is always “breath”: the repetition of the very emblem of life never escapes this mortal pairing.68 No human act can avoid this continually reiterated decay.
The motion to dress the infant remains thwarted until the final stanza, when the only thing dressed is the structure supporting the corpse: “Man, ere he is aware, / Hath put together a solemnitie, / And drest his herse” (31-33). The correspondence of actions, not just the meditatio mortis, makes the process of life, “while [man] has breath / As yet to spare” (33-34), a
preparation for the ceremonies of death. These preparations are continual (man, going about the business of daily life, has been all the while preparing for his own burial ceremony “ere he is aware”) and, Herbert concludes, life is in fact an ongoing lesson about death. As in “Church- monuments,” the natural fact of mortality is a pedagogical opportunity. The poem ends with a prayer, “Yet Lord; instruct us so to die, / That all these dyings may be life in death” (35-36). Our “dyings” (this curiously un-idiomatic word suggests action more than the noun “deaths” would) are a kind of habit built into existence, actions repeatedly undertaken rather than states achieved. This brief moral at the poem’s conclusion, the perspectival volta that works to turn awareness of mortality toward a spiritually productive end, demands an appreciation of the composite quality of human action. Dying—understood as an unfolding, reiterated, and, if it can be pluralized, an oddly repeatable action—is, in fact, the definition of life, and we only need realize it. The
68 Summers notes that the rhymed sounds at parallel points in each stanza “accentuat[e] the repetitive aspect of each age” of life that the poem describes (153). Guernsey, also attentive to the poem’s form, argues that the poem’s prosody stands in for the human body; she calls attention to a number of rhythmic features and rhyme structures that develop the poem’s chastening theme (35-37).
poem’s conclusion suggests that Herbert is sensitive to the fact that such a recurrence or “habit” can be both an almost involuntary repetition of actions or customary action purposefully
undertaken (“Habit” 9a; 9b). The latter sense of the word “habit” is more recent—The Oxford English Dictionary includes only one attestation for this sense from Herbert’s lifetime—but the concluding couplet of “Mortification” suggests that even an involuntary repetition, the “dyings” intrinsic to life, can become the object of active meditation, a way that God can “instruct us so to die.” Restful “Successive nights, like rolling waves, / Convey [youths] quickly, who are bound for death” (11-12), and the joyful “mirth and breath / In companie” is “musick [that] summons to the knell” (15-17). Understood as “dyings,” these acts can become the matter of divine
instruction.69 To see the shroud and swaddling-cloth layered together simultaneously, as if in a textile palimpsest, is to be at once chastened and granted hope that the way we undertake our habits of dying can point us finally to “life in death.”