Anamorphosis and the religious subject of George Herbert's "Coloss. 3.3."

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2007 by Eric B. Song

George Herbert experiments in clever and often profound ways with the interplay between visual and literary traditions. Although "Coloss. 3.3." is not one of his better-known poems, it is in a certain sense one of the most insistently visual works in The Temple. In more strikingly shaped poems such as 'The Altar." and "Easter Wings.," the contours of the verse can also be experienced aurally: as the lines contract and expand, they change the poetry's rhythm. By contrast, all ten lines of "Coloss. 3.3." are pentameters, and the pattern of the poem can be experienced by the eye alone. This essay argues that "Coloss. 3.3." borrows from the visual technique of anamorphosis: the poem's horizontal lines are intersected by a diagonal line that demands a switch in perspective and makes it impossible to read along both axes simultaneously. It is precisely the function of anamorphic art to destabilize any single perspective and thus to produce multiple, temporally disjointed viewing experiences of one object. This essay will enter into conversations with (and about) Rene Descartes, Jacques Lacan, and Soren Kierkegaard in order to explore anamorphic art's unique relationship to time, knowledge, and the subject.

However, I do not wish to argue that "Coloss. 3.3." is a literal instance of anamorphosis; the poem requires a far less jarring change in perspective (a mere flicker of the eye) than does an anamorphic painting. The description of "Coloss. 3.3." as anamorphic is thus not a strict classification but rather an analogy or a point of comparison. Indeed, the relationship between "Coloss. 3.3." and anamorphic art conforms to the pattern that Helen Vendler ascribes to Herbert's use of the emblematic tradition: "Many of Herbert's lyrics ... define one aspect of his attachment to traditional materials, on the one hand, and one [sic] the other, his inventive departures from those traditions." (1) This essay will show how Herbert both utilizes and departs from a visual technique that generally produces doubt and a fragmented sense of time; "Coloss. 3.3." explores the anamorphic potential of poetry in order to enact a religious experience that transcends the individual reader's spatial and temporal limitations.

The central interpretive challenges of "Coloss. 3.3." are suggested by its epigraph. Sidney Gottlieb has argued that "Coloss. 3.3." is indebted to a specific emblem in Thomas Jenner's The Soules Solace (1626). (2) Yet, as Gottlieb suggests, the general strategy of Herbert's poem diverges significantly from that of an emblem. The visual puzzle of "Coloss. 3.3." is hardly difficult to decode. However, this ease is deceptive, for the poem--like many of Herbert's lyrics--exposes the interpretive solution that it initially offers as insufficient. Thus, if the epigraph ("Our life is hid with Christ in God") functions as an explanatory motto, it ironically raises more questions than it answers. (3) First, why does Herbert excise the first clause of Colossians 3:3, which reads, "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God?" (4) The poem does go on to allude to death ("One life is wrapt In flesh, and tends to earth" [line 5]) but Herbert's delicate "tends to earth" deflates the force of the Pauline death sentence. The poem is much more emphatic about life than it is about death: the second line reads, "That Life hath with the sun a double motion." The poem's epigraph raises a second question about Herbert's use of scripture: why does Herbert turn the second-person address of Paul's admonition to the Colossian church into a first-person declaration? This latter question needs some immediate refinement. The incongruity between the plural "[o]ur" and the singular "life" in the epigraph gestures toward an organic and communal religious bond between the poem's speaker and its readers. As Ramie Targoff has remarked, "For Herbert, writing devotional verse was simultaneously personal and communal, faithful and formal ... the speaker intertwines the expression of his inner self with the creation of skillful texts that might be shared by fellow worshippers." (5) Yet the actual text of "Coloss. 3.3." sharply revises the communally oriented epigraph. The poem refers briefly to "our diurnall friend" (line 3), but the diagonal, italicized line of the poem alters the epigraph to read, "My Life Is Hid, In Him, That Is My Treasure." There are, in a sense, not two but four first-person singular possessives in the poem, for the word "my," which appears twice in the poem, is effectively doubled by its placement along the diagonal axis of verse. The epigraph's relation to the poem invokes a generic question that a reader of the religious lyric must face: how does "Coloss. 3.3." mediate the intensely personal, subjective experience of the lyric's speaker with something like a communal expression of faith?

Stanley E. Fish has read "Coloss. 3.3." as a successfully self-consuming poem, one that negates the poet's conspicuous artifice by pointing to God as the true source of meaning: "the speaker's voice becomes indistinguishable from that of God's," so that "the poet loses himself." (6) As influential and suggestive as Fish's reading is, it nonetheless suffers from a certain opacity when called upon to answer the questions I have posed above. When the poem's epigraph speaks of "Our life," it does not align the speaker with God, but rather with the reader: both the speaker and the reader share one life in Christ. It is unclear, then, how the ostensible disappearing act of the poet or of the speaker works to establish the community that the epigraph imagines. Fish does describe the reader's experience of the poem's two axes: "He has been led by the demands of the verse to proceed in time, traveling from point to point but for (the sake of) the eternal word, to move within the confines of a time-space experience but to use that experience in order to catch a glimpse of a reality which, while it may be revealed in, is not bounded by, time and space." (7) Fish does not elaborate how Herbert's poem might achieve something as lofty as giving the reader a glimpse of a temporally and spatially unbounded truth. However, by comparing the effects of "Coloss. 3.3." with those produced by anamorphosis, we can describe more precisely how the poem conveys a transcendent sense not only of time and space, but also of shared religious experience.