Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Herbert Discussing the Word 140
Thanksgiving’, with the first ten lines of the poem acting as a summary and response to the
tragedy that Christ underwent. We read:
Oh King of grief! (a title strange, yet true,
To thee of all kings onely due)
Oh King of wounds! how shall I grieve for thee,
Who in all grief preventest me?
Shall I weep bloud? why thou hast wept such store
That all thy body was one doore.
Shall I be scourged, flouted, boxed, sold?
‘Tis but to tell the tale is told.
My God, my God, why dost thou part from me?
Was such a grief as cannot be. (1-10)
Herbert here agrees with Jesus and admits that there never was a grief likes his, especially
at the point of being abandoned by God. The Incarnation was a movement by God
towards humanity, yet the crucifixion finds God in human form, Jesus, being abandoned
by God at the very point of redemption. The concept of being abandoned by God is
clearly one that is terrifying, that is the breaking of the omnipotent Trinity, and critics like
Janis Lull have been more comfortable describing this as a ‘supreme tragic fiction’ 32 that
Jesus performs ‘as if it were real’, 33 yet as can be seen from the discussion of the
‘communication of attributes’ in the Lanyer chapter God in the person really does die, and
so there is a true tragedy at play when the paradox of the immortal God dying is portrayed
in this poem. For Christ, this is a grief that he endures, but that we will never experience,
32 Janis Lull, The Poem in Time (London, 1990), p. 53.
33 The Poem in Time, p. 53.