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

Herbert Discussing the Word 157
dialogue will continue until the final moment of complete communion that is found in the
final Eucharist of ‘Love (III)’. This point is similarly missed by A. D. Nuttall when stating
that ‘the very act of dramatising [the words of God] (which is a kind of usurpation) they
blaspheme it’, 52 because the words of God can be known since he has already provided
them through his Word.
The inspiration of God can continue through the poet without the poet needing to
fear the blasphemy of claiming a new revelation from, nor of misrepresenting God. To
return to the second line of ‘Prayer (I)’, Nuttall states that ‘The image is very beautiful but
at the same time obscurely troubling. Most of us prefer fresh air to CO 2’. 53 These images
are not troubling because they are not bound by the rules of nature, rather they are bound
by the Incarnation, and as such, everything can be and has been redeemed through the
physical presence of Jesus and the indwelling of God. Through this grace then, the
believer and poet is able to return not actual breath but creation and creativity back to the
one who sent it. Prayer comes from God to humanity (the beings made in his image) and
return to them through God becoming their flesh, or as William Shullenberger says,
‘Prayer, like preaching, carries the possibility of atonement for speaker and for auditor
because of Christ’s typological inhabitation of the human speech act’. 54
Herbert can speak
as God, because God is in Herbert. God and his workings may be unknowable, but,
because of the Incarnation, they can be ‘something understood’.
‘Faith’ and ‘Prayer’ lead the reader to what is perhaps the greatest of the Christian
sacraments, ‘The H. Communion’, and it is in ‘The H. Communion’ that the reader sees
how much the incarnational life and death of Jesus is the one doctrine that allows humanity
52 A. D. Nuttall, Overheard by God (London, 1980), p. 3.
53 Overheard by God, p. 33.
54 William Shullenberger, ‘Ars Praedicandi in George Herbert’s Poetry’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-
Larry Pebworth (eds.), “Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse” (Columbia, MO, 1987), pp. 106-107.