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

Herbert Discussing the Word 164
They and my minde may chime,
And mend my ryme. 61
This poem is a beautiful lament and rebuke, made all the more significant by the fact that it
is followed by ‘Christmas’. As Herbert states in that poem, ‘The shepherds sing; and shall
I silent be?’ 62
But, returning to ‘Deniall’, the reader is presented with Herbert’s view of an
unhearing God, one with whom he can have no contact, and is representative of a life
broken, as the rhymes are broken at the end of every stanza until the end. But even in
ending the poem with what seems to be a reconciliation is really Herbert declaring that he
knows the only way to fix the brokenness is for God to turn back to him and to ‘cheer and
tune [his] heartlesse breast’ so that all will be set right, but the poem does not actually
show this taking place. In this, Strier is correct when he states that ‘The poet cannot, in
this sense, mend his “ryme” himself. He cannot mend his spiritual state by mending his
representation of it’. 63
However, there is the hope that it will happen, and as Chana Bloch
points out, ‘His suit is granted as he speaks; his rhyme is mended, and the firm cadence of
the last line is, in its own way, a form of praise’. 64 Herbert cannot completely mend
himself as he mends his poem, but he can offer praise in the knowledge that as he can
mend his creation, his ‘rhyme’, so too can God mend his creation, the poet, and it is in the
next poem that we see God perform this action, by way of mending humanity as he sews
the human and divine into one. ‘Christmas’, the point of God entering the world as a
human, is what Herbert uses to assure his readers that God will indeed listen to them.
They will not be ‘dust’ with tongues, but creatures made in the image of God. This
dichotomy of the known and unknown God is made explicit in the next poem.
61 ‘Deniall’.
62 ‘Christmas’, line 15.
63 Love Known, p. 191.
64 Spelling the Word, p. 278.