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

Herbert Discussing the Word 166
As Herbert completes this set of Christmas poems, we see that all God’s ‘sweets’ are in the
Incarnation. Significantly, we see that we can know God by way of the Incarnation, ‘for
we have all of us just such another’. We all have this box because we all have a physical
body and an ethereal soul, just as God did, but, as Herbert shows when he closes out the
poem, ‘man is close, reserv’d, and dark to [God]’. (25) We have our own cabinet, a ‘poore
cabinet of bone’ (28) in which ‘Sinnes have their box apart’. (29) And so it is that
although we can know God through the Incarnation, it is only through the cross that we
truly have access to God, because ‘God does not expect to find in man what He expects to
give him. A heart that is “free and eager and joyful” is given only by the Spirit’, 66 and
through this gift God is able to pierce the ‘box apart’.
Herbert tells his readers in ‘Prayer (II)’,
Of what an easie quick accesse,
My blessed Lord, art thou! how suddenly
May our requests thine eare invade! (1-3)
Even though prayer gives us easy and speedy access to God, there is still a distance that
must be bridged. We cannot simply talk with God face to face. Although we know that
God, in Jesus, has a face that can be seen, we do not know what it looks like. We can take
the Eucharist, we cannot have a meal with God. We are divided. ‘The Bag’ contains a
grotesque (and Crashavian) image of how Jesus’s death gives a way to send our cares and
concerns to heaven. Through imagining our prayers and petitions as letters, we can put
them in the ‘bag’ that was formed in Jesus’s side when the soldier speared him as he hung
66 Love Known, p. 27.