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

Herbert Discussing the Word 169
exist completely in the same space. Herbert no longer needs to contemplate how to get his
words to God, because he is standing there with him. Speaking of the similarities in theme
between ‘Prayer (I)’ and ‘Love (III)’, P. G. Stanwood states that ‘There are two themes,
one which reaches forth, the other which stands ready to receive and can be completed
only in receiving; for prayer, like love, is offered to be answered, and answered in order to
make love possible’. 72
‘Love (III)’ is not a poem simply about the Lord’s Supper, but about the final feast
that comes after the judgement, and this finality is essential when approaching the verse.
Although most of the recent critical readings of the poem take it out of its relationship to
the preceding poems, it is much more dramatic, and the exchange between Herbert and
Christ makes much more sense, if seen in a post-Judgement situation. Michael
Schoenfeldt has rightly brought to the forefront the erotic and social implications of the
poem, but in doing so, he has overstated their importance in the poem. 73
Regarding the
erotic readings of the poem, R. V. Young is correct when he states that ‘it is misleading to
suggest that “Love (III)” is permeated by scarcely concealed erotic preoccupations under a
surface of conventional piety. Nothing is more conventional than for Christian devotion to
be expressed in unmistakably erotic figures that point beyond themselves to what, from a
Christian perspective, is the most ecstatic fulfilment of the most intense desire’, 74 or as
Whalen says, ‘the result is a true consummation, a marriage of human and divine in a
poem that boldly invests spiritual experience with erotic intensity’. 75 While Michael
Schoenfeldt provides some very interesting insights into the poem when he reads it in
relation to the concept of rules of courtesy, he misses much when he does not allow for the
72 P. G. Stanwood, ‘The Liveliness of Flesh and Blood’, Seventeenth Century News 31 (1973), 53.
73 Schoenfeldt’s reading can be found in Prayer and Power: ‘Love (III)’ in relation to courtesy, pp. 199-229,
and the erotic, pp. 255-270. Warren M. Liew also addresses the erotic reading of the poem in his article
‘Reading the Erotic in George Herbert’s Sacramental Poetics’, George Herbert Journal 31.1&2 (2007-8),
33-62.
74 R. V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion (Cambridge, 2000), p. 136.
75 Poetry of Immanence, p. 159.