George Herbert's Pattern Poems and the Materiality of Language: A New Approach to Renaissance Hieroglyphics

Herbert's hieroglyphic poems, like Renaissance hieroglyphs in general, have been studied mostly in relation to Renaissance concepts of metaphor and allegory, as well as in relation to Renaissance traditions of pattern poems and emblem literature.' However, they can also be understood in the context of Renaissance linguistic theory, especially the Renaissance interest in the material underpinnings of language in written letters and spoken sounds. Murray Cohen has shown the importance of this interest in what he calls "sensible words" in the period between 1640 and 1700,2 but discussion of the material basis of language begins much earlier, with the Humanists in the sixteenth century, and continues into the early seventeenth century as well. Herbert's hieroglyphic use of language can be further illuminated within this earlier context. I do not wish to exclude metaphor as a significant dimension of Herbert's hieroglyphs, but the approach I propose emphasizes the relationship of metaphor to other forms of linguistic thought. This approach tries to relate Herbert to a strain of Renaissance thought not often associated with his work: whereas most historically oriented discussions of Herbert have as their context the theological and spiritual tenor of his church, his relationship to the Christian Renaissance has often been neglected. The importance of Renaissance ideas for Herbert's poetry is evident in an aspect of the period's linguistic thought where Humanist, Neoplatonist, and cabalistic interests converge, namely in the Renaissance view of words as material things that belong to the same network of resemblances that endows natural objects with allegorical meaning-a view that underlies the Renaissance interest in hieroglyphs and emblem literature. The letters and words that form the typographical pictograms of Herbert's hieroglyphic pattern poems, "The Altar" and "Easter Wings," for example, are also the written marks of the poet's utterance-his prayer, his plea, his spoken word. In this regard, Herbert's hieroglyphs depend on