"Church Monuments" by George Herbert

Subjects discussed in this episode include: 
 

-Aspects of devotional and Metaphysical poetry

-Memento Mori and its more fun twin, Carpe Diem 

-Tell the truth, but tell it in true rhymes. 

-The passing of time really blows. 

-Death may be the mother of beauty, but sin is the mother of death. 

-You may be star dust, but you're still dust. 

-A surprisingly harmless debate about pronouns. 

-There are no blasphemous hoodlums in this poem, unfortunately. 

-What's the difference between you and a time-keeping device? There isn't one. 

-Glass is just fancy sand. 

-Facing your mortality: not just a 17th century Christian activity. 

Text of the poem: 

Church Monuments 

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,

Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes

May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;

To which the blast of death's incessant motion,

Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,

Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust

My body to this school, that it may learn

To spell his elements, and find his birth

Written in dusty heraldry and lines;

Which dissolution sure doth best discern,

Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.

These laugh at jet, and marble put for signs,

To sever the good fellowship of dust,

And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,

When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat

To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?

Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem

And true descent: that when thou shalt grow fat,

And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know,

That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust

That measures all our time; which also shall

Be crumbled into dust. Mark, here below,

How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,

That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.

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Art by David Anthony Klug 

Transcript

Versecraft Episode 3: George Herbert’s “Church Monuments”

(Music)

Today we’ll be looking at one of the great poems of the English Renaissance, “Church Monuments,” by George Herbert. Herbert, who lived from 1593 to 1633, was an Anglican priest, and all his poetry is what one might call devotional poetry—poetry which addresses God or one’s own soul. The poems from the previous two episodes could also be considered devotional poetry in a broad sense, but Herbert, as one might expect, is more overtly religious and theological than Bowers or Roethke. Herbert wrote his devotional poems in the Mannerist or Baroque style popular in Europe at the time, which is often called the Metaphysical style in England; this style is characterized by the use of extended metaphors called conceits, which creatively link one concept or image with another in several eye-opening ways. Also typical of the Metaphysical style is a conflation of sexual and spiritual feeling, and extravagant displays of learning and wit. As you might suppose, the Metaphysical style can be executed more or less tastefully. In some cases, conceits and witticisms are little more than gimmicks designed to show off the ingenuity of the poet; in others however, such as in the case of this poem, the conceit can powerfully illuminate an idea in a way which we had not considered before, and thereby enhance the profundity and emotional impact of the poem. 

“Church Monuments” is not only a devotional, metaphysical poem, it also embodies what is called the Memento Mori trope. Latin for “Remember you will die,” Memento Mori poems are poems which remind you of your mortality in order to convince you to see earthly desires as vanity and embrace the life of the spirit instead. The secular counterpart to this trope is the Carpe Diem trope, which evokes mortality in order to enjoin the reader to do the opposite: to seize the day before death seizes you. Though our poem fulfills the former trope, it does so with tremendous accomplishment, and never feels cliché. The poem goes like this: 

Church Monuments 

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,

Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes

May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;

To which the blast of death's incessant motion,

Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,

Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust

My body to this school, that it may learn

To spell his elements, and find his birth

Written in dusty heraldry and lines;

Which dissolution sure doth best discern,

Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.

These laugh at jet, and marble put for signs,

To sever the good fellowship of dust,

And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,

When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat

To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?

Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem

And true descent: that when thou shalt grow fat,

And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know,

That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust

That measures all our time; which also shall

Be crumbled into dust. Mark, here below,

How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,

That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.

For those of you who tuned in last week, you will notice that the form of this poem is very similar to Roethke’s poem: both are twenty-four lines long, composed of four sestain stanzas. Both are in iambic pentameter, although Herbert’s use of the meter is much closer to Bowers than Roethke— he relies primarily on enjambment and punctuation rather than lots of metrical variation to achieve an expressive rhythm. Speaking of enjambment, observe how the thoughts overflow across not only the lines but the stanzas—only the last stanza ends with a period. This overlapping quality gives the poem a sense of continuous motion, a steady stream of thought which ends, as life must, in one’s eventual “fall” into death. Because of this form, I won’t analyze the poem exactly stanza by stanza, but rather thought by thought. You will notice that the rhyme scheme is ABCABC, and that all the rhymes are perfect—this is the 17th century after all, and slant rhymes are not allowed yet. Not until Emily Dickinson in the 19th century would they be used often, and not until Wilfred Owen in the early 20th century would they become accepted and popularized.

            To properly get into the poem, let’s begin with the first stanza, ending with the middle of the last line: 

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,

Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes

May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;

To which the blast of death's incessant motion,

Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,

Drives all at last.

Immediately, we find the speaker engaged in a state of prayer. His soul “repairs to her devotion.” Note the feminine pronoun— in Jewish and Christian thought, the soul and even the Holy Spirit, which is called the “Shekhinah” in Judaism, are often characterized as female. While his soul is praying, he says, “here I entomb my flesh.” Where is here? Well, if we bear in mind the title of the poem, “Church Monuments” and take a hint from the verb “entomb” applied to a living person, we can reasonably assume that the speaker is praying inside a tomb. Why is he praying in a tomb? “That it betimes may take acquaintance of this heap of dust.” “Betimes” is an archaic word which means “early on.” Therefore, the speaker is saying: I am praying in a tomb so that I can get used to the idea of death before my death—I am acquainting with the dust of others, and thereby acquainting my own flesh with its status as dust. Why do all things turn to dust? Because all things are driven by the blast of  “death’s incessant motion—” time— which in turn is characterized as a breath made out of the “exhalation of our crimes.” The breath of time which blows us toward death only exists because we blow ourselves there by committing sins. Here the speaker expresses one of the key theological mechanics of Christianity: Sin is the origin and cause of death, from Adam and Eve onwards, and all people are born with and commit sin. According to this view, it is only because Christ has taken on the sins of the world that we have the opportunity to escape death and enjoy eternal life. Nevertheless, until the Final Judgement, people will continue to die, and their flesh will continue to decay—and this brute fact is what the speaker ruminates upon. 

Let’s begin again, continuing on through the second to last line of the second stanza: 

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,

Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes

May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;

To which the blast of death's incessant motion,

Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,

Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust

My body to this school, that it may learn

To spell his elements, and find his birth

Written in dusty heraldry and lines;

Which dissolution sure doth best discern,

Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.

            Because death is certain, the speaker devotes himself to teaching his mortal body, whom you will notice has a masculine pronoun,  “to spell his elements and find his birth” in the carvings of the tomb upon which he meditates. Now, while this stanza later makes clear that the subject of “his elements” is the speaker’s body, we might wonder why the speaker changes the pronoun of his body from “it” in the line “that it may learn” to “his” in “spell his elements, and find his birth.” I have a feeling this is merely an inconsistency, but it does open the door to suspecting that, because the body is an “it,” that when the speaker speaks of “his elements” he is referring to the subject of the previous sentence, in which case the “he” would refer to the personification of Death. Therefore we can read these either lines as: I devote my body to learning about its own elements through the study of tombs, and recognize that its origin lies in a cycle of mortality, OR we can read it as: I devote my body to learning about the elements of death through the study of tombs, and through this study discover death’s origins in human sin. Though the first reading is probably the “correct” one, it is enriching to have the other in the back of our minds as well. The final two lines confirm that the body is identifying itself with what it sees: a monument for a dead person, now dust, which is itself turning into dust, as the body someday will. The body is “comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.”

Now that we have a better handle on the activity of the speaker, with some room for interpretation, let’s  begin again up through the question in the third stanza: 

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,

Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes

May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;

To which the blast of death's incessant motion,

Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,

Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust

My body to this school, that it may learn

To spell his elements, and find his birth

Written in dusty heraldry and lines;

Which dissolution sure doth best discern,

Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.

These laugh at jet, and marble put for signs,

To sever the good fellowship of dust,

And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,

When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat

To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?

As we have seen before, and will see here, part of what makes this poem difficult is the difficulty of discovering the subjects of the speaker’s pronouns. “These laugh at jet, and marble put for signs.” Who are “these?” Though they have become personified, they must be either the “dusty heraldry and lines” or “dust and earth” of the previous sentence. I admit that at first, I thought that “these” referred to other people in the tomb, perhaps teenagers, who were behaving less than respectfully toward the deceased. In truth however, the former readings, though elaborate, makes more sense. It seems apt that dust and earth would mock the hubris of humans building grandiose tombs—but I prefer the less obvious reading, where “these” refers to “dusty heraldry in lines.”  This reading says: the ornamentation of the tomb itself, which is now crumbling away, mocks by its decrepitude the arrogance of people who build large stone monuments which they think will last forever and separate their bodies from the earth, and in doing so “sever the good fellowship of dust, and spoil the meeting.” The speaker remarks that even these monuments that unnaturally separate corpses from the earth will themselves “bow, and kneel, and fall down flat” and that the dust of the monuments will mingle with the dust of the corpses which they now “have in trust.” Note here the way Herbert shapes the sound of the words to mimic their meaning: in a rare metrical substitution, the line “fall down flat” ends with a spondee, resulting in three heavy accents in a row, which are emphasized even more by the alliteration between “fall” and “flat”—a perfect way to emphasize the heavy toppling of the monuments. 

Herbert has spoken so much of dust and dissolution that we may wonder what else he could have to say on the matter. As it turns out, something strangely beautiful and wonderfully vivid, perhaps the finest metaphysical conceit in the English language. Let’s now read the poem all the way through to discover this climax: 

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,

Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes

May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;

To which the blast of death's incessant motion,

Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,

Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust

My body to this school, that it may learn

To spell his elements, and find his birth

Written in dusty heraldry and lines ;

Which dissolution sure doth best discern,

Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.

These laugh at jet, and marble put for signs,

To sever the good fellowship of dust,

And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,

When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat

To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?

Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem

And true descent: that when thou shalt grow fat,

And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know,

That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust

That measures all our time; which also shall

Be crumbled into dust. Mark, here below,

How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,

That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.

Again, the speaker commands his body to learn that from dust he came and to dust he shall return, so that when he is tempted by earthly pleasures, he shall think little of them. How will he enforce this reminder? Think of yourself as an hourglass, the speaker says—an hourglass shows the passing of time through the accumulation of sand or dust. So too, one can measure the passage of time by the decay of the body. Yet more than this—glass itself is made of sand and will someday collapse into the same kind of dust it now holds. So too, the body which now measures its own age will one day completely collapse, so that its age is no longer identifiable, no longer remembered, and its dust will mingle with the dust of its tomb, the dust of the earth. Everything is an hourglass, everything a reminder of entropy and container of dust. This metaphor is not only perfect in itself but drives home both the theme and the imagery of the previous stanzas. 

In addition to all this wordplay, Herbert is making an allusive pun as well—“flesh is but the glass” recalls the famous statement in the book of Isaiah that “all flesh is grass,” a phrase which makes a similar point about the transience of life. I can’t help but add that Brahms’ setting of this phrase in his German Requiem: “Denn Alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras” is in my opinion one of the most sublime pieces of Classical music ever written. After this episode you should give it a listen. 

Observe, the speaker concludes, “how tame these ashes are, how free from lust, that thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.” “Fall” is the perfect choice of word, for to be reminded of one’s own mortality can both prepare one for one’s eventual “fall” into death, and can also condition the mind to refrain from falling into sin. This poem, the subject of which are church monuments, has itself become a monument for the church: an immaculately crafted sepulcher of words which communicates its orthodox message with eloquence, imagination, and universality, and which, unlike the monuments of stone, will never crumble into dust so long as there are people alive to appreciate it. 

With all that we have learned and explored, let us encounter the poem one last time as an old friend: 

Church Monuments 

While that my soul repairs to her devotion,

Here I entomb my flesh, that it betimes

May take acquaintance of this heap of dust;

To which the blast of death's incessant motion,

Fed with the exhalation of our crimes,

Drives all at last. Therefore I gladly trust

My body to this school, that it may learn

To spell his elements, and find his birth

Written in dusty heraldry and lines;

Which dissolution sure doth best discern,

Comparing dust with dust, and earth with earth.

These laugh at jet, and marble put for signs,

To sever the good fellowship of dust,

And spoil the meeting. What shall point out them,

When they shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat

To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust?

Dear flesh, while I do pray, learn here thy stem

And true descent: that when thou shalt grow fat,

And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know,

That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust

That measures all our time; which also shall

Be crumbled into dust. Mark, here below,

How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,

That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.