Robert's reading of "Church Monuments" as originating in a moment outside of a church is well-founded—that's where most church monuments are erected—yet the poem also might be seen to occur in an imaginary architectural/liturgical "space" within Herbert's The Temple (as published in 1633.)

There "Church Monuments" marks the threshold of a suite that addresses several aspects of physical experience common to church-yards and churches: after it comes "Church Music," "Church-Lock and Key," "The Church Floor," and then, "The Windows." With its focus on tactile "Jet," "Marble," and "dust," "Church Monuments" shares a project with these ensuing poems, meditations on what if feels like to be so "entombed," the church and its audible comforts, sound as key in a lock, "speckled stone," and light seen through "brittle crazy glass." I feel clearer about what Herbert is doing in "Church Monuments" when I read it in the context of this suite, which has been called "the furniture poems." Together these poems give me a feel for how Herbert's speaker is trying make himself at home in his god's earthly home.

The Norton Critical edition of Herbert's work indicates that the 1633 edition of The Temple may be the first time that this poem was divided into four six-line stanzas. Two distinct manuscript versions of "Church Monuments" compose the poem as one block of text—the block is an unusual choice for Herbert, the carver of so many well-turned stanza shapes, and it could be he's responding to the blocks of stone in a real or imagined churchyard. One of these manuscripts has line 17 singled out by an indentation, perhaps to emphasize the speaker's tightening resolve at uttering "Dear Flesh." Or perhaps Herbert meant the line to cinch his block mimetically—to create a waist and thus give "Church Monuments" a greater resemblance to an hourglass.

Speaking of the location of these church monuments, I have read that another possibility is that they are in the church itself. In Herbert's time, the deceased could be buried beneath the floor, in monuments (!), or behind plaques on the wall. Both Herbert and his parents were buried inside churches.

Of course, Robert's placing the monuments in the graveyard outside goes a long way toward explaining that great phrase in which the monuments "shall bow, and kneel, and fall down flat / To kiss those heaps, which now they have in trust."

Yes, Mary Ann, it's that memorable image of bowing and kneeling and falling down flat that leads me to imagine a graveyard with upright stones. . . . but everything Daniel Bosch says about the literal and figurative architecture of The Temple is germane. Including the alternate shape of the printed or written poem as a block-- either an upright rectangle or one you walk on, as in many English churches.

I must say I hope the monuments are outside the church, because to me that is one of the most moving aspects of the poem: the contrast between the soul going into church, for perhaps more “orthodox” devotions, while the flesh remains outside for a profounder meditation. Perhaps it is my 21st Century bias to want to push the un-Christian perspective of the poem that way, but I can’t help it—while the “I” goes with the soul into church to pray, the flesh is being schooled in deeper lessons.

I love your phrasing -

while the “I” goes with the soul into church to pray, the flesh is being schooled in deeper lessons.

- much more eloquent than my wording to make a similar point in reply to Paul Breslin in mgerard's thread - but I would caveat one aspect of your wording. It seems to me that the "I" is divided as well (rather postmodern of it, i dare say) - the "I" both prays in the church AND stays out to 'entomb my flesh' and to 'trust my body'.

It's definitely interesting that the poem distinguishes the "I" from both the soul and the flesh. I do read the "I" as keeping closer company with the soul, though. I more or less read "I gladly trust / My body to this school" as "I entrust my child to this daycare center while I go to work."

I too like thinking about the outside of the church and the inside. As you point out, Robert Thomas, the "I" who is, in utterance of the poem neither the flesh not the soul, is the one who entrusts, entombs, etc. The learning to read and spell adds another emotional note.

Quite a poem.

The idea of the contrast between the soul going into church and the body is nice, but it really does all take place within the church. Herbert's one book of poems in English, The Temple, opens with a long poem that hardly anybody ever reads -- I'm kind of fond of it though--called "Perrirhanterium", which means Church-Porch, and it is a catalog of the kinds of things that you have to leave outside the church door before you enter, as if you're dusting off your feet. It's a list of bad habits, it's an injunction to reverence for the sacred space: "Think the king sees thee still/For his king does..." After this poem, all the activity of imagination is going on inside the church. But within the Church, the soul takes another step even further inward toward the divine, "repairing to her devotions" and leaving the body behind to contemplate what belongs to it: death. This is a theme that runs throughout English Renaissance poetry and religious thought, and is hardly new there. For a really lovely image of where the soul goes look at Herbert's "H.Communion." It is a recurrent theme in Herbert's work; inside the Temple there is still further to go, into a sacred space that transcends the physical sacred space.

Those monuments would have been a completely ordinary sight in any English church of the time. Think of those tombstone effigies of old nobles, for instance. Remember that this poem was written before the English Civil War, when there were a lot more of those types of monuments inside churches. Many survive to this day. Usually they were the resting places of the rich and powerful, who could afford to make the large financial donations that secured them such commemoration. Outside the church were the cheap seats, so to speak. So everyone, including Herbert, would have known that these represented a last gesture of pride and display of status. That's the irony of the monuments falling and kissing the dust, and Herbert knew exactly what he was doing.

sorry that should say "and the body staying outside"

Oh Kia, you (and others like Dan Bosch) have pretty much convinced me that my narrative of entering the church must defer to being in it. (The symbolism of that-- my preference for being outside-- is apt.)

The monuments I've seen in English churches are not very vertical-- not easy to picture them bowing, then, kneeling before they fall down flat. In my memory, they are catafalques or crypts or coffins or plaques on the floor or niches. Do you have any architectural remarks or explanations to add to your convincing sentences here?

I see your point about the physical monuments, and I've got nothing architectural, just social:. I think the answer to this is the height is not so much physical as the height of status, of position, of class, of <i>pride</i> and all the investment of identity in those things. That's why the bit about kneeling has a little ironic dig in it. Herbert was of that class; early in life he had shown great promise as an orator, and his real ambition was to be in public life. But James I, who would have been his patron, suddenly died and the whole climate of patronage changed and instead of worldly fame for his talents the preferment he got was an obscure country parish. The story is partly told in his "Affliction" poems. The sense of the irony of his own position is what gives the extra edge to the "kneeling" monuments. He knew what it was like to kneel to circumstances, to subdue his the pride that was his inheritance.

Oh and I will add that I love the sound of this poem for exactly the reason that you do--the incredible suavity and naturalness of the language. That's Herbert's voice and nobody sounds quite like him.

Robert, I agree with your later assessment that the monuments were in the church. I won’t go into all the reasons that I agree with earlier commentators. Based on that fact, “entombed” carries added weight: the speaker/parson, in fact, spends much of his time in a vast tomb, where the dead are enshrined inside the church. It is important to note that it took connection or wealth to be buried inside the church, as opposed to outside in the cemetery. Inside, one might be recognized forever. A kind of immortality. Inside, one’s tomb would be more protected from the elements. Herbert puts these notions to rest, if not to shame. The monuments inside the church are decaying to dust, slower maybe than the ones outside, but decaying nonetheless. He also seems to be mocking the High Anglican rituals of bowing, kneeling and falling prostrate (yes, the stones do this as they disintegrate), but he seems to be saying that the high clerics are prone to the same fate as other dust, that there is a false sense of security in their ritual of proclaiming the immunity of the soul from suffering and their position of superiority. (The high Episcopalian priests fall prostrate at the Cross on Good Friday in Cambridge, Mass.) Yes, the soul may not suffer, but the body does, as the poem attests, and the clerics’ position only appears to exempt them from reality (much like doctors who can’t tolerate getting sick or think themselves immune from the same illnesses that afflict their patients). We don’t love poems because we can intellectualize them. I love this poem because its rhythms move my energy, my life force, and because I know there is a whole self behind the poem talking to me. In this case, the voice reaches me and touches me across centuries. Robert, you are right to locate the power of that reach in his sentences.

This is one of Herbert’s poems that prefigures modern liberal Christianity with its embrace of the fallible human body and the body’s ultimate suffering as a symbol of the suffering of the soul. What it is not is a theological poem.

If we look at the grammar of the poem, you’re right about the energy its first sentence evokes in us. I would add that the fact that the main verb is embedded causes us to breathe differently, to extend our breath, but also that it’s important that it’s not only a two-syllable word (”entomb”), but an iamb. The emphasis on the second syllable creates movement.

I think the poem is quietly subversive. The sentence structure and syntax keep it from being a sermon, a diatribe or an easy gloomy gloss on mortality. The sentence here is the answer to the tombs. And shouldn’t every great poem be exactly that?

Teresa Cader, I believe you have summed up and pointed out quite a lot!

I didn't know that contemporary Episcopal priests practice the custom or prostration.

And thanks to you and Kia, I can supplement my old mental image of headstones bowing and kneeling and falling flat with another, of the interior, grander monuments doing the same in time.

Robert,

You mentioned that you studied with Yvor Winters. Another of his students, Alan Stephens, was my teacher. Most of his books were published by Alan Swallow, though the later ones were done by smaller presses. Al died on July 28. He loved the English Renaissance poets--especially Herbert--and he made use of them in a way that I don't think you can find in any other 20th-century American poet. The poem below is one sonnet in a sequence he wrote in the 1970s. It's on the theme of mortality, with the same artful simplicity that you find in Herbert, and yet arriving at a very different conclusion. I hope you don't mind if I post it here.

50. Night-Piece

Lying in the long dark, insomniac,
I see it clearly, sea and beach and air
And a red winter sun, down low, for fire
For the fourth element made out by the Greek
On Sicily's coast two dozen centuries back--
Fire that'll turn me into atmosphere
After I'm dead, and ashes tossed out where
Maybe they'll wash ashore. I hear gulls creak,
And put my being in with the elements
We share with the whole show, rather than
With the odd creature in it that is man
Or with my self, still odder . . . till the tense
Weavings of wakefulness begin to fray
Loosen and come apart and float away--