The Economy of Praise in George Herbert's "The Church"

Abstract

Addressing his "chief good," the Christ to whom he owes his salvation, Herbert asks how he can respond in his poetry to Christ's sacrifice. Within this rhetorical context, that of a speaker at a loss for words before the magnitude of another's act, the problem of response becomes a problem of economic transaction, as we can see from the puns on the words "measure," "count," and "tell." These are countinghouse terms; but they also belong to the technical vocabulary of poetry or refer to its intentions. The word "measure" means here to ascertain an amount or quantity; it also refers to a specific unit in prosody or music. The word "count" has three senses: to enumerate, to give an account of. or to scan a verse of poetry. The word "tell" can mean to enumerate or, simply, to speak. Herbert's "Lovely enchanting language" ("The Forerunners,"!. 19), by means of catachresis, can make economics, in the sense of symbolic exchange, a metaphor for poetry, for Herbert another system of symbolic exchange. The un-