ABSTRACT
The identity of the 'speaker' of Herbert's poems is, after all, a perennial issue. This chapter examines whether the voice is regarded as transparent or opaque, it functions as a veil; the transcendence that it shadows has many names: God; Christ; or, even, the human 'self'. Revelation is always delivered by the voice of Herbert's texts, by the supposed tone; from the sounds heard, everything follows. The poems so explicitly thematize the divestment of self and of authorship, raising, thereby, for modern criticism the problem of the location of Herbert in relationship to texts that he seems willing to disown, and yet continues to produce, that it is particularly the status of the voice and writing of the Other that is in question. Christ is the way, the door: the dead letter kept in circulation and kept from arrival at anything more or less than endless supplementation.
