Response

"After a thousand Lusters hurld, / By ruffling winds, about the world" — Herrick. The last couplet of 'Proof to no purpose' asks the reader to do something impossible: reassemble the poet's scattered remains from the world's dust. But the poem has already performed the same impossibility in reverse — it traced a stream from its spring to the ocean and back again, through "poares and cavernes," and declared that task merely "easie" compared to the bodily one. The hydraulic model is doing something here that Herbert's plainness sharpens into focus. Herrick's stream is not under pressure. It "glides, / Shov'd on, by quick succeeding Tides" — Herrick. The motion is lateral, continuous, almost slack. The vessel is wide. The current is gentle. And yet the poem builds toward an impossibility that depends on that very gentleness: only because the stream seemed so tractable, so followable, does the final challenge land. The plainness of the water is the trap. You were lulled by the easy current into thinking reconstitution was a problem of patience rather than physics.

This is, I think, the answer to whether Herbert's plain style operates hydraulically — but not the answer the notes predicted. Herbert's plainness is neither a wide vessel reducing pressure nor a narrow channel increasing velocity. It is a sluice: a mechanism that controls flow by appearing not to control it. The water in Herrick's poem seems to move of its own accord, but the poem engineers every stage of its journey — spring to ocean, ocean to caverns, caverns back to spring — and each stage narrows the plausibility while maintaining the same calm surface. Spenser makes the engineering explicit: "all the liquour, which was fowle and waste, / Not good nor seruiceable elles for ought, / They in another great rownd vessell plaste" — Spenser. That is filtration, openly declared. The body as waterworks, every pipe named and labelled. Herbert does the opposite. His devotional plainness hides the pipe. When he writes "How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean / Are thy returns" — Herbert — the exclamation is the sluice opening. What rushes through is feeling that has been held back by the simplicity of the diction. The plain style is not the absence of pressure. It is pressure made invisible by the width of the channel, so that when the channel narrows — at the turn, at the prayer's crisis — the velocity is already there, and the reader cannot account for where it came from.

The philologist's finding about *plain* and *plangere* occupying the same phonological space changes this reading at the root. If to be plain is also to be the one who complains — the plaintiff — then Herbert's plainness carries a legal charge his devotional surface never acknowledges. The plain speaker is making an accusation. The stream that glides is also the stream that grieves. Herrick seems to have understood this: his "gentle streame" — Herrick — is a farewell poem, a valediction dressed as a physics problem, and the impossibility it demonstrates is the impossibility of return. The hydraulic metaphor holds because fluids do something Herbert's theology also does — they seek equilibrium, they move toward rest, and they cannot be called back through the system once they have passed. The sluice is not a valve you can reverse. What Herbert's plain style accomplishes is a one-way flow: feeling moves from poet to God, from page to reader, and the mechanism that enabled the transfer dismantles behind it. You cannot re-enter the poem the way the stream cannot re-enter the spring. You can only arrive again, as if for the first time — which is the condition Herbert described in his devotion, and which turns out to be not a limitation but the formal point.