6. Anomaly, Conundrum,
Thy-Will-Be-Done
On the Poetry of George Herbert
CARL PHILLIPS
But I am lost in flesh, whose sugared lies Still mock me, and grow bold: Sure thou didst put a mind there, if I could Find where it lies. “dullness” (21–24)
To have my aim, and yet to be Further from it than when I bent my bow. “the cross” (25–26)
HE SEEMED TO ME, AT FIRST, SUBVERSIVE. I was younger then. Of George Herbert, what I knew was he'd been a priest. Of devotion, what I imagined was: how difficult can it be? Only cross belief with enough discipline—Also honesty—love—somewhere, figuring… About the flesh, I understood as much as about ambition: truly, nothing at all.
The Temple, comprising essentially all of Herbert's poems, seems increasingly a private record, even as the prose work The Country Parson was intended—for himself as much as for others—to be a publicly available instructional work: “a complete pastoral,” as Herbert puts it in his note
the parson, having studied and mastered all his lusts and affections within, and the whole army of temptations without, hath ever so many sermons ready penned, as he hath victories. And it fares in this as it doth in physic: he that hath been sick of a consumption, and knows what recovered him, is a physician so far as he meets with the same disease and temper; and can much better and particularly do it, than he that is generally learned, and was never sick. (chap. 33)
Thus, the more objective stance of the purposefully didactic prose. It is in the poetry, however, that we see the frailty of the pastor—of, finally, any individual—laid bare, that we see him engaged in the very wrestling from which he will emerge experienced (not just “generally learned”) and will consequently give to the poems themselves a degree of earnestness that I find in the work of no other seventeenth-century poet.
What becomes clear in the prose is that Herbert believes that the pastor should have suffered bouts of affliction but that he is not to advertise such moments; rather, the fact of the pastor's private experience, to the extent that it is evident at all, will be most obvious in the quality of the guidance and wisdom he is able to extend to his parishioners. That is, there is a distinction in the prose work between Herbert's era and our own, in which the exposure of our public figures' private flaws would seem to endear us all the more to them. By the above logic the poems of The Temple—in showing the would-be devoted sometimes wrestling with, sometimes all but yielding to, and sometimes admitting to having yielded to temptation, and in capturing the same speaker unrepentantly railing against God or, presumably as blasphemous, inquiring into and challenging the fairness of God's ways—read as a private record. This record suggests in its overall design less an author who has in mind the best way to please and thereby win a readership than one intrigued by the irregular, unpredictable shifts of heart and mind that are what it is to be human. As with the best of the lasting writers (just now Dickinson and Hopkins come to mind), what takes its origin in personal experience becomes a touchstone for human experience more generally. And it is in this regard that I tend to agree with Anthony Hecht and others who have described Herbert as a confessional poet. He is—both in what approximates the liturgical sense of that word (the Reformation having made confession
Why affliction?—Why, inevitably, our suffering? These are questions Herbert asks repeatedly in The Temple, even as he—characteristically—knows that the answers are not so far from hand; the problem, rather, is in their being at best fickle comforters.
Looking at The Church, the central part of The Temple (and ignoring the two book-ending parts, each a single poem—“The Church-Porch” and “The Church Militant,” respectively [which, as Louis Martz has pointed out, “seem rather imposed on either side than organically related to the whole,” xxv]), it is worth noting that Herbert opens the main portion with “The Altar,” then immediately follows it with “The Sacrifice,” a poem (not coincidentally, the longest of Herbert's poems, at 252 lines) that details the event that makes the altar so significant to Christian thought, that is, Christ's crucifixion. The next eight poems all meditate on both the crucifixion and what man's response should be to it:
| Then for thy passion—I will do for that— | |
| Alas, my God, I know not what. | |
| (“The Thanksgiving,” 49–50) |
| I have considered it, and find | |
| There is no dealing with thy mighty passion: | |
| For though I die for thee, I am behind. | |
| (“The Reprisal,” 1–3) |
| O my chief good, | |
| How shall I measure out thy blood? | |
― 139 ― | |
| How shall I count what thee befell, | |
| And each grief tell? | |
| (“Good Friday,” 1–4) | |
Clearly, Herbert means to suggest that it is imperative we remember the passion of Christ adequately; we are duty bound to respond, inasmuch as it is by the death of Christ for humanity that humanity has access to salvation. But how to respond? One way is by seeing Christ as a model for imitation; this includes approximating, as much as we can, the very affliction that Christ suffered. In so doing we more worthily enjoy the resurrection that Christ won for us:
| With thee | |
| Let me combine | |
| And feel this day thy victory: | |
| For, if I imp my wing on thine, | |
| Affliction shall advance the flight in me. | |
| (“Easter-wings,” 16–20) |
Another justification for affliction is related to why sin is necessary, a fact that emerges when we look at two poems that appear one after the other and, as a pair, present an important aspect of Herbert's thought. First, the poems:
Mattens
| I cannot ope mine eyes, | |
| But thou art ready there to catch | |
| My morning-soul and sacrifice: | |
| Then we must needs for that day make a match. |
| My God, what is a heart? | |
| Silver, or gold, or precious stone, | |
| Or star, or rainbow, or a part | |
| Of all these things, or all of them in one? |
| My God, what is a heart, | |
| That thou shouldst it so eye, and woo, | |
| Pouring upon it all thy art, | |
| As if that thou hadst nothing else to do? |
| Indeed man's whole estate | |
| Amounts (and richly) to serve thee: | |
| He did not heav'n and earth create, | |
| Yet studies them, not him by whom they be. |
| Teach me thy love to know; | |
| That this new light, which now I see, | |
| May both the work and workman show: | |
| Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee. |
Sin (II)
| O that I could a sin once see! | |
| We paint the devil foul, yet he | |
| Hath some good in him, all agree. | |
| Sin is flat opposite to th' Almighty, seeing | |
| It wants the good of virtue, and of being. |
| But God more care of us hath had: | |
| If apparitions make us sad, | |
| By sight of sin we should grow mad. | |
| Yet as in sleep we see foul death, | |
| and live: So devils are our sins in perspective. |
In “Mattens” Herbert says that despite the many blessings provided by God (as celebrated in stanzas 1–3), man chooses—or has, as an empirical creature, no other choice—to study not the invisible creator but his more immediately knowable, because visible, creations. Having said that, Herbert goes on to ask that God himself be made as visible as his creation—“May both the work and workman show”—and that the visible be further rendered into something tangible—“Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee”—an unlikely event and one that, given the earlier stanzas of the poem, Herbert already knows to be inappropriate to wish for. Where, after all, is faith?
Equally unseeable, says the next poem, is sin, which Herbert would also have be made visible, until reaching the conclusion that “devils are our sins in perspective.” Even as devils offer a perspective by which to understand sin, so does the poem on sin offer a perspective on the subject matter of “Mattens,” namely, God's blessings. This is why sin is necessary and—to return to the original discussion—it is an explanation for the existence of affliction in our lives: how better, Herbert would ask, to understand salvation (by which we are to be released from affliction) than by affliction itself, affliction being a modified version of salvation's opposite, damnation? And again, sin provides the perspective by which to know, via our own affliction, the greater affliction of Christ (“like stones [sins] make / His blood's sweet current much more loud to be,” Herbert says in “Churchlock and Key,” 11–12).
Thus, the rationale. But reasoning notwithstanding, there remain for Herbert two difficulties with affliction. One is that affliction is ultimately inadequate when it comes to knowing Christ's affliction in its entirety. For not least of the distinctions between Christ and natural humanity is that it is via sin that persons are subject to affliction (beginning with Original Sin); Christ suffers in a state of sinlessness. As Herbert puts it, “I am behind,” by which I take him to mean that human beings, in their efforts to imitate Christ, are at an insurmountable disadvantage from the start; all of those efforts, therefore, will necessarily fall short.
The second problem with affliction is less sophisticated but no less true: namely, affliction doesn't feel good.
In “The Windows” Herbert describes humanity as “a brittle crazy glass” (2)—by “crazy,” meaning cracked, flawed. We are also told, however, in “Repentance,” that “Fractures well cured make us more strong” (36). In light of what Herbert says about affliction, sin, and their places in our lives, it seems reasonable to understand by this glass metaphor that sins—and the afflictions we suffer as a consequence of sin—can be ultimately good for us. If we are bettered by sin—made “more strong”—can't there be made an argument for indulging in sin, the more thoroughly to know the blessings of God? How can it be that we are made better by the very sins that we are instructed to rail against? Is it true that we are so bettered, or is this the only recourse, when it comes to thinking about the matter—given that, for the Herbertian Christian, sin is as inevitable as our yielding to it, as is our consequent suffering for having yielded? Not the least aspect of Herbert that wins for him my allegiance and trust—and makes him a distinctly earnest poet among his contemporaries whose work too often can seem mere flourish—is his silence in the wake of these questions.
How often it is that Herbert's poems will on one level argue—and persuasively—against the very arguments they no less persuasively put forward on a more immediate level. The poem “Justice (I)” can be seen, in terms of its form and rhyme, as a balance or set of scales, in which the weights are God and humanity:
Justice (I)
| I cannot skill of these thy ways. | |
| Lord, thou didst make me, yet thou woundest me; | |
| Lord, thou dost wound me, yet thou dost relieve me: | |
| Lord, thou relievest, yet I die by thee: | |
| Lord, thou dost kill me, yet thou dost reprieve me. | |
| But when I mark my life and praise, | |
| Thy justice me most fitly pays: | |
| For, I do praise thee, yet I praise thee not: | |
| My prayers mean thee, yet my prayers stray: | |
| I would do well, yet sin the hand hath got: | |
| My soul doth love thee, yet it loves delay. | |
| I cannot skill of these my ways. |
An inability to understand God in line 1 is by line 12 replaced with the confession (admission?) that the speaker does not understand his own ways; the implication is that the correct gesture, on our part, is not to attempt to understand God, not to question God's ways, but to consider what—in asking that God justify himself—is being said about our own inadequacies, about our presumption and arrogance. The notion that God is finally superior to—and not answerable to—our understanding is conveyed in the respective rhyme schemes of the two longerlined “quatrains” that serve as internal frame for the poem. In lines 2–5, which address God's response to the speaker, the rhyme scheme is a-a-a-a, the single rhyme suggestive of solidity, that which is unwavering, fixed—as consolidated in its tonal position as in its strength. Lines 8–11, which examine the speaker's responses to God, display a b-c-b-c rhyme scheme. If the earlier quatrain gains its strength from its sustaining a single note, as it were, then the second quatrain is arguably more suggestive of wavering, of straying, of suffering a weakness because of a lack of comparative unity of sound. In short, the poem can be said to argue—on the level both of content and of the rhymes by which that content is conveyed—that human beings are inferior to God and are shown to be all the more so by their reluctance to acknowledge their subordination to God.
However, can't we also say that a rhyme scheme of a-a-a-a is finally monotonous, redundant, unimaginative, oppressive in its lack of tonal variation and, accordingly, sophistication? By this logic, isn't a b-c-b-c scheme more melodic, more advanced because more varied?
If the poem is a scale, then, who tips it? God or humanity?
“Justice (I)” is one of many Herbert poems whose ambiguity deepens with each reading. There are, as well, many poems that deliberately do not progress forward—that is, they begin in a moment of despair or of confusion and end in a similar moment. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that these poems have as their trajectory the trajectory of prayer, which is unidirectional and upward (a “reverséd thunder,” “Prayer [I],” 6)—any return, in the form of answer (as, again, with prayer) happens in response to, which is to say outside of, the poem. What is being withheld is the easy resolution that a less reflective or more arrogant poet would be quick to offer. In not resolving the questions that arise, Herbert gains more authority, inasmuch as he seems to say the most honest thing to be said about the conundrum of God and humanity—in short, that conundrum is the fact: God punishes and rewards, as human beings both win and fall from grace; and the line between reward and punishment, between plummet and ascent, is decidedly blurred. This is everywhere apparent in The Temple, whose poems move with relentless accuracy to the irregular strophe of the human spirit, which is to say, to the rhythm of all our human strengths and weaknesses. In The Country Parson Herbert speaks of “a double state of a Christian even in this life, the one military, the other peaceable. The military is, when we are assaulted with temptations either within or from without. The peaceable is, when the Devil for a time leaves us, as he did our Saviour, and the angels minister to us their own food, even joy, and peace, and comfort in the Holy Ghost” (chap. 34).
That is the prose statement of a dilemma, not a resolution to it. The Temple is the poetic enactment of that dilemma. To read the poems is often to wade more deeply into dilemma; to meditate, in turn, on those dilemmas is in a sense to experience a kind of affliction in the form of seeing clearly our fallen condition. Yet haven't we seen in the poems that all affliction brings with it instruction? Conversely, no instruction without affliction—
Governing movement of The Temple: strophic, decidedly and inevitably, in keeping with the emotional, psychological, and intellectual shifts of an individual trying to bring into equilibrium the unknowable nature of God
Herbert, of course, no stranger to the classics.
To every great poet there is a particular arrogance whose nature is twofold: it permits the poet to write with the conviction of one who believes he or she is in possession of the truth; nevertheless, it does not blind the writer to his or her own potential failings. The latter quality produces the earnestness that, in turn, distinguishes the merely bombastic from the credibly authoritative.
If questioning the ways of God is one of the items with which Herbert openly wrestles throughout The Temple, another is writerly ambition. As with the two poets mentioned earlier—Hopkins and Dickinson—Herbert seems (quite reasonably) aware of his gift; the problem is, What to do with it? How to temper it to best serve God and not oneself ? How to fashion the perfect offering and then avoid a dangerous pride in one's own achievement? How to be a virtuoso of form and metrics yet seem less to be flaunting than appropriately harnessing that talent?
The question of the artist's responsibility is raised early in The Temple, shortly after it has been established that as human beings we are responsible for following the model of Christ in his suffering—a resolution that was no sooner reached than it confronted the question of how to approximate such a model, given our human disadvantages. Similarly, in “The Temper (I)” Herbert both announces that the artist (by which he means, of course, his own case, that of the Christian artist) is responsible for praising God and proceeds to ask how such praise should be put forward—again, given the spiritual instability that attends being human:
| How should I praise thee, Lord! how should my rhymes | |
| Gladly engrave thy love in steel, | |
― 145 ― | |
| If what my soul doth feel sometimes, | |
| My soul might ever feel! | |
| (1–4) | |
| Yet take thy way; for sure thy way is best: | |
| Stretch or contract me, thy poor debtor: | |
| This is but tuning of my breast, | |
| To make the music better. | |
| (21–24) |
The two stanzas argue for, at the very least, a parallel between spiritual and artistic devotion; for Herbert it seems clear that the two are in fact not parallel but one and the same. The welltuned breast (that is, the spiritually responsible one) will inevitably produce the music (literal music but also music as metaphor for a fitting devotion) appropriate to God. But even as the two types of devotion are akin, they inherit the same difficulty, namely, a human instability. Again, the action to take is clearly stated—in “Jordan (I),” in “The Quiddity,” but most pleasingly and economically, both, in “Jordan (II)”:
| When first my lines of heav'nly joys made mention, | |
| Such was their lustre, they did so excel, | |
| That I sought out quaint words, and trim invention; | |
| My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, | |
| Curling with metaphors a plain intention, | |
| Decking the sense, as if it were to sell. |
| Thousands of notions in my brain did run, | |
| Off 'ring their service, if I were not sped: | |
| I often blotted what I had begun; | |
| This was not quick enough, and that was dead. | |
| Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sun, | |
| Much less those joys which trample on his head. |
| As flames do work and wind, when they ascend, | |
| So did I weave myself into the sense. | |
| But while I bustled, I might hear a friend | |
| Whisper, How wide is all this long pretence! | |
| There is in love a sweetness ready penned: | |
| Copy out only that, and save expense. |
(The friend, incidentally, is usually identified as Christ; see Martz, 457.) Simplicity, it would seem, is crucial—an honesty of line and of sentiment
| Only an open breast | |
| Doth shut them out, so that they cannot enter; | |
| Or, if they enter, cannot rest, | |
| But quickly seek some new adventure. | |
| Smooth open hearts no fast'ning have; but fiction | |
| Doth give a hold and handle to affliction. (19–24) |
Yet, as with the inevitably complicated human soul, how is Herbert to adopt a plainness of style when he is so expert at poetic craft? And in light of the question that he raises in “Providence”—“But who hath praise enough? nay, who hath any?” (141)—mustn't the artist also avoid being accused of stinting on his craft? The line is, again, as blurred as the line between certain vices, the ones “whose natures, at least in the beginning, are dark and obscure: as covetousness and gluttony” (The Country Parson, chap. 26). Add to all of this that, like human beings, words are themselves at a disadvantage that necessitates their being ever inadequate to the responsibilities demanded of them, inasmuch as words “Doth vanish like a flaring thing, / And in the ear, not conscience ring” (“The Windows,” 14–15). Finally, there is the fact that
| None can express thy works, but he that knows them: | |
| And none can know thy works, which are so many, | |
| And so complete, but only he that owes them. | |
| (“Providence,” 142–44) |
—owes meaning “owns” in Herbert's time, with the sole owner being God himself.
What is a man of words—and especially of Herbert's facility with them—to do? Just as we have uncovered ways to justify sin, it is possible to argue that a commitment to conveying praise worthy of God justifies an inventiveness of form; that is, the artist is (or should be) engaged in a constant search for the most perfect form in which to cast his offering. My sense is that this was no mere justification for Herbert—he was earnest in his desire to put forward his best, for God. I also find it hard to
| A wreathéd garland of deservéd praise, | |
| Of praise deservéd, unto thee I give, | |
| I give to thee, who knowest all my ways, | |
| My crooked winding ways, wherein I live, | |
| Wherein I die, not live: for life is straight, | |
| Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee, | |
| To thee, who art more far above deceit, | |
| Than deceit seems above simplicity. | |
| Give me simplicity, that I may live, | |
| So live and like, that I may know thy ways, | |
| Know them and practise them: then shall I give | |
| For this poor wreath, give thee a crown of praise. |
A similar sense of satisfaction must have been part of Herbert's reaction to what he had been able to accomplish with but only two rhymes—and only the same four words with which to generate them—throughout his “Clasping of Hands,” the first stanza of which follows:
| Lord, thou art mine, and I am thine, | |
| If mine I am: and thine much more, | |
| Than I or ought, or can be mine. | |
| Yet to be thine, doth me restore; | |
| So that again I now am mine, | |
| And with advantage mine the more, | |
| Since this being mine, brings with it thine, | |
| And thou with me dost thee restore. | |
| If I without thee would be mine, | |
| I neither should be mine nor thine. |
And consider the first couple of stanzas of “Paradise,” which enact in end words the poem's subjects—that humanity is ever enclosed within Christ, who is in turn contained within God (as the word with which the first line of each tercet ends proves to enclose two other words), and that a
| I bless thee, Lord, because I GROW | |
| Among thy trees, which in a ROW | |
| To thee both fruit and order OW. | |
| What open force, or hidden CHARM | |
| Can blast my fruit, or bring me HARM, | |
| While the inclosure is thine ARM? |
As with many a question in Herbert—in this case how to temper an ambition to serve God as expertly as possible with an ambition, as an artist, to surpass what one has done before or is capable of doing in future—this question elicits from the poet a silence as humble as it is honest. It is honest because Herbert understands that the demands of art and of piety—inasmuch as these are tempered, necessarily, by human nature—will often be in a conflict that to reconcile would at best be artistry, but never art. Even as to try to reconcile the ways of God is the stuff of science or logic, or perhaps philosophy. None of these is faith.
Poems like those just mentioned, in particular like “Paradise” or like Herbert's translation/version “Coloss. 3.3 Our life is hid with Christ in God,” find pleasure as much in the play of typography as of word:
| My words and thought do both express this notion, | |
| That Life hath with the sun a double motion. | |
| The first Is straight, and our diurnal friend, | |
| The other Hid and doth obliquely bend. | |
| One life is wrapped In flesh, and tends to earth: | |
| The other winds towards Him, whose happy birth | |
| Taught me to live here so, That still one eye | |
| Should aim and shoot at that which Is on high: | |
| Quitting with daily labour all My pleasure, | |
| To gain at harvest an eternal Treasure. |
This is play, indeed, but not mere play. Part of the message in Herbert's work is the message that is the title of the poem just cited. The human desire may be to have everything made visible; this is not only evident in
For me, whether he does it through wordplay, through metrical dexterity, or through a gift for argument that recalls how dangerously close is rhetoric to sophistry, Herbert suggests that there is nothing merely superficial, nothing absolutely clear when it comes to God, the soul, the body's restiveness, temptation, and how to reconcile them all. There are always other layers—which is why devotion requires vigilance, patience, both—as there is eventually always a ne plus ultra: this is where acceptance is required—faith, presumably, about which Herbert says, “Faith needs no staff of flesh, but stoutly can / To heav'n alone both go, and lead” (“Divinity,” 27–28).
I have said that the constant inventing of new forms and rhyme schemes can be understood as mimetic of the devoted's tireless searching for the vessel most fit to present to God—a God whose desires, like his methods, are unpredictable, ever elusive. But I also see the poems as physical enactments, on the page, of the body's restlessness, as much in the face of
As with poets, so too with poems: some remain more interesting than others. Much has, of course, to do with the reader: if I continue to prefer Dante's Hell to his Paradise—what, then? Likewise, with the poems of Herbert. In poems such as “Business,” with its patience-straining trochaics and its decidedly pat ending—“Who in heart not ever kneels, / Neither sin nor Saviour feels”—do I resist easy conclusion? What is it about a metrical regularity that (here anyway) is offputting? I have a similar ambivalence about a poem like “Vanity (I),” whose argument follows a rather conventional tripartite structure, each part presenting an allegory, essentially the same one (the individual—whether as “fleet astronomer,” “nimble diver,” or “subtle chymick”—seeks to know everything), which is then countered by a final stanza whose question—“what hath not man sought out and found, / But his dear God?”—is predictable enough. “Constancy,” “Sunday,” “Avarice”—I'm aware that the poems that appeal to me less are in general also those that take as subjects sins to guard against, or holy days, or religious duty. (A notable exception is “Prayer [I],” in part because it includes—surprisingly, at first—sin as a component of prayer and in part because it moves associatively from image to image, each increasingly more vague, the final definition of prayer being only, and abstractly, “something understood.” That is, it pretends to no simple answer.) What these particular poems lack is an agony that would imply a speaker who has survived experience, which would in turn produce the earnestness that characterizes most of Herbert's poems. They also tend to be delivered in third person—that is, they lack the I whose intimacy will render a genuine agony even more so.
Another way of looking at the less satisfying poems—recalling what Herbert says in The Country Parson about the two sides to every Christian, “the one military, the other peaceable”—is that these poems issue from the peaceable side of Herbert. And peace somehow never seems quite to warrant long attention from us, compared to strife—or in saying so do I speak more of my own than of the world's tendency?
Or perhaps the poems are meant to seem somewhat predictable, routine
Whatever the reasoning, what prevents these poems from seeming, in the end, aberrations of naivete is their placement within The Temple. If we encounter one of the potentially naive or sermonlike poems, we are never very far away from a poem that offers a speaker questioning the very sentiments that have been earlier expressed. As a result the poems that lack agony read, to me, like a self all but rehearsing, going through the rote motions of what it knows to be “right,” even as we can sense the self 's lack of conviction; that is, the effect is of a self understanding instinctively that there's a big difference between religious expectation and what is possible given human limitation. For example, “The Pearl. Matth. 13.45” speaks of a balance that has finally been achieved, a correct acceptance of the relationship between God and humanity:
| My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live, | |
| And grumble oft, that they have more in me | |
| Than he that curbs them, being but one to five: | |
| Yet I love thee. | |
| (27–30) |
But it is immediately followed by “Affliction (IV),” which opens on a note of wrenched outcry:
| Broken in pieces all asunder, | |
| Lord, hunt me not, | |
| A thing forgot, | |
| Once a poor creature, now a wonder, | |
| A wonder tortured in the space | |
| Betwixt this world and that of grace. | |
| (1–6) |
The placement of the two poems has its implicit argument: any sense of balance, any temper (“the due or proportionate mixture of elements or qualities,” says the OED) must needs be temporary. It will always be the case that “I cannot skill of these thy ways” (“Justice [I]”), that our inability will be but one aspect of our affliction, and that all respite from affliction throws affliction into relief only—it does not end it.
Considering how, save for a single line, all thirteen of its stanzas examine the same point in the same way—human beings are foolish, their hands foul, their eyes blind to God's greatness, therefore entirely unworthy even to serve God, never mind the receiving of blessings—the poem “Misery” should be among the poems that I find less appealing, more dogmatic and too indifferent to a very real, human agony. Why is this not the case?
For a long time it seemed to me to have to do with how the third person, in which seventyseven of the lines are cast, is abandoned for the first person, in the poem's last line:
| But sin hath fooled him. Now he is | |
| A lump of flesh, without a foot or wing | |
| To raise him to a glimpse of bliss: | |
| A sick tossed vessel, dashing on each thing; | |
| Nay, his own shelf: | |
| My God, I mean myself. | |
| (73–78) |
By means of a simple shift in point of view, Herbert—with an honesty that is the more devastating for seeming to have been accidentally stumbled into—implicates himself in the very behavior that he has spent all this time denouncing.
That is part of it, yes. But also I think the poem succeeds by what I shall call its mathematics. As a poet I place great value on a poem's title and on its last line and on the relationship between the two. Given how Herbert suggests in the poem that the misery of the title refers to the miserable condition of man, and given how he also includes himself as an example at the poem's end, I have sometimes seen all of the poem's
Punctuation is another of a poem's aspects with which I am always concerned; it creates the silences, in the form of variously timed pauses, in which at least half of a poem's meaning, I am convinced, resides. The last line of “Misery” reads, “My God, I mean myself.” I read the line two ways: “My God” is meant as apostrophe; that is, God is the addressee of the remark that follows—“I mean myself.” But also, in the pause that the comma inserts, a temporal space is opened up, and inside it there is time to wonder if Herbert could possibly also have in mind the comma as equals sign. That is, another translation of the line is “by ‘my God' I mean ’myself.'” In that sense the line suggests a boldness or arrogance that we have, after all, seen in plenty of Herbert's poems, those in which the poet cries out in Job-like fashion against the inexplicable ways of God, demanding that those ways be justified.
More math: misery = my God = myself. I mean by this an equivalence in terms of ideas rather than of “merely” numerical play, although it is worth noting that misery and myself are each seven letters long—as is the phrase “my God,” if we include the space between those two words; and why not, given the weight that seems particularly to attach both to Herbert's punctuation and his use of pause within a given line? In either context the equation reinforces the theme that we have seen in poems of typographical play, namely, that there is an inextricable relationship between God, humanity, and suffering—we have only to pare away one to find another enclosed, in an impossibly circular fashion: impossible, because the circle never changes (it being the nature of a circle to remain unbroken), yet its coordinates are in constant shift.
[Last night]
| Favorite poet? | |
| George Herbert. | |
| Favorite poem by? | |
| “Artillery.” | |
| Best line in? | |
| “Then we are shooters both….” | |
| Favorite line: | |
| “Shun not my arrows, and behold my breast.” |
Of “Artillery,” this mostly: that it is one of many Herbert poems that present human life as an ongoing process of bargaining (even when, as here, the speaker knows there is no real bargaining—“no articling with thee”—to more than speak of) between God and human beings. Most often the bargain is unidirectional; that is, Herbert puts his terms forward in a poem, and the poem ends. In these instances the poem resembles—no, it is—prayer, when it isn't psalm, which is praise sent in one direction. Both figure here:
Artillery
| As I one ev'ning sat before my cell, | |
| Me thoughts a star did shoot into my lap. | |
| I rose, and shook my clothes, as knowing well, | |
| That from small fires comes oft no small mishap. | |
| When suddenly I heard one say, | |
| Do as thou usest, disobey, | |
| Expel good motions from thy breast | |
| Which have the face of fire, but end in rest. |
| I, who had heard of music in the spheres, | |
| But not of speech in stars, began to muse: | |
| But turning to my God, whose ministers | |
| The stars and all things are; If I refuse, | |
| Dread Lord, said I, so oft my good; | |
| Then I refuse not ev'n with blood | |
| To wash away my stubborn thought: | |
| For I will do or suffer what I ought. |
| But I have also stars and shooters too, | |
| Born where thy servants both artilleries use. | |
| My tears and prayers night and day do woo, | |
| And work up to thee; yet thou dost refuse. | |
| Not but I am (I must say still) | |
| Much more obliged to do thy will, |
| Than thou to grant mine: but because | |
| Thy promise now hath ev'n set thee thy laws. | |
| Then we are shooters both, and thou dost deign | |
| To enter combat with us, and contest | |
| With thine own clay. But I would parley fain: | |
| Shun not my arrows, and behold my breast. | |
― 155 ― | |
| Yet if thou shunnest, I am thine: | |
| I must be so, if I am mine. | |
| There is no articling with thee: | |
| I am but finite, yet thine infinitely. | |
Just as bargaining involves two, so does prayer—even in those cases like “Artillery,” in which (unlike, say, “The Collar,” “Jordan (II),” or “Dialogue,” among others) God himself does not respond with counterterms. In fact, it seems that God is most present for Herbert in those poems (the majority) in which God is not actually a “character” or speaker. If anything, there is a heightened intimacy—the intimacy of two in one corner of the same very large room: one is speaking, one listening….
And in the poems in which God does appear—in word or as dramatis persona or via messenger (again, “Artillery”)—it is never in the word, the representation, or the messenger that I detect the truer presence of divinity. It's elsewhere, in that part of the poem that Stanley Kunitz calls a poem's “wilderness”[2]—he means, I think, the necessary part of a poem that eludes analysis because it has to and that makes its presence known to our sometimes-too-rational selves only by its very resistance to those selves. That resistance is of course not visible, but it is palpable; to feel it, though, the flesh alone is for once as helpless as—
as I think Herbert would say it always will be—
“But I have also stars and shooters too….”
Yet what can it mean, but folly, to place confidence in the weapons available to us if we know the weapons themselves to be inferior—if they have intentionally been made so—if the maker is also our opponent—
“We are shooters both—”
Yes, except one of the two parties—and that party not our own—holds finally all power; what point, then, in shooting at all—to pass the time that will pass anyway—any event—without us?
“Thy promise now hath ev'n set thee thy laws”
By promise, default, oversight, pity—how is it victory, if secured thus? Conversely, what is victory to the one who can only find defeat, each time, a stranger?
“I am but finite, yet thine infinitely”
All victory, then, as meaningless—and ours finally—and not our own. As for defeat: that it is ultimately not possible—just immediately so.
Anomaly, conundrum, thy-will-be-done: all three, says Herbert, whom I find not so often embracing as standing braced, human, frightened, cocksure, and full of questions before—what, exactly? That which he cannot understand?
If Herbert would know the mystery that is God, he is also just as baffled by and at the same time in awe of the mystery of himself—sometimes more so. After all, the invisible and unsubstantial must by definition elude us, at least in terms of the eyes, of the hand. But how much more frustrating not to be able to understand what—being flesh—requires relatively little to know?
| There are mirrors; or you could touch me. | |
| Here, where you see I touch my very self. |
The particular beauty of “The Pulley” has to do with the impurity of the comfort it offers.
The Pulley
| When God at first made man, | |
| Having a glass of blessings standing by; | |
| Let us (said he) pour on him all we can: | |
| Let the world's riches, which disperséd lie, | |
| Contract into a span. |
| So strength first made a way; | |
| Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure: | |
| When almost all was out, God made a stay, | |
| Perceiving that alone of all his treasure | |
| Rest in the bottom lay. |
| For if I should (said he) | |
| Bestow this jewel also on my creature, | |
| He would adore my gifts instead of me, | |
| And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature: | |
| So both should losers be. |
| Yet let him keep the rest, But keep them with repining restlessness: | |
| Let him be rich and weary, that at least, | |
― 157 ― | |
| If goodness lead him not, yet weariness | |
| May toss him to my breast. | |
It is difficult to know how to feel about the news that our restlessness is essentially God given. On one hand, there's a comfort in knowing that the restlessness that makes us stray sometimes from God is of his own making—we are refreshingly blameless. But there's a perverseness, isn't there, to such a God? How else to understand a deliberate withholding of blessings? What does it mean about God and about man if any bond between the two can only be achieved through stratagem?
Yet, perverse or not, the God of “The Collar” endures thirtytwo lines of man's restlessness, lines of outcry against God, which God then counters with a single word, “Child!” In which word I hear admonishment, welcome, fear, intimacy, the tone of what forgives as much from pity as from respect….
I have said how Herbert withholds easy solution. The way, in the poems, God does? Or perhaps Herbert searches earnestly enough but does not find, in the end, easy solution—in which way, he recalls our best selves….
I once described my own poems as “advance bulletins from the interior,” by which I meant that over time they delivered to me a meaning other than—more troublingly personal than—the meaning I had more consciously intended or at least thought I'd intended. To the extent that the poems have some relevance to their readers, I am grateful. That they also deliver their own confessions—for they do not seem my own entirely—makes me aware of the ways in which poetry can correctly be called dangerous. This is why to write requires great care on so many levels. It also requires, incongruously, a certain appetite for risk. One proceeds with honesty. At risk, always, is the truth itself.
I mention this because how I view my own poetry, how I approach the reading and writing of it, cannot help having something to do with how I respond to and come away from Herbert's work. Don't we, necessarily, see the world and everything in it (literature included, of course) through the lens of our selves, each self responsively shaped according to the world's actions on it? As far as I know we step free of the world no more easily than we relinquish the lens through which we see it—by death alone. Necessarily, in this life, I am that self.
| For what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. | |
| ROMANS 8:15 |
Herbert persuades by the very thing with which his poems are so frequently ill at ease: his flawed self. It is not so much that he admits to flaw (as much is said in the prose) but that he brings flaw into view as instructive example (one definition, incidentally, for confession)—an instruction intended, I believe, primarily for himself. He persuades by openness, even in those poems in which high artifice figures—if anything, the elaborateness of form often throwing the directness of personal cry into greater relief.
If there is an overall message by the end of The Temple, it seems to emerge not from intellectual or literary engagement but from a life that has with no little difficulty come through to the farther end of hardship of body and soul—much to its own surprise:
| O my only light, | |
| It cannot be | |
| That I am he | |
| On whom thy tempests fell all night. | |
| (“The Flower,” 39–42) |
Lines like “The fineness which a hymn or psalm affords, / Is, when the soul unto the lines accords” (“A True Hymn,” 9–10) speak in part to the need for something as seemingly obvious as committed feeling—in poetry it's otherwise all form and function. And in part, the lines address the hymn—in the form of correct behavior—that we are told we should strive to make by calibrating our souls to the lines drawn out for them by God.
What is not said is that any of this is without its difficulty. It is mostly strife, which in “The Banquet” we are instructed to love, although how to do so is never stated in practical terms. My sense by the end is that we essentially learn to live with what will, anyway, be there—be it God, strife, our human frailties.
In the final poem of The Temple (again, I omit “The Church Militant”) the soul is “guilty of dust and sin,” but it is nevertheless encouraged by Love (God, I have always assumed) to “sit down…and taste my meat”:
Love (III)
| Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, | |
| Guilty of dust and sin. | |
| But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack | |
| From my first entrance in, | |
| Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, | |
| If I lacked anything. | |
| A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: | |
| Love said, You shall be he. | |
| I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, | |
| I cannot look on thee. | |
| Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, | |
| Who made the eyes but I? | |
| Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame | |
| Go where it doth deserve. | |
| And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? | |
| My dear, then I will serve. | |
| You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: | |
| So I did sit and eat. |
| Absolution? | |
| Salvation? | |
| Or, having admitted to his share of the blame, God's peace-offering? | |
| Or consolation, but too late? |
As in so many places in Herbert, and what brings me back again and again to the poems: a silence, one that I don't want so much anymore to penetrate or (related, I begin to suspect) that I don't need to, no. Increasingly, may it be enough, to hear it.
NOTES
1. Poems and prose are cited from George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, ed. Louis L. Martz (Oxford: Oxford Unive01
2. Quoted in Selden Rodman, “Tongues of Fallen Angels,” in Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz, ed. Stanley Moss (Riverdale-upon-Hudson, N.Y.: Sheep Meadow Press, 1993), 24.