Every Reader's Herbert

     George Herbert, the seventeenth century poet and Anglican priest, reminds me of certain Tang Dynasty Buddhists who retreated from the world to cultivate their spirituality and to write. Scion of a wealthy aristocratic family and godson of John Donne, he excelled at Cambridge where he was named Public Orator before joining Parliament. Though he seemed headed for a career in government – his brother Edward who assumed the title of 1st Baron Herbert combined service as a soldier and ambassador with significant publications as a poet and philosopher – at the age of thirty-six George Herbert gave up all worldly ambitions to devote himself to the duties of a parish priest in the obscure parish of Fugglestone St. Peter. He seems to have pursued his work there with exemplary dedication. Izaak Walton’s unreliable biography tells how Herbert paused while walking to Salisbury to offer assistance to a poor man and arrived eventually to join his company “soyl’d and discompos’d,” saying that “the thought of what he had done, would prove Musick to him at Midnight.”
     By the time of his death, only a few years after his ordination, he had published nothing beyond a few Greek and Latin poems, but on his deathbed he gave the manuscript of a volume he called The Temple to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, later known for his own withdrawal from affairs to establish the community at Little Gidding. Herbert’s poetry is entirely concerned with religious topics; it resembles the Psalms in that his primary topic is the depression and elation, the alternation between obedience and errancy in the individual spiritual life. This may be a hard sell to a modern audience that would prefer verses treating love or violence or madness, but Herbert’s passion is so high and his self-discernment so sensitive that he moves and impresses readers who cannot share his doctrines.
     Yet Herbert had a remarkable sensual quality in his spirituality. In his manual for rural priests like himself, he suggests that minister should preach using figures of speech employing images of "things of ordinary use” such as farm implements in order to lead the congregation toward “Heavenly Truths.” Though his description of his parishioners as “thick, and heavy, and hard to raise to a poynt of Zeal” may sound condescending, his poems use the same technique to make spiritual experience intelligible to his readers.
     Metaphysical poets like Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw favored extended, often unlikely comparisons now called “conceits.” “The Pulley” illustrates both a rhetorical figure of this sort and the unique ambivalence of the author’s faith, marked by an unusually agonistic note, as though he, like Jacob, must always wrestle with his angels.


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 dispersèd 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,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.”


     The pulley is unmentioned in the body of this little fable; still, the reader understands that the mechanical device represents the force that lifts the soul toward god, toward what Christians call salvation (what other traditions may consider enlightenment or liberation). The deity in Herbert’s view uses a cunning means to outwit human sloth, relying neither on the force of revelation nor on blind faith. If the surest way to hoist people up to the heavens is their deep-rooted anxiety, the troubled believer may paradoxically gain confidence as well as guilt from doubt, certainty arising our of uncertainty. The mortal is drawn upwards, willy-nilly, by the pulley of his restless Angst.
     In a clever trope on the story of Pandora, god is said to have granted all good things to people, withholding only “rest,” to ensure than they avoid complacency or pride and fail to render divine homage. In the last stanza the word rest is deployed bearing its other meaning of remainder in a playful way suddenly referring not to relaxation but to all the other treasures. The word acts like a prism, promising “the rest,” that is, all the other available excellences as well as “rest” meaning psychic repose. The implications of the word “rest” grow until what might have meant simple indolence merges with the final rest of an eternity in paradise.
     With his audience for the most part reading his poetry on a printed page, Herbert exploited the appearance of the text, making pictures with the words in a sort of concrete poetry. One example is “Easter Wings” which was originally published sideways on two facing pages, as though it had been rotated ninety degrees to the right.


Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne
And still with sicknesses and shame.
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.


     Here in place of the pulley that lifts the believer heavenward, it is wings, associated with Christ’s return from the dead which Christianity teaches allows the individual likewise to conquer death. The image of “imping” or grafting extra feathers on a falcon’s wings in the effort to increase her powers in flight is another example of an unlikely Metaphysical conceit which with wit seeks to shadow forth truth. God’s wings cannot fail; therefore, Herbert can fly by joining his poor insufficient human wing to the divine. Though such an image had perhaps never before been used, it should strike the reader with the pleasure of a stroke of wit and the deeper and longer-lasting satisfaction of a comforting insight.
     The effects of the poem’s arrangement on the page are simple but multiple. Apart from the immediately pleasing novelty effect of the double pair of wings, the reader observe that the shortest lines describe the greatest spiritual impoverishment and the latitude of the longer lines contains a plenitude of bliss. In a sense, each of Herbert’s poems may be conceived as an attempt to fashion wings that might bear his readers aloft.
     Herbert’s paradoxical principle of spiritual advancement through hesitation is again the theme. The first stanza concludes with the convention of the “fortunate fall,” which deems Adam’s sin in the end felicitous because it allows then for Christ’s sacrifice and the salvation of humankind. With insistent alliteration, Herbert insists that the fall in this way is a prerequisite to his gaining wings to “further the flight in me.” In the next stanza, more directly personal, Herbert confesses his shortcomings, his “sicknesses and shame,” yet claims that his very “affliction” “shall advance the flight in me.” Out of his need, Herbert has created a model that has since served many others. One may doubt one’s sanctity, but who can doubt his or her sinfulness? Of his poignant longing to rest in the divine bosom, Herbert has created what the cynic may regard as an ingenious exercise in self-hypnosis.
     In the final poem of Herbert’s book, the speaker’s acceptance and rejection of the divine is paralleled by the dramatic back and forth, the call and response of the poem’s dramatic narrative. For all the poet’s anxieties and self-criticism, this tortuous oscillation ends on a sublimely positive note, and it suddenly seems as though his doubt was the dynamo that propelled him in his terms to salvation.


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 any thing.

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.


     Here the dramatic back and forth of conversation substitutes for the elaborate Metaphysical conceits of other poems. The second line’s mention of “dust” stands out for its very concreteness. The pose is utter sincerity and directness; in which ars est celare artem (“art is to conceal art”). The poet fashions a lovely anticipation of heaven using the homely image of a good meal. While perfectly orthodox in terms of Christian teachings on grace and original sin, the persona’s self-doubt opens the text even to non-Christians.
     Herbert’s themes were so unrelentingly Christian at a time when the rhetoric and drama of Christian myth shaped virtually European spirituality. Modern secularists may be more tolerant of Hindu or Buddhist theology than Christian, but it is not difficult to transpose Herbert’s existential fears, his sense of unworthiness into terms general enough to apply to most individual experience. A dear friend who is a critic told me he does not deal with religious writings, because no one can know anything of the claims of religion and thus we have nothing to teach each other. This attitude, of course, is parochial, limited to a cultural slice of our own time and place. In fact god broadly conceived probably tops even love as a topic to engage writers and readers through the whole of human history. And fortunately, Herbert, though grave as can be, is anything but sanctimonious.
     Those for whom personal experience is more significant in spirituality than tradition, theology, and bureaucratic status value often the full-blown visionary mystics, but the consciousness of a man like Herbert who struggled and wavered and yet, according to the testaments of his contemporaries, strove to actually live a Christian life, may have more to offer most readers. In the end religion and philosophy are not arcane disciplines for studious eccentrics, but instead present the issues at the core of everyone’s life. The records of a man like Herbert who, with a sensitive and open heart, sought to live the best life he could conceive in this fallen world, will always find receptive readers. He aimed every poem at the very horizon of truth, seeking to glimpse Ultimate Reality in the myriad things of this world. If he never could feel he stood quite on solid ground, he is the more plainly like all the rest of us.