Living Wittily

The Bodleian, George Herbert and the precision of the printer

The second extraordinary gift I received on my visit to the Bodleian Library was to be a viewing of the earliest printed copy of George Herbert's The Country Parson. This in itself would have been a moment to capture for a booklover whose small constellation of favourite poets includes as a luminous guide, George Herbert. So if the chance to see that 17th Century treasure was grace, then what can I say about being shown, and allowed to turn a few pages, of the handwritten copy of Herbert's The Temple which was the licenser's copy used for the first printed edition, produced in 1633, soon after Herbert's death. This was grace upon grace.

Beautifully bound, written on parchment paper, in a flowing hand with restrained flourishes, the work is a labour of love, and the poems some of the most sublime devotional verses ever written in English. My jaw-dropping astonishment prompted my friend Richard to ask if I needed holding up - more seriously, there are times when words written with disciplined precision and a care for beauty become icons, if not of the Lord himself, then of the Word of God distilled into words that intentionally pull the reader closer to God, deeper into that place where heart speaks to heart, in words carefully chosen and prayerfully offered. I looked at the 'Easter Wings' shape poem; turned to the concentrated richness of the sonnet 'Prayer I'; and as always read slowly that last masterpiece of theological invitation, 'Love bade me welcome....'. I looked and simply enjoyed. Not sure when I'll get the chance to se it again - and I suppose it might have been possible to photograph it. But it never ocurred to me task, and that's probably because no photo is equivalent to seeing and touching and connecting with history.

No apologies for taking the excuse to post 'Prayer 1', which is freighted with more spiritual perception and honesty than the sonnet's constraining fouerteen lines have any right to contain.

PRAYER. (I)         

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
        Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
        The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,
        Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
        The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
        Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
        Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

        Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
        The land of spices, something understood.

George Herbert and the Orchestration of Scripture

Not sure what poem Mike refers to that was cruciform. (See Mike's comment on previous post). One of David Adams' prayers is cross shaped, but it's pushing it to call it poetry, I think.

When it comes to shape poems, the few examples in George Herbert's The Temple are skilled artifices of poetic playfulness. The shape of the poem images its content. In the poem below, the four capitalised words distil the essentials into spiritual concentrate: -

ALTAR -> HEART-> SACRIFICE-> ALTAR.

One of the very best books on Herbert's poetry by Chana Bloch is called Spelling the Word, in which Bloch demonstrates Herbert's virtuosity with biblical text. The instructions for the tabernacle and the altar in the Pentateuch, the worship on the altar of the heart that is Jeremiah's new covenant, and the spiritual worship that is the living sacrifice in Romans 12 are only three of many texts which provide layers of meaning and suggestion throughout this poem. The poems are first written as records of Herbert's personal devotion, their essence drawn from his own scripture-informed contemplative conversations with God. Of course, unlike today, Herbert was able in his time to assume biblical literacy in those readers who came after him. But for those who still hear the scriptural symphonies through the Word orchestrated, this poem remains disconcertingly clever and to the point, and the product of a devotional genius. 

The Altar

A broken ALTAR, Lord thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workmans tool hath touch'd the same
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name:
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctifie this ALTAR to be thine.

The Agonie, George Herbert

There's a well previewed book due out in June, but carrying an intentionally mischievous title. You can read it for yourself! The sub-title helps to soften the murderous sentiment, and maybe the writer has a point. Even a devoted George Herbert fan like me would be hard pushed to defend Herbert's The Country Parson as a handbook for 21st Century pastoral ministry. (Of course Herbert was writing in his own context of time, place and ecclesial tradition - not his fault if later generations couldn't think out there own contextually valid models of pastoral care). Still, the ideals that informed Herbert's impossibly high vision of the Country Pastor as omni-competent guide in matters spiritual, medical, moral, horticultural (not kidding!), and social, now sound in our context of time place and ecclesial tradition, irredeemably patronising, paternalist and so rooted in a pre-industrial, pre-modern socially stratified society that they have little remaining purchasing power. That said, we are told this book is written to encourage those who still try to live up to expectations and styles of ministry that are simply impossible in our much more complex and hard to negotiate post-Christian culture. Maybe so - still don't like the title though!

But when it comes to Herbert's poetry, there is a different story to be told. In Seventeenth Century English poetry, master Herbert is the one whose utmost art enables him to be the secretary of praise. Yes the poems are soaked in biblical allusion, devotionally charged, admittedly metaphysical, theologically sophisticated and psychologically subtle  - I see all these as entire positives. The Temple remains one of the genuine masterpieces of Western Christian Literature, as Herbert's life is one of the genuine masterpieces of pastoral devotion. The Temple is as personally revealing as Augustine's Confessions and just as autobiographical; as spiritually and morally serious as The Imitation of Christ, but without that disheartening moralism that is the preoccupation of a Kempis' devotions so single-mindedly concentrated on personal improvement. Herbert's poetry is much more diagnostic of human motives, more exploratory of the mystery and meaning of grace, more sympathetic with human sin and fallibility, more aware of the objective reality of Christ's person and work. He portrays Christ in richness and variety, in meekness and majesty, and without that pastoral hectoring that (to me at least) surfaces repeatedly in a Kempis. Ironically, compared to The Imitiation, the Christ encountered in The Temple is a much more attractive call to the Christ-like life, and to dependence on that grace and love revealed in Christ as the reality of who God is, to us and for us.

One good example of what I mean is Herbert's poem "Agonie", where the passion of the Christ is drawn with verbal precision and images redolent with suffering. "Sinne and Love" are seen as the baffling realities that have turned a good purposive creation into threatened eternal tragedy. Herbert finds the crux of all meaning, the central core of creation's purpose, in  God's holy love, eternal love bearing sin. The Scottish theologian James Denney described the cross and the  suffering love of the crucified God as "the last reality of the universe, the truth of who God is". Poems like "The Agonie" should be cherished and learned, not as museum pieces, but as artefacts of Christ-centred truth and authentic theology, which preserve and model that capacity for unselfish wonder and faith-filled surrender fast disappearing in our frantic pursuit of that cultural chimera, 21st Century Christianity.

Incidentally, we discussed this poem in class the other day and one of our students held to the view that the poem refers to Christ in Gethsemane and uses the image of the winepress. True enough of the second stanza, but by the final stanza Calvary is in the foreground, and just behind it the eucharistic table.

 Agonie

Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
        But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.

        Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
        His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.

        Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
        If ever he did taste the like.
Love in that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

Desideratum: The English Poems of George Herbert

desideratum. Noun
- something desired as a necessity; 
- essential, necessary, requisite
- anything indispensable;
"food and shelter are necessities of life"; "the essentials of the good life"

This book has for some time been a desideratum. Too expensive for me to justify the expense.

Given to me for my birthday from Sheila. One more of those accumulated kindnesses that strengthens marriage "like seasoned timber",(1). Each kindness a sacrament of friendship, making grace as undeserved favour less incredible, because so often encountered in the generous being-thereness of those special others in our everyday life.

(1) Checking the reference in my new book :))  the phrase is from Herbert's "Vertue", line 14. The note on the line says "wood matured and tested (through the trial of the seasons)". Just so!    (pages 316, 319) 

Utmost Art. George Herbert and the proper reticence of "Prayer (I)"

PRAYER. (I)         

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
        Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
        The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;

Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,
        Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
        The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
        Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
        Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

        Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
        The land of spices, something understood.

***^^^***

Is there anywhere in the poetry of our langauge, a richer meditation on what prayer could, or might be? No cutting of mystery down to size here. Instead an opening up of theological possibility and spiritual option. The absence of the verb to be, and therefore the reluctance to define, mean Herbert is not saying what prayer is - instead he links a catena of images, suggestive rather than definitive, biblical and classical, allusive and elusive, but each of them hinting at why, in the words of one of Herbert's greatest fans, when it comes to devotion, "You are here to kneel / where prayer has been valid." (T S Eliot, 'Little Gidding', The Four Quartets)

I have a copy of this sonnet, written out in calligraphic script by a friend, since died, who learned calligraphy as a Japanese POW, sharing the same prison compound as Laurens Van der Post. That sheet of paper (along with another by R S Thomas, 'The Musician', worked by the same artist which I posted earlier), are the nearest I possess to literary Icons - combining disciplined skill and art of production with the crafted literary beauty of content. The Herbert sonnet I've looked at, read and re-read, know by heart, and its depth and range of reference to human longing and frustrated spiritual reach, still astonishes, and reassures.

Then some years ago I published a paper on "Prayer (I)", exploring the subtle and complex imagery Herbert has woven together, doing my level best to appreciate Herbert's utmost art. At no stage did I do more than skim the surface. Which is to be expected when studying a supreme exponent of metaphysical poetry, whose passionate goal was to write verse worthy of the One whose praise was beyond human words, yet whose Love made silence impossible. So I keep coming back to this poem, heartened by its power to resist the solvent of critical analysis, and encouraged that it frustrates overly curious theologising. Reminds me again of Eliot's words:

You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity,

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.