This new tapestry is based on only two lines from George Herbert's poem, 'The Flower.' (Printed at the end, below) They happen to be lines that resonate in quite startling ways with my own spiritual experience of surprise at the seasons of the heart, and living through each year of life in the rhythm of growth, flourishing, fruitfulness and withdrawal.
"Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart
Could have recovered greennesse?"
'The Flower' is one of those poems by George Herbert that defies mere exposition, as if parsing the words, and explaining the syntax, and awareness of the context in which such poetry is written, bears decisive relation to why the poem was written at all. Herbert's own explanation of the poems we now know as The Temple, should be enough to alert us that we are standing on the holy ground of another man's dealings and pleadings and negotiations with God. Even angels are careful where they put their feet in such spiritual terrain.
Entrusting the manuscript of the poems to his friend Nicholas Ferrar through an intermediary, he passed on the message that the poems were "a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that passed betwixt God and my soul..." In these poems we are overhearing the struggles of a soul, the conversations between a man and the God he is determined to serve, and love, and know in the intimacy of trust. But a God who is also beyond understanding, whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are as likely to baffle and perplex as much as comfort and guide.
The Temple records Herbert's inner climate, his responses to circumstances, his attempt at articulating the emotional fluctuations and frustrations of his desire to love and know God. But so much is ambiguous, unpredictable, well beyond longed for certainties and settledness of heart. Herbert is expert in the spiritual anxieties of one who both loves and fears God, longing for God's affirmation yet often feeling God is indifferent, or worse, disapproving, and so more distant than near, and more judgemental than accepting.
Then again, few have described the loving acceptance of God with more wondering trust, and when Herbert looks on the Cross the reader is drawn into the poet's awe, a combination of explicit description and adoring wonder at the mystery of divine love personified and crucified in Jesus. With many others I think 'Love III' is Herbert's finest poem, and one of the most moving accounts of God's love that I know. That first line! "Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back / guilty of dust and sin."
Back to 'The Flower', which comes quite late in the collection which may have more to do with Herbert's editors than any chronological sequence he might have planned. It is one of the poems that says more than our best scholarship and expositions can uncover. It is a deeply personal account of the inner impact of all those 'spiritual conflicts' he has endured along the road of his 'heart in pilgrimage.' There is no attempt to analyse or rationalise. Instead the reader overhears prayer as conversation with God, a combination of wonder and complaint, acceptance and questioning, gladness and perplexity, between intimates but of unequals.
'The Flower' is an account of a plant that seems to be flourishing, but then as the seasons pass, begins to lose its life sources, withers and goes underground for the winter. And early in the poem occur the two lines which I chose to explore in a tapestry.
I began by reading about 17th Century gardens. What flowers were in common use in English gardens around 1630? What about French and Italian influences on Renaissance gardens being planned and planted in the great houses of England in Herbert's time? What about the garden as a place of meditation and prayer, at least for those who could afford them? I found a lot of what I was looking for in Stanley Stewart, The Enclosed Garden, which is a brilliant study of the use of the garden image in 17th Century poetry.
Next I went looking for the flowers that were available seasonally in the period, and selected those most likely to be common in Herbert's time. The tapestry is a combination of these research findings, and worked around the two lines about 'recovered greenesse'. In the four corners, from bottom left we go clockwise through winter, spring, summer and autumn (the one illustrated). Put in floral terms, hellebore and crocus with winter jasmine; narcissus and tulips; yellow lupin and rambling rose; then aster and rose hips.
The central square panel is from a plan for a formal parterre garden of the period, like such gardens, governed by both geometry and symmetry in providing the beds for the botany! There is a great deal of 'greennesse', in tones and shapes giving both vitality and vibrance to the recovered flourishing of the garden. Sunrise in spring and sunset in autumn, snow in winter and blue skies in summer - the four seasons of a garden - and for Herbert, the changing seasons in the life of the soul and its relation to God.
The overall aim in this tapestry is modest; to give some visual clues to two lines expressing astonishment at God's grace and the poet's returned creativity, energy and spiritual recovery. In that sense the tapestry is itself a way of celebrating what Henry Scougal, the 17th Century Aberdeen Professor of Divinity called in his small but celebrated essay on the spiritual life, The Life of God in the Soul of Man.
On one personal note, I have found the synergy between Herbert's poems and designing tapestry to be a fascinating inner conversation. Being familiar with the poems from many readings of the book, I'm fascinated with the ways in which my own inner responsiveness to poems over the years, influences and suggests ways of giving visual expression to spiritual experience. That makes each of these tapestries very personal, perhaps even idiosyncratic. But I hope some of the explanation offered above at least helps make sense of what on earth I think I'm about!
The Flower
How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are Thy returns! ev’n as the flow’rs in Spring,
To which, besides their own demean
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring;
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flow’rs depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
These are Thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickning, bringing down to Hell
And up to Heaven in an houre;
Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
We say amisse
This or that is;
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
O that I once past changing were,
Fast in Thy Paradise, where no flower can wither;
Many a Spring I shoot up fair,
Offring at Heav’n, growing and groning thither,
Nor doth my flower
Want a Spring-showre,
My sinnes and I joyning together.
But while I grow in a straight line,
Still upwards bent, as if Heav’n were mine own,
Thy anger comes, and I decline:
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone
Where all things burn,
When Thou dost turn,
And the least frown of Thine is shown?
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O, my onely Light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom Thy tempests fell all night.
These are Thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flow’rs that glide;
Which when we once can find and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us where to bide.
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
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