Living Wittily

George Herbert Week (V) Start the Day with a Metaphysical Poet

Some of us are morning people, others reach their most alert a bit later than the day, and some work best at the hours of changeover, after 10 o'clock at night. In Christian spiritual practices first thing in the morning, or at least soon after waking, which may not be early morning, has often been considered moments which firstly and rightly belong to God.

George Herbert was a parish priest, and a man of intense if refined piety. His collection of poems contains a number which I use now and then as prayers, including Matins, his morning prayer poem. (Incidentally I have just read it, and in the background had put on a CD by Kiri Te Kanawa, Ave Maria - the track playing right now is Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring - words that Herbert could have penned and would certainly have owned)

Here is Herbert, beginning his day; there are worse ways to start.

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 should'st 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 sun-beam I will climb to thee.

George Herbert

Photo taken from our back window on a blustery Spring morning.

George Herbert Week (IV) The Brittle Crazie Glasse of the Preacher

The Victorians knew how to produce a book as a work of craftsmanship. I have three very different old editions of Herbert's poems. Here is one of them published in MDCCCLXV - that would be 1865.

 

 

 

 

To be honest, I now discipline myself not to buy others and it would take something very special to tempt me to buy yet another edition.

I mean, I have the Cambridge critical edition which is a simply fabulous production, replete with learning and edited by someone whoknows the poems both intimately and critically;

the Everyman hardcover which also has fine notes, an excellent introduction and is produced in a series renowned for quality paper, printing and binding; 

Tobin's Penguin edition is now 20 years old but remains a good, handy reference.

 

 

 

Patrides' older Everyman paperback is still the one I carry around and the most annotated of the ones I own;

even the small Everman pocket edition is a lovely volume, and the one I use when I read Love (III) at Communion.

And then  there are the three Victorian editions.

For years now Herbert has been for me both a research interest and a favourite source of spiritual and intellectual stimulus.  I've plenty other poetry interests but for reasons not easily explained Herbert is the one I have pursued with most energy, and is certainly the poet on whom I've read the most scholarly literature - (and spent the most money)

Here's one of my favourite Herbert poems - as a study of the spiritual psychology of the preacher, and the pastoral theology of preaching it offers a quite different take from the homiletical plot, narrative theology, post-modern hermeneutics and contemporary expressions of informal  and IT communication. Instead it honours humility, reverence, availability to the light that shines through the brittle crazie glass that is the preacher, a window of grace. The appeal is to the conscience, the heart, the will - yes, Herbert understood the transformative core of faithful, and faith-filled preaching.       

             THE WINDOWS.

LORD, how can man preach thy eternall word ?
        He is a brittle crazie glasse :
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
        This glorious and transcendent place,
        To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy storie,
        Making thy life to shine within
The holy Preachers, then the light and glorie
        More rev'rend grows, and more doth win ;
        Which else shows watrish, bleak, and thin.

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one
        When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and aw :  but speech alone
        Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
        And in the eare, not conscience ring.

George Herbert Week (iii) Trust, the Fusion of Humility and Confidence

(George Herbert's Church, Bemerton)

 

George Herbert's hymns are so old fashioned they are almost forgotten, not just out of favour but out of sync with current taste and preference. His poem King of Glory, King of Peace recalls a spiritual atmosphere and intensity of devotion requiring more of us than our usual contemporary attempts at dumbed down intimacy and informal conversation with One who is Holy Love, both transcendent and immediate.

It's a hymn best sung in a cathedral, a place where beauty and light, architecture and acoustics, give visual and aural expression to the same sentiments of devotion. And it should be sung with that restrained politeness that in Anglican spirituality comes near to the spiritual quality of courtesy and quiet gratefulness, not spiritually greedy or emotionally ambitious, but showing that quality of balance that makes Herbert's poetry such a fine example of what he himself called "my utmost art".

The structure of the poem is both simple and flawless; the rhythm is as easy as breathing; the only word of more than two syllables is 'eternity's', and it's always reckless to assume such conceits are unintended in Herbert - the longest word for the vastest concept; Praise, thankgiving, petition, confession and dedication are forms of prayer represented in lines that are brief arrows of devotion; and the encounter is intimate without being familiar, the personal pronouns of address showing the fusion of humility and confidence, which together make up trust. It is a beautiful hymn, a technically brilliant poem, and one of my favourite personal prayers:

King of glory, King of peace,
I will love thee;
and that love may never cease,
I will move thee.
Thou hast granted my request,
thou hast heard me;
thou didst note my working breast,
thou hast spared me.

Wherefore with my utmost art
I will sing thee,
and the cream of all my heart
I will bring thee.
Though my sins against me cried,
thou didst clear me;
and alone, when they replied,
thou didst hear me.

Seven whole days, not one in seven,
I will praise thee;
in my heart, though not in heaven,
I can raise thee.
Small it is, in this poor sort
to enroll thee:
e'en eternity's too short
to extol thee.

George Herbert Week (ii) Making Drudgery Divine

Amongst the more amusing forms of serendipity is to do a search on Amazon. A search for the more recent books published on George Herbert is a case in point. As well as the 17th Century priest poet there are works by the American social philosopher and psychologist George Herbert Mead, himself an influential thinker around areas of pragmatism and social behaviour. The juxtaposition of Anglican country parson and a philospher contemporary with Tiffany Glass and Art Nouveau is odd enough. But then a few items further down come books about George Herbert Walker Bush, previous President of the United States, and father of the other George W Bush who was also U S President, and the inevitable collision of ideas that happen when world views are a couple of universes away from each other.

I'll get to the point in a minute. Amongst my favourite books on the Bible and Art is Painting the Word by John Drury. That is a fine book which opened up a lot of windows when I was trying to get a handle on the role of Art as a form of biblical exegesis and as evidence of how biblical texts were received and interpreted through the centuries. So when I put in George Herbert and came across the social philosopher and the two previous Presidents, I also discovered that John Drury has a full length monograph coming on the poetry of George Herbert. The description on Amazon says: 

For the first time, John Drury convincingly integrates the life and poetry of George Herbert, giving us in Music at Midnight the definitive biography of the man behind some of the most famous poems in the English Language.

That I think is saying too much too soon. Others have convincingly integrated the life and poetry of Herbert, including Amy Charles, Helen Vendler and my favourite by James Boyd White, "This Booke of Starres". Still, a New Testament scholar who is immersed in Christian Art and Christian text, and who has spent decades reading and working through Herebrt's "The Temple", is a good choice of critic and expositor. So I'm looking forward to reading this latest addition to some of the more thoughtful and accessible treatments of Herbert's "utmost art".

Here's another of the better known poems, familiar to those who still sing old hymns, and for whom daily holiness is found in the ordinary services and courtesies of human exchange:

Teach me, my God and King,
in all things thee to see,
and what I do in anything
to do it as for thee.

A man that looks on glass,
on it may stay his eye;
or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
and then the heaven espy.

All may of thee partake;
nothing can be so mean,
which with this tincture, "for thy sake,"
will not grow bright and clean.

A servant with this clause
makes drudgery divine:
who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,
makes that and the action fine.

This is the famous stone
that turneth all to gold;
for that which God doth touch and own
cannot for less be told.

George Herbert Week: (i) Quaint complexity and Spiritual Intensity

The quaint complexity, spiritual inensity and metaphysical reach of George Herbert's poetry have made him one of the most popular devotional poets in the English tradition of religious poetry. In the 19th Century he was printed and re-printed in all kinds of editions, from the leatherbound deluxe to the small popular fit in your pocket devotionals. I have several copies, of various ages and values, and I try to resist the temptation to pick up others as they are published, or older ones with their copper plate illustrations, extravagant fonts and decorated pages.

 

 

The critical edition by Helen Wilcox, published by Cambridge a few years ago, and costing an arm and a leg in hardback ( in my case a gift from Sheila) but mercifully now available at an affordable paperback, is definitive. The introduction, critical notes and comments demonstrate the editor's easy expertise in the history, culture and religious thought of the 17th Century, and as a reader who loves the poetry enough to be a true critic - wise, informed, erudite and generous in the rich flow of information and comment. 

 

The Everyman Edition is a lovely volume, as the new Everyman volumes are - clothbound, high quality paper, clear print in a good sized font, and again good introduction and notes full of information. And in hardback at £12.99 almost one tenth!! of the cost of the hardback Cambridge Edition.

The Editor is Ann Pasternak Slater - her middle name one of the celebrated names of Russian literature - she is Boris Pasternak's niece. Describing Herbert's capacity to take ordinary things and discern eternal significance, and commenting on his phrase 'heaven in ordinarie', she says, "The commonplace is not merely capable of sanctity; it is what can most easily explain the transcendent to us".

Only a few of Herbert's poems are anthologised these days; understandable for a writer whose every line is resonant with biblical words, ideas and associations, and whose every other line alludes to Christian experience, or classical reference, or theological or liturgical connections. Take the poem below; replete with suggestion yet no active verb - he never says what prayer IS. But every clause is a facet glinting with possibility and hesitant insight. If you know it, enjoy it. If you haven't come across it before, enjoy it. Maybe, when all is said and done, the most we should hope for in our prayers is that there is "something understood."

 

Prayer (I)

Prayer, the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
God's 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' Almighty, sinner's tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days'-world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices, something understood.

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.