Writer’s Block (GH Day 7)

Who hasn’t experienced writer’s block? I struggle with it all the time. That’s partly why I’ve begun this blog: to get myself into more of a habit of writing about literature, so that it will hopefully start to come more easily when I work on academic essays.

George Herbert has several poems that address his anxieties or insecurities related to something resembling writer’s block. One of these poems is “Dulness” (courtesy of www.ccel.org):

Dulnesse.

VVhy do I languish thus, drooping and dull,                         As if I were all earth? O give me quicknesse, that I may with mirth                                           Praise thee brim-full! The wanton lover in a curious strain                         Can praise his fairest fair; And with quaint metaphors her curled hair                                           Curl o’re again. Thou art my lovelinesse, my life, my light,                         Beautie alone to me: Thy bloudy death and undeserv’d, makes thee                                           Pure red and white. When all perfections as but one appeare,                         That those thy form doth show, The very dust, where thou dost tread and go,                                           Makes beauties here; Where are my lines then? my approaches? views?                         Where are my window-songs? Lovers are still pretending, & ev’n wrongs                                           Sharpen their Muse: But I am lost in flesh, whose sugred lyes                         Still mock me, and grow bold: Sure thou didst put a minde there, if I could                                           Finde there it lies. Lord, cleare thy gift, that with a constant wit                         I may but look towards thee: Look onely; for to love thee, who can be,                                          What angel fit?

Herbert’s goal is to write clever and fitting poems praising his Lord. He feels that it comes easily to the secular poet to praise his beloved, so why can’t Herbert experience that “constant wit” (last stanza) as well?

I’m not a poet, just a prose writer, but I’ve often wondered the same. Why is it that I, who am trying to write as if unto the Lord, not unto men, struggle so much to write with cleverness? I’ve sometimes asked for the kind of inspiration, or “quickness” (first stanza), that Herbert asks for here.

Let’s unpack his images. In the first stanza, the poet imagines himself as like Adam before God breathed into him the breath of life (Gen 2:7). He is “all earth” (just clay, with no life yet) and therefore asks for “quickness,” life, inspiration in the more complete meaning of the word (to have a spirit put into him).

Stanzas 2 & 5 complain about the secular poets, who can easily find ways to praise their “fairest fair,” their lady loves. But “[w]here are my lines, then?” asks Herbert? After all, as he explains in stanzas 3-4, he has a Lord who is “loveliness” and “beautie” and “perfection,” especially because of his sacrificial death on the cross (stanza 3).

Stanza 6 seems to reveal the reason: the poet is “lost in flesh.” His inherent sin nature opposes his attempts to praise his Lord. Significantly, this reference to our sinful flesh comes in stanza 6, six being the number of man (imperfect, while seven = completeness and perfection). “Sure Thou didst put a mind there,” muses the poet. It’s just matter of finding it, right?

But only God can “clear [His] gift”: the poet’s mind and poetic talent. Herbert ends with his noble goal here: “that with a constant wit / I may but look towards Thee.” He desires clarity of thought and clever wording so that he may write of God to the glory of God, concluding with humility that he is not even “fit” enough to love God, just to look upon Him.

Perhaps God blocks us up sometimes in order to redirect our intentions, our goals, and draw our focus back upon Him, keeping us dependent on Him for our talent and wit?  

Whose Vision?: GH Day 6

There’s a poem by George Herbert that I really haven’t noticed before, and it’s titled “Submission.” It is framed by the idea that the poet’s eyes belong to the Lord. I will quote the entire poem, courtesy of the complete Temple provided by Christian Classics Ethereal Library (http://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/TempleFrames.html):

Submission.

But that thou art my wisdome, Lord,        And both mine eyes are thine, My minde would be extreamly stirr’d        For missing my designe. Were it not better to bestow        Some place and power on me? Then should thy praises with me grow,        And share in my degree. But when I thus dispute and grieve,        I do resume my sight, And pilfring what I once did give,        Disseize thee of thy right. How know I, if thou shouldst me raise,        That I should then raise thee? Perhaps great places and thy praise        Do not so well agree. Wherefore unto my gift I stand;        I will no more advise: Onely do thou lend me a hand,        Since thou hast both mine eyes.

Because the Lord is his wisdom, says Herbert in the opening stanza, the poet’s eyes belong to God. This thought prompts at least 2 great questions: How does the Lord become our wisdom? And especially how can I relinquish my vision to God?

I am reminded of the wonderful old hymn, “Be Thou My Vision,” a later verse of which begins “Be Thou my wisdom.”

Lately I’ve been watching the U.S. version of Masterchef, which this 2012 season features a contestant who is blind. She, therefore, has to depend heavily on aural instructions and descriptions, as well as her other senses. I’m only half-way through the season, but it seems that relying on these other senses and being such a careful listener to others has made her a better cook than many in the competition who have depended on their own sight.

Submitting one’s vision to God, both literally (what I perceive today) and figuratively (what my goals/dreams are for my future), is a scary thought, especially because it’s a loss of control. Like most humans, I like to be in control of my own life. I’d rather put on “God glasses,” but have my own eyes underneath. What the poet is suggesting here, though, is that submission of one’s vision to God means a complete giving up of the use of one’s eyes.

Trinity College, Cambridge (Herbert's alma mater)

Herbert suggests in the opening stanza that if he were to rely on his own sight, he would miss God’s “design” for his life. The next stanzas play this idea out and, for some of us more ambitious folk, are very convicting. It seems rational, right? Surely if God put me in a higher/better position I’d be able to bring more praise to Him because of being more in the public eye? The poet acknowledges his struggle with this logical idea versus the reality in the next 2 stanzas. He is more likely to take from God than give: “How know I, if Thou shouldst me raise, / That I should then raise Thee?” (13-14). Ouch! So true. When things are going well, when we’re reaching our goals and ambitions, when we’re prospering, we tend to forget the One to Whom we owe our position/prosperity. “Perhaps great places and Thy praise / Do not so well agree” (15-16). God knows best. The question is can I submit my vision for my life to Him?

In the final stanza, the poet accepts the lot that God has given him and submits his vision for his life to God, but, just as a blind person might, asks for God to “lend me a hand” (19) to make up for the poet’s inability to see.

Contemplating Cabinets: GH Day 5

The poem immediately following “Christmas” in The Temple is called “Ungratefulness.” My eyes glanced over to this poem as I was reviewing “Christmas,” and I started to notice a few things.

Here is the 5-stanza poem, courtesy of the Complete Temple site from A.J. Arner (http://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/TempleFrames.html):

           Ungratefulnesse.

LOrd, with what bountie and rare clemencie                   Hast thou redeem’d us from the grave!                           If thou hadst let us runne,                   Gladly had man ador’d the sunne,                           And thought his god most brave; Where now we shall be better gods then he. Thou hast but two rare cabinets full of treasure,                   The Trinitie, and Incarnation:                           Thou hast unlockt them both,                   And made them jewels to betroth                           The work of thy creation Unto thy self in everlasting pleasure. The statelier cabinet is the Trinitie,                   Whose sparkling light accesse denies:                           Therefore thou dost not show                   This fully to us, till death blow                           The dust into our eyes: For by that powder thou wilt make us see. But all thy sweets are packt up in the other;                   Thy mercies thither flock and flow:                           That as the first affrights,                   This may allure us with delights;                           Because this box we know; For we have all of us just such another. But man is close, reserv’d, and dark to thee:                   When thou demandest but a heart,                           He cavils instantly.                   In his poore cabinet of bone                           Sinnes have their box apart, Defrauding thee, who gavest two for one.

The primary imagery in “Ungratefulness” is perhaps not what you’d expect. It’s cabinets. He introduces these “two rare cabinets full of treasure” in stanza 2, explains what each cabinet is in the next two stanzas, and then contrasts these treasure chests with mankind’s closed-off cabinet in the final stanza.

I’ve had cabinets on my mind much more than usual lately. As I’ve moved from one residence to another, I’ve been emptying and cleaning out cabinets, amazed at how much I’ve tucked way back into them over the years. Then, in my new place, I’ve been sizing up the cabinets: what can they hold and where? Are they big enough for those bowls or that craft project?

I am now more grateful than before for my old cabinets, which fit everything, unlike the new, more “reserved” ones, to use Herbert’s wording (line 25), which are in some ways poor substitutes for those previous.

Herbert’s poem is bookended by stanzas discussing humanity’s ingratitude toward God. God has given us two cabinets, explains Herbert: the Trinity & the Incarnation.

Herbert doesn’t just use an enclosures metaphor (cabinets & boxes); he presents us with enclosures in the form of the poem. In addition to the “bookends” I mentioned before, each of the first four stanzas is “enclosed” in its rhyme scheme like so:

Clemencie            a

Grave                        b

Runne                        c

Sunne                        c

Brave                        b

Then he            a

The middle “c”-rhyme lines are enclosed by the outer layers of “b” and finally “a” rhymes. In the final stanza, the enclosure rhyme has been divided into two: aba cbc, complementing Herbert’s assertion that God has given His two cabinets (Trinity & Incarnation) for mankind’s “poor cabinet of bone” (line 28), which further encloses the speaker’s container of sins (line 29).

The chiasmus (X) structure of the rhyme in stanzas 1-4 reinforces the poem’s focus on Christ, given to us in the Incarnation. This carries forward the theme from “Christmas,” only mankind in “Ungratefulness,” instead of “expecting” and opening the doors, as the Lord does for the narrator in “Christmas,” is “close, reserved, and dark” to his Lord (line 25), ungrateful and unreciprocating.

Look at the treasures of the Godhead that God has given us through Christ (Col 2)—how can we be ungrateful to Him? How can we not give Him everything we are, not just our hearts, but the sins that we cling to as well?

Christmas in July: GH Day 4

CHRISTMAS.

      ALL after pleasures as I rid one day,
          My horse and I, both tir’d, bodie and minde,
          With full crie of affections, quite astray ;
      I took up in the next inne I could finde.

      There when I came, whom found I but my deare,
          My dearest Lord, expecting till the grief
          Of pleasures brought me to him, readie there
      To be all passengers most sweet relief?

      O Thou, whose glorious, yet contracted light,
          Wrapt in night's mantle, stole into a manger ;
          Since my dark soul and brutish is thy right,
      To Man of all beasts be not thou a stranger :

          Furnish and deck my soul, that thou mayst have
          A better lodging, than a rack, or grave.



      THE shepherds sing ;  and shall I silent be?
                      My God, no hymne for thee?
      My soul ’s a shepherd too :  a flock it feeds
                      Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
      The pasture is thy word ;  the streams, thy grace
                      Enriching all the place.
      Shepherd and flock shall sing, and all my powers
                      Out-sing the day-light houres.
      Then we will chide the sunne for letting night
                      Take up his place and right :

      We sing one common Lord ;  wherefore he should
                      Himself the candle hold.

      I will go searching, till I finde a sunne
                      Shall stay, till we have done ;
      A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
                      As frost-nipt sunnes look sadly.
      Then we will sing, and shine all our own day,
                      And one another pay :
      His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
      Till ev’n his beams sing, and my musick shine.

This poem from Herbert is divided into 2 parts, the first of which is an  Elizabethan sonnet. That's the part I'm going to focus on in this post. When I  go over this poem with my classes, I typically focus on what we'd expect from a  poem entitled Christmas. That this poem both plays on and thwarts our  expectations of the nativity story is one of the things that attracts me to it  (instead of Mary riding into town we have the narrator, instead of an innkeeper  we have Christ, instead of stable beasts & a manger we have the speaker's  "brutish" soul).

    

Today, though, I'd like to focus on the speaker's interaction with an expectant  Lord. Herbert here draws on elements of the Prodigal Son story, as the narrator  has been out pursuing pleasures, while the Lord has been waiting for him to tire  of those pursuits and turn in to rest. This reminds me of Herbert's "The  Pulley," where God withholds rest (that is contentment) from mankind, hoping  that the lack of rest will "toss him [humans] to his [God's] breast."  And isn't it the case that if pursuing our own pleasures, whatever those may be  (and they may be "good" ones--career, fellowship, developing talents), were to  provide us with long-lasting satisfaction, we would feel no need for the Lord,  no urgency to seek Him out, to lean against His comforting breast?

    

Body & mind tired (the horse & its rider were a common image for body  [represented by horse] and mind [represented by rider]: that is, the speaker's  whole being, including his emotions, is exhausted. The speaker also describes  himself as "quite astray," with a probable echo of Isaiah 53:6 ("all we like  sheep have gone astray"), alluding to the speaker's sinful condition.

    

I love this depiction of the Lord in Herbert's "Christmas." He is  "expecting"--unlike the innkeeper with no room in the nativity story, this  custodian longs to provide the weary, sinful traveler a place of rest: "ready  there / To be all passengers' most sweet relief."    

The poem shifts from this second quatrain to the third, where the focus turns to  this expectant Lord, who is also the baby in the manger, and now, in a  reciprocal gesture, the speaker offers the incarnate Lord his soul, a "better  lodging" than the other 2 spots where Jesus was laid: the feeding trough and the  tomb.

    

What follows in part 2 of "Christmas" plays on the shepherds' part of the  nativity story, but that's a subject for a later time.... 

Love-Joy (GH Day 3)

Today’s poem is brief. Here it is in full, once again courtesy of Luminarium.org:

LOVE-JOY.

AS on a window late I cast mine eye,

I saw a vine drop grapes with J and C

Anneal’d on every bunch.   One standing by

Ask’d what it meant.   I (who am never loth

To spend my judgement) said, It seem’d to me

To be the bodie and the letters both

Of Joy and Charitie ;  Sir, you have not miss’d,

The man reply’d ;  It figures  JESUS CHRIST.

This seemingly simple little poem shows the playful or whimsical side of George Herbert’s poetry. He plays here with the letters J & C (Joy & Charity [love], Jesus Christ). He plays with Christ as the vine (from the Gospel of John chapter 15), as well as with an understood allusion to Holy Communion (grapes = wine). The body of the grapes represents Christ’s body, while the juice represents his blood. Christ as the Word (logos--John 1) is “the body and the letters both” (line 6).

Perhaps Herbert titled the poem not “Joy and Charity” (JC), but “Love” followed by “Joy” because these are the first two fruits of the Spirit the Apostle Paul lists in Galations 5:22. Also, because of Christ’s love for us in his sacrifice on the cross, we can have joy in him. His love comes first.

This pattern of the “I” speaker addressed by “one” (sometimes a “friend”) is a pattern Herbert uses in a few poems (cf. “The Collar” or “Jordan 2”), where the other speaker is understood to be Christ or God.

Posted here is my photo of the window in Salisbury Cathedral (Wiltshire, England) that celebrates Herbert’s poems with images of a vine and grapes. (My apologies for the poor resolution. The photo was taken with a disposable camera several years ago.)

"Mirror, Mirror" (GH Day 2)

On a walk through the park yesterday I was reading George Herbert’s sonnet “The Holy Scriptures (1),” which I’ll post here, courtesy of Luminarium.org:

THE HOLY SCRIPTURES. 

1.     

OH Book !  infinite sweetnesse !  let my heart

     Suck ev’ry letter, and a hony gain,

     Precious for any grief in any part ;

To cleare the breast, to mollifie all pain.

Thou art all health, health thriving, till it make

     A full eternitie :  thou art a masse

     Of strange delights, where we may wish and take.

Ladies, look here ;  this is the thankfull glasse,

That mends the lookers eyes :  this is the well

     That washes what it shows.   Who can indeare

     Thy praise too much ?  thou art heav’ns Lidger here,

Working against the states of death and hell.

     Thou art joyes handsell :  heav’n lies flat in thee,

     Subject to ev’ry mounters bended knee.

One sentence, broken between 2 stanzas (lines 8-10), always stands out to me. This (the Bible) is the looking glass that mends, writes Herbert. I don’t know about you, but every time I look at myself in the mirror I see a flaw (or two or three) that needs mending. But how often does my mirror reach out and fix my hair or my makeup or the bags under my eyes? It, of course, doesn’t. (I wish it would! Perhaps in the future they’ll invent such a thing. I’m sure there must have been such a device on The Jetsons. . . .)

Yet, Herbert’s sonnet (just to refresh your memory, that’s 14 lines of 10 syllables with an iambic [unstressed syllable followed by stressed] meter) asserts that the Scriptures are a glass that not only corrects the looker’s gaze (how we see/what we see/the eyes through which we see), but also washes the looker’s face.

“Sunday School grads,” as my pastor would call them, might detect in Herbert’s analogy an allusion to the biblical book of James, chapter 1, verses 23-24: “Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.” It wouldn’t help anything for me to look at my reflection in the mirror, notice that my hair needs combing, and then shrug my shoulders and walk away without fixing the problem. The word/Word that James refers to is of course the Holy Scriptures.

So, back to Herbert: “the thankfull glasse” (line 8). Is the looking glass thankful (how could it be?)? Or is the looker thankful? Herbert’s syntax is ambiguous here. I’m going to choose the more reasonable interpretation: the looker is thankful. And how thankful we should be for a glass that not only shows, but mends what’s wrong with us, if we will only submit to its washing. How could the Scriptures do this? That’s a bigger—and more important—meditation, which I’ll leave you to ponder on your own. Herbert’s opening gives the first step, however: we must “suck” on the Scriptures (like a baby does when nursing—cf. the metaphor used by the Apostle Peter in 1 Peter 2:2-3). The Apostle Paul speaks to the “mending” aspect of Scripture in 2 Timothy 3:15-16.

What probably both interests—and rankles—me about these lines, though, is the direct address of “Ladies.” Why only ladies? Do gentlemen not also utilize looking glass technology to assess their appearance? Here, I’m going to generalize about my gender: I  do think women look more at ourselves in the mirror, are more concerned about our appearance, do tend to focus more on how we look than on our character. I think Herbert addresses us because we need the reminder that the standard to which we ought to be comparing ourselves is not the world’s ideal of beauty, but God’s ideal of holiness as revealed in His Word (e.g., 1 Peter 1:15-16, Colossians 3:12).

I also wonder why these lines (8-10) are divided between 2 quatrains of the sonnet (that is, between 2 sets of 4 lines). This radical breaking apart of a sentence, a complete thought, a metaphor and the use of enjambment in lines 9-10 (where the thought flows on to the next line) is not as usual for Herbert. So why does he do this here? I have to admit that I don’t have a good answer for this. The separation certainly makes us as readers pause and look longer, both between lines 8-9 and lines 9-10. Maybe the poet simply wants to emphasize this concept by catching our attention and making us wait. (We might also note, however, that Herbert uses enjambment in the 1^st quatrain between lines 1-2, in the 2^nd quatrain between lines 6-7, and later in the 3^rd quatrain between lines 10-11, but there’s no time to speculate about that here.)       

Announcing One Hundred Days of Herbert

So much for not being ambitious! I plan to write 100 days of posts on something related to the wonderful seventeenth-century English parson-poet George Herbert. George Who, you ask? How unfortunate that in the 20^th and now 21^st centuries only literary scholars read George Herbert. Two hundred, 300, and especially 400 years ago he was a household name to any English-speaking person who was literate. (Just ask Samuel T. Coleridge.)

In brief, George Herbert (1593-1633, or, roughly contemporary with Shakespeare) wrote English, Latin, and even some Greek lyric poems during his short lifetime, most of which are in some sense “devotional.” He is considered part of the Metaphysical school of poets from the early seventeenth century (along with John Donne), but Herbert really blazed the way for religious lyric poems that meld Metaphysical wit with Classical polish. The publication of his volume of English poems called The Temple after his death launched this particular trend that lasted roughly half a century.

St. Andrew's, Bemerton

A younger son from an aristocratic family, Herbert was educated at Cambridge’s Trinity College (B.A., M.A.), served as a Cambridge orator and Minister of Parliament, and settled down in the last few years of his life to become a Church of England parson in the country village of Bemerton, outside Salisbury, Wiltshire. Prone to illness his whole life, Herbert finally succumbed in 1633, giving the volume of English poems that he had prepared to his friend, Nicholas Ferrar, to publish. (Herbert’s only previously published poems had been his Latin and Greek ones, many of which are more occasional, such as addressing contemporary debates.)

You may find representative poetry from Herbert in any early English literature anthology or online at such fine sites as Luminarium.org. The entire Temple, as well as Herbert’s prose handbook, The Country Parson, is found online courtesy of Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL). For just a simple paperback reading edition of Herbert’s Temple, get a Penguin copy. For the ultimate scholar’s edition, see Helen Wilcox’s recent (and magnificently thorough) English Poems of George Herbert.

C. S. Lewis, in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, had this to say about Herbert’s place among the English “old books” instrumental in his [Lewis’s] conversion: “I was deeply moved by the Dream of the Rood; more deeply still by Langland; intoxicated (for a time) by Donne; deeply and lastingly satisfied by Thomas Browne. But the most alarming of all was George Herbert. Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment.”