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.
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