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?
No comments:
Post a Comment