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.)