"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.)