Expectations (GH Day 9)

Who of us has not struggled with expectations in life that go unmet? My list grows ever longer, ranging from prolonged singleness to my potential as a scholar to my ability to cook a successful chicken dinner.

Herbert’s poem “The Pilgrimage” is about unmet expectations and is presented in the form of an allegory. Here it is courtesy of luminarium.org:

THE PILGRIMAGE
by George Herbert

I travell'd on, seeing the hill, where lay
                              My expectation.
             A long it was and weary way.
             The gloomy cave of Desperation
I left on th'one, and on the other side
                              The rock of Pride.

And so I came to Phansies medow strow'd
                              With many a flower:
             Fair would I here have made abode,
             But I was quicken'd by my houre.
So to Cares cops I came, and there got through
                              With much ado.

That led me to the wilde of Passion, which
                              Some call the wold;
             A wasted place, but sometimes rich.
             Here I was robb'd of all my gold,
Save one good Angell, which a friend had ti'd
                              Close to my side.

At length I got unto the gladsome hill,
                              Where lay my hope,
             Where lay my heart; and climbing still,
             When I had gain'd the brow and top,
A lake of brackish waters on the ground
                              Was all I found.

With that abash'd and struck with many a sting
                              Of swarming fears,
             I fell, and cry'd, Alas my King;
             Can both the way and end be tears?
Yet taking heart I rose, and then perceiv'd
                              I was deceiv'd:

My hill was further: so I flung away,
                              Yet heard a crie
             Just as I went, None goes that way
             And lives: If that be all, said I,
After so foul a journey death is fair,
                              And but a chair.

Just to clarify, an allegory is, in the rather cumbersome definition from Holman & Harmon’s usually helpful Handbook to Literature, “A form of extended metaphor in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. Thus it represents one thing in the guise of another—an abstraction in that of a concrete image.” Clear as Herbert’s “lake of brackish waters” (23), right?

Often, characters or places in an allegory are named for the abstract quality that they represent. Herbert’s speaker here passes through Fancy’s Meadow and Care’s Copse. Readers might be reminded of Bunyan’s later Slough of Despond from Pilgrim’s Progress.

Rather than a specific, smaller expectation, this poem represents the speaker’s life as a journey, surviving significant obstacles all in the hope of getting to the “gladsome hill” (line 19). There the narrator has laid his hopes, he says, and his heart. He expects something (we’re not told what)—a great reward, perhaps—something to make his “long . . . and weary way” (3) worthwhile. What he does not expect is to have this expectation thwarted.

Have you ever expected a beautiful scene at the top of a hill, and all you got was brackish water?

Like Herbert’s speaker here, we probably felt somewhat “deceived” (30), betrayed—by God, by a significant other, by the travel brochure.

Herbert’s speaker picks himself up, dusts himself off, and starts again: “taking heart I rose” (29). Yet the hill he thought he was heading for, his end goal, the place that would make all the hardship worthwhile (he hopes), is further still. There are more hardships remaining for one exhausted from hardships already encountered.

What follows in the final stanza has always been a bit ambiguous to me. Does “flung away” mean away from the original path (that is, back or to the side somehow)? Or does “flung away” mean heave himself forward to continue, though very disheartened? Regardless, the speaker is so fed up with the difficulties of his journeying and especially the disappointing of his expectations that he feels that death is better than continuing.

It’s rather a downer of a poem, to some extent, as the main message seems to be that the Christian life is hard and disappointing, and the afterlife will at least be rest (“a chair”). No trace seems to be in this poem (although it is in several others by Herbert) of Christ, who promised us in this world we will have trouble, but He has overcome the world. Still, I find the reminder from this poem that we had better re-adjust our expectations so that they’re His expectations to be a good, albeit sobering, one.   

 (At this rate, it’s going to take a long, long time for me to reach my “One Hundred Days of Herbert! I’m still going to try, though. One must have some goal to reach for, however unattainable it might seem. As Robert Browning wrote, “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Hmm, I’m teaching Browning this upcoming semester, so maybe more Browning later. . . .)