Hanging On (GH Day 8)

How hard it can be to come to a place of utter dependence on God, especially when He doesn't seem to provide any answers or certainty! There’s a lesser-known poem by George Herbert that touches on this very experience: “Perseverance,” an English poem found only in what scholars have titled the "Williams manuscript." Here is "Perseverance," taken from both the Wilcox and Hutchinson editions* of Herbert’s works. (I have modernized the spelling, which originally included Herbert’s abbreviations):

My God, the poor expressions of my Love

Which warm these lines, and serve them up to thee

Are so, as for the present, I did move

            Or rather as thou movest me.

But what shall issue, whether these my words

Shall help another, but my judgment be;

As a burst fowling-piece doth save the birds

            But kill the man, is sealed with thee.

For who can tell, though thou hast died to win

And wed my soul in glorious paradise,

Whether my many crimes and use of sin

May yet forbid the banes [banns] and bliss?

Only my soul hangs on thy promises

With face and hands clinging unto thy breast,

Clinging and crying, crying without cease,

                             Thou art my rock, thou art my rest.

  

As in “Dullness,” Herbert’s speaker is again concerned about his poetic output, only this time his sensitive conscience worries about whether his well-intentioned efforts might lead someone else astray and, in the speaker’s worst fear, damn him (the speaker) in the process. This poem feels "raw" to me in its emotion as it expresses these fears. In fact, Wilcox notes that the first definition for “expressions” (line 1) given in the Oxford English Dictionary is the literal one: “squeezings out under pressure.”

Herbert’s speaker is in a state of suspension as he presents himself in relation to his Lord in 3 metaphorical contexts: as poet-servant “serving up” his poems as an offering, as bride having been promised to the Bridegroom, and as a crying baby at his mother's  (possibly Father's) breast. In none of these scenarios does God respond to the speaker's fears. 

Have you ever felt that way? Like God seems to be giving no certainty, no comfort, no  answers? 

I think every Christian probably goes through such times. The Psalmist certainly did. Witness, for example, David in Psalm 39, verse 12a: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; hold not your peace at my tears!” (ESV).

Unlike most Psalms, however, Herbert's "Perseverance," ends only with intellectual truth (“thy promises”: “Thou art my rock, thou art my rest”), without providing emotional comfort. The speaker remains “crying without cease,” although, granted, he is at least crying out the right thing. (Wilcox points out in her notes that the first crying in line 15 is weeping, but the second is the speaker exclaiming the phrase that follows.)

Not, as the old hymn goes, “standing on the promises,” but “hang[ing] on [God’s] promises” here. Once again, I find Wilcox’s note on the OED definitions of “hangs on” to be illustrative: 1) “Is dependent upon,” 2) “Relies upon with expectation,” & 3) “Literally, clings to.” In other words, the child of God gets through the tough, “no answers” times by being dependent upon the Lord, with expectation that He will provide, clinging to His promises (and Him!) while waiting.

"Perseverance" is not Herbert's strongest work, which is probably a reason why he left it out of his final collection, The Temple. Even if we don't have as much to say about the poetics here, the theme, and especially the emotion, culminating in the crying child image in the last stanza, is one that resonates, I should think, with many readers.

*F. E. Hutchinson, Works of George Herbert (1943); Helen Wilcox, The English Poems of George Herbert (2007)