The Sun (GH # 30)

Today is the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. For millennia, cultures have celebrated midsummer. It’s more of a big deal in climates that experience a long, harsh winter than it is for the U.S. southern states, where I grew up, or for California, where I live now. I remember one summer when I was in the northern Eastern Europe country of Latvia, where they have a huge midsummer festival called Ligo (pronounced “leegwa”), involving folk dress and songs and dancing (at least, that’s how it was several years ago). At this time of the year in Latvia, the sun doesn’t go to bed until late at night.

On this longest day, I am reminded of a short, simple poem from George Herbert called “The Sonne,” in which Herbert plays with the homophones “sun” and “son” (pronounced the same in English, but with very different meanings):

The Sonne

Let foreign nations of their language boast,

What fine variety each tongue affords:

I like our language, as our men and coast:

Who cannot dress it well, want wit, not words.

How neatly do we give one only name

To parents’ issue and the sun’s bright star!

A son is light and fruit; a fruitful flame

Chasing the father’s dimness, carri’d far

From the first man in th’ East, to fresh and new

Western discov’ries of posterity.

So in one word our Lord’s humility

We turn upon him in a sense most true:

      For what Christ once in humbleness began,

      We him in glory call, The Son of Man.*

The flexibility of spelling in the 16^th and 17^th centuries made the parallels between the words even easier, as “sun” might sometimes be spelled “son” or vice versa (with rather interchangeable vowels). Herbert, as with others of his age (see John Donne’s “Hymn to God the Father”), plays with the similar-sounding words sun/son in a few poems and usually finds figurative similarities between the words as well.

In “The Sonne,” for instance, the son is the delight of his parents and the fruit of their loins, which Herbert morphs into the “fruitful flame” (line 7) of the sun (the “bright star” in the sky [6]). “Posterity” in line 10 represents not just new generations of children, but new legacies born of discoveries across the Western hemisphere in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages of exploration in the New World. These fruitful voyages west, which brought new literal fruits to Britain as well as figurative ones, are paralleled with the sun’s journey across the sky from East to West (8-10).

So, having explored the connection between son and sun, Herbert now turns his attention to the Son. Having been humbled in becoming the issue of Mary and (stepfather) Joseph, Jesus, the Son of Man, in his glorified state shines like the magnificent sun (14).

Herbert also sneaks in another little connection between the Son and the sun (and, for parents who have only children [line 5], even the son). At line 12, Herbert’s “turn” of phrase (son to sun to Son) in “We turn upon him” is a play on the earth turning around the sun, just as our lives should turn around the Son of God as our center. This revelation of the “sense most true” (12) also functions as what’s called the “turn” of the sonnet, the part of the sonnet where the poet moves from problem to resolution or, as in this case, a lesser idea to a greater connected one.

Enjoying the flexibility of the early modern English language, Herbert has been playing with the similarities between a son and the son, but ultimately both son and sun point to the Son of God. See also parallels Herbert draws in “Mattens” (“by a sun-beam [Son-cross] I will climb to thee” [line 20]) and “Jordan (2)” (“Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sun [Son]” [line 11]). In a Latin poem from Passio Discerpta (#16 “To the failing sun”), Herbert links the sinking sun (sunset) with the Son of God on the cross (when darkness came over the land—Matt. 27:45). Both sun and Son, he indicates in his Latin poem, will rise again.

      

So, as you enjoy this longest day of the summer sun, may you enjoy the fruits of a relationship with the Son as well.

* I’ve modernized the spelling of Herbert’s poems for easier reading.