Dusty with a Chance of Dirt Balls (GH #32)

"Dust to Dust": ruins of church, Chester, UK

At a conference I attended last spring, a colleague introduced me to A. S. Byatt’s short story called “Raw Material,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in April 2002. http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2002/04/byatt.htm Last week I finally read it.

The main character, a creative writing teacher (Jack), asks the best writer in his class, a slightly deaf older woman (Cicely Fox), what she likes to read. She responds,

"Oh, the old things. They wouldn't interest you young people. Things I used to like as a girl. Poetry increasingly. I find I don't seem to want to read novels much anymore." . . .

He said, "Which poems, Miss Fox?"

"These days, mostly George Herbert."

"Are you religious?"

"No. He is the only writer who makes me regret that for a moment. He makes one understand grace. Also, he is good on dust."

"Dust?" Jack dredged his memory and came up with "Who sweeps a room as for thy laws / Makes that and the action fine."*

"I like 'Church Monuments.' With death sweeping dust with an incessant motion: 'Flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust / That measures all our time; which also shall / Be crumbled into dust.' And then I like the poem where he speaks of his God stretching 'a crumme of dust from Hell to Heaven.' Or 'O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue to cry to thee / And then not heare it crying.'"**

"He knew," Cicely Fox said, "the proper relation between words and things. 'Dust' is a good word."

Herbert does like to use the word “dust.” He often reminds us that we are made from dust (Gen 2:7), will return to dust, and are as dust in comparison with God’s glory and greatness. Herbert takes the idea of man as formed from dust, now acting as supplicant before his Creator (cf. “Denial”), a (literal) step further in “Longing”:

  Behold, thy dust doth stir;

It moves, it creeps, it aims at thee;

Wilt thou defer

To succour me,

Thy pile of dust, wherein each crumme

Says, Come? (stanza 7, lines 37-42)***

I love the image Herbert paints of the creeping dust: poor pathetic dust trying to reach the King with his petition for aid. (Herbert explores this image of God as ruler denying relief to the supplicant later in stanza 10: “Thou dost reign / And rule on high, / While I remain / In bitter grief” [lines 56-59].) Indeed, the speaker is hoping this picture will tug on the Lord’s heartstrings enough to move Him to respond in compassion. Yes, “dust” is a good word.

Not surprisingly, George Herbert’s poems inspired many other poets in the seventeenth century, not the least of which is the early American colonist Edward Taylor, a Reformed minister on the Connecticut frontier.

In the “Prologue” to Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations, the speaker refers to himself as “a Crumb of Dust,” asking the Lord to “Inspire this Crumb of Dust till it display / Thy Glory through’t: and then thy dust shall live” (lines 21-22). We may be dust, Taylor acknowledges, but if God “inspire” us (in the original meaning of the word, as in God breathing into man the breath of life in the creation), His glory can both shine through us and give us life. (I might also note that Taylor’s opening poem is about humbly taking up his pen in a poetic theodicy: to demonstrate God’s “Properties” [that is, attributes; line 28]. He’s playing on the idea of poets being “inspired.”)

 

Taylor’s poems (almost exclusively religious) are evocative in their own right. He knows how to use words as well, but, unlike Herbert, who uses them in subtle and clever ways, Taylor almost shocks with them. I’ll leave you with one of my favorites, from his “Meditation. Rev. 3.5. The same shall be cloathed in White Raiment.” In the first stanza, Taylor’s speaker considers himself too lowly to be arrayed in white robes with all the saints, calling himself “but a jumble of gross Elements” (line 5). As the second stanza begins, the poet has found his vivid image. What does it look like for a sinful human being to wear the white robes of the righteous? According to Taylor, it looks like “A Dirt ball dresst in milk white Lawn” (line 7).****

I’ve always thought of a big ball of brown dirt dressed in one of those white, ruffled christening gowns. It’s a metaphor that’s almost ludicrous, and yet does not a ball of dirt or a crumb of dust more adequately express how small sinful humanity is compared to God’s holiness than what we usually envision?

* From Herbert’s “The Elixir.”

** From Herbert’s “Church Monuments,” “The Temper 1,” and “Denial,” respectively.

*** Herbert’s spelling of crumb (crumme) enhances its sight rhyme with “Come.”

**** An excellent edition of Taylor’s poems is the one edited by Donald E. Stanford and published by UNC Chapel Hill (The Poems of Edward Taylor).