That “every lover of English poetry should read, and every student of English poetry should study” George Herbert, was T. S. Eliot’s opinion, of his co-religionist’s work. We should read Herbert not for the “exquisite craftsmanship,” or “the extraordinary metrical virtuosity,” or the “verbal felicities,” but for the “content of the poems”—a strange reason, surely? Great poems are great for the how, not for the what, or never just for that, is this not true, and common knowledge? Even Eliot’s diction works against him: “content” sounds so bland, after the excitement of “craftsmanship,” “virtuosity,” and “felicities.” George Herbert was a poet, not, in the horrid phrase that’s seized our time, a “content creator.”
What is the “content” Eliot was so high about? Many of Herbert’s poems record spiritual suffering, presumably his own, and appeals to God for solace or understanding. There are accusations against God, and pleas for relief. But this is not a new story, and versions of it are told, I’m told, even in the Bible. Contra Eliot, what makes Herbert worth reading—what makes his versions stick in the mind—is their unique mode of expression: their “verbal felicities.”
Consider “The Cross.” Herbert wanted only “some place, where I might sing, / And serve thee,” but as soon as “this dear end” is “given,” his “power to serve” is taken away, by illnesses physical and spiritual. Herbert’s description of these illnesses culminates in a perfect line of verse:
One ague dwelleth in my bones,
Another in my soul (the memory
What I would do for thee, if once my groans
Could be allowed for harmony):
I am in all a weak disabled thing.
The obstacles are outside as well as in, and Herbert blames God, in another perfect line:
Besides, things sort not to my will,
Even when my will doth study thy renown:
Thou turnest the edge of all things on me still [...]
Even the most harmless things have a dangerous “edge”—what an idea. Also good is the first line, “things sort not to my will,” as if a human could have such power, that things would, of their own accord, do the bidding of his desires. Later in the poem is a shocking comparison, articulating the misery of his helplessness:
To have my aim, and yet to be
Further from it than when I bent my bow;
To make my hopes my torture, and the fee
Of all my woes another woe,
Is in the midst of delicates to need,
And even in Paradise to be a weed.
This is Herbert the equal of Donne, finding truth in paradox, for how can there be weeds in heaven?
“Affliction (I)” has the same theme, with the details shifted. Again addressing God, Herbert says “though didst entice to thee my heart,” and Herbert felt “so many joys.” Three stanzas describe those joys, and just before the turn to “sorrow” are these four lines:
At first thou gav’st me milk and sweetnesses;
I had my wish and way;
My days were straw’d with flowers and happiness;
There was no month but May.
That last line makes me smile, and I’ve been trying to understand why. Maybe, it’s that Herbert found a way, even after “My days were straw’d with flowers and happiness,” to turn the hyperbole up to eleven. How could life be better than that?—I’ll show you.
The sorrows in this poem are again physical sicknesses, but also now the unique soullessness of an academic life: “Thou didst betray me to a ling’ring book, / And wrap me in a gown.” This prepares the way for a spare and plain couplet that breaks your heart, for even the alleged benefit of a bookish life—access to knowledge—turns out useless:
Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me
None of my books will show.
The ending of this poem is one of Herbert’s strongest, another bit of paradox worthy of Donne, though I cannot say I understand it:
Yet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek;
In weakness must be stout.
Well, I will change the service, and go seek
Some other master out.
Ah my dear God! Though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.
“If not X, let it not be that X,” it makes no sense. John Drury tries to help, in Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert. He offers existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s last journal entry, written while dying, as a “vantage point” for reading the line:
What does God want? What pleases him even more than the praises of angels is a man, who in the last lap of his life, when God is transformed as though into sheer cruelty, and with the cruelest imaginable cruelty does everything to deprive him of all joy in life, and who continues to believe that God is love and it is from love that God does this. Such a man becomes an angel. And in heaven he can surely praise God. But the apprentice time, the school time, is always the strictest time. Like a man who thought of journeying through the whole world to hear a singer who had a perfect voice, so God sits in heaven and listens. And every time he hears praise from a man whom he brings to the point of uttermost disgust with life, God says to himself, This is the right note. He says, Here it is, as though he were making a discovery.
“Herbert’s last line,” Drury claims, “is, surely and precisely, Kierkegaard’s ‘right note.’” But at best this “vantage” helps us grasp what the line expresses (love, devotion, praise); it’s no help with what the line means. I’m put off also for another reason. Kierkegaard’s God is the conductor/instructor Terence Fletcher from the film Whiplash, admonishing “not my tempo” between slaps and worse abuse, who regards torture as the only route to beauty. George Herbert was an Anglican rector: no way was his conception of God so bleak, nor should that bleakness be read into the poem, or the poem read from its perspective.
See also: The Consolations of George Herbert.