POETS Day! Fugglestone St. Peter’s own, George Herbert

POETS Day snuck up on me this week. I try to extend some lifeline, no matter how flimsy it may be, to give plausible rational for skipping out of work early, but I’ve done a lot of these now. Finding a new excuse every week isn’t as easy as it may seem. Don’t let that deter you.

You don’t need me to supply you with a reason. It’s right there: TS. Piss Off Early comes with its own why. Tomorrow’s Saturday. Admire the fulgence of the anagram’s fullness and start the weekend at a time of your choosing.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Catch a ball game at a bar. Take a walk in a park. On average, we only see 4,113.2 Fridays in a lifetime and at minimum 2% of those are 13ths. Don’t waste one clock-watching.

If you do manage to get out, take a moment to read a poem or three. Maybe these.

***

My wife and I honeymooned in Vancouver. It was 2002, three years after the British ceded Hong Kong to Communist China. Refugees scattered all over the Pacific Rim. These weren’t the poor. I read that British Columbia absorbed thirty thousand souls. We were told to expect amazing high-end Chinese cuisine and we found amazing high-end Chinese cuisine.

We went to an elegant place near the harbor for dim sum. It was in a hotel lobby; a huge room below a series of mezzanines with an open wall of glass extending up several floors. Neither of us had ever eaten dim sum before but we were told that instead of a menu there would be a cart full of food that would visit tableside and you chose what you wanted from there.

That’s what happened. A cart came by and there were dumplings and bao, which may or may not be a dumpling as well but seems distinct to me. I think there was soup and definitely spicy vegetables. Little strips of sticky meat. Everything was fantastic. What we didn’t know was there would be a series of carts with different offerings making the rounds.

We loaded up on the first thing that came by and though we loved what we got, we saw what we didn’t. The duck on the third cart looked impossibly crisp. There was a lesson to be learned; a variant on “Don’t make fast friends.” Get the lay of the land before you commit.

I didn’t learn that lesson.

When reading about George Herbert I started laughing as soon as I saw he was the pastor of a church in England called Fugglestone St. Peter because I stopped maturing at twelve. I may not be spelling that right. Most of the sources I’ve read have it as “Fugglestone St Peter” with no period. Full stop in this case, I suppose. That’s odd so I supplied one, but I saw “St” as opposed to “St.” enough to allow that it may be intentional. Anyway, I laughed at “Fugglestone” and immediately included it in the title of this post before reading any further about Herbert. Had I read further, I would have found that the poems he wrote in English are collected in a volume called The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.

I saved the file already with Fugglestone in the title and I don’t want to bother changing it, but I never imagined such an upright man of letters would present such a giggle-target rich environment. I should have learned from the crisp duck.

There’s no doubt that George Herbert was an impressive man. He sat in Parliament and was elected Public Orator of Trinity College, Cambridge, a position which earned him royal notice. It was accepted that sons of prominent families, as Herbert was, could take on titles and receive salaries in the church but have their responsibilities handled by others. After taking orders, he took his duties as a clergyman seriously, developed a reputation for visiting the sick among his flock, bringing them sacraments and assurance. Unfortunately, he was sickly and fell to consumption in 1633 at the age of thirty-nine.

Why he took holy orders is clouded by events that took place after his death. Herbert’s family, as I mentioned, was prominent. His godfather was John Donne if that gives perspective. He began a very promising political career. His closer to contemporary biographers report it was piety that led him to abandon court for a higher calling. That may well be. His poetry shows a discovered Christian zeal not so well expressed until Gerard Manley Hopkins, according to Norton’s Anthology of English Literature, 5^th ed. The problem for later biographers is that posthumously, Herbert was held up as a totemic figure in the 1670s. The Civil War ended and the monarchy was restored. He became an example of duty and righteousness for a time in need of stability and was elevated to the Calendar of Saints (St or St. George?)

It’s possible he left politics because he fell from favor. His friendship with Francis Bacon was likely an asset to his political rise, but Bacon was disgraced by charges of corruption in 1621. Herbert was favored by James I, but the king died in 1625. He may have taken the collar in 1626 because his political ambitions were stymied.

As a poet he was technically brilliant. Many of his works describe a feeling of listlessness or despair prior to knowing God. That he inspired Hopkins should be no surprise, but a list of others who claim inspiration from Herbert is impressive. Emily Dickensen, T.S. Eliot, Henry Vaughan, W.H. Auden, and Elizabeth Bishop begin a lengthy list.

I like that while technically brilliant, he experimented and toyed with form. It may seem like before E.E. Cummings and his contemporaries, poetic innovation happened at a glacial pace and tinkering was limited to an occasional variation in the sonnet rhyme scheme. Herbert played with layout. I can’t reproduce some of his more visual poems here because the editing software left justifies everything, but the lines of his poem “Easter Wings” are laid out so that lines begin longer and shorten then lengthen to look like a pair of angel’s wings, “Altar” looks like what I’m told is an altar though it looks like a capital “I” to me. He didn’t invent visual poems. They’ve been a part of poetic tradition since the ancient Greeks, but he set himself apart from his immediate tradition.

Here, in “Prayer (I),” – he reused a lot of titles so scholars have numbered them – he presents a traditional sonnet form but conjures the quiet stillness of one in prayer by using no verbs. It’s effective.

The Prayer (I)

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

Herbert sets six stanzas of five lines each for “Denial.” The first five stanzas have an abab rhyme with the fifth line discordant. The first stanza, tellingly, ends with “And disorder.” They’re about a man lost and in search of God. In the sixth stanza he finds salvation and the fifth line resolves with the rhyme scheme ababb, the final line announcing completion.

Denial

When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent ears,
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse;
My breast was full of fears
And disorder.

My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow,
Did fly asunder:
Each took his way; some would to pleasures go,
Some to the wars and thunder
Of alarms.

“As good go anywhere,” they say,
“As to benumb
Both knees and heart, in crying night and day,
Come, come, my God, O come!
But no hearing.”

O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue
To cry to thee,
And then not hear it crying! All day long
My heart was in my knee,
But no hearing.

Therefore my soul lay out of sight,
Untuned, unstrung:
My feeble spirit, unable to look right,
Like a nipped blossom, hung
Discontented.

O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favors granting my request,
They and my mind may chime,
And mend my rhyme.

This final poem is another sonnet and probably my favorite of his because of a false rhyme rather than in spite of it. Line six, ending in “gone” is supposed to rhyme with line eight, but it ends with “possession.” I’m sure there’s someone willing to tell me “Akshully…” and explain that the accent of his time aligns the rhyme but I’m not having any of it. It’s not that I mind a false rhyme normally. It’s that he’s typically so precise. It sticks out. It’s a beauty mark or slight tooth gap behind a knowing smirk.

Redemption
George Herbert (1593-1633)

Having been tenant long to a rich lord,
Not thriving, I resolvèd to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th’ old.

In heaven at his manor I him sought;
They told me there that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possessiòn.

I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theaters, gardens, parks, and courts;
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of thieves and murderers; there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

Poets go in and out of style. My Norton Anthology claims “All sorts of readers, not otherwise noticeably devout, have responded to [Herbert’s] quiet intensity; and the opinion has even been voiced that if Donne was the supreme metaphysical poet for readers if the 1930s, Herbert occupies that position for the 1980s.”

I think they were a little premature. Herbert’s talent was immense and it’s astonishing what impact he was able to make in his short thirty-nine years, but Donne remains Donne. Who knows? Maybe he’ll be the next next Donne.

P.S. About an hour or so after thinking I was done with this instalment – text uploaded, poems indented, picture submitted, etc. – I sat down with Martin Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers. I’m only a quarter in but so far it’s a solid debut novel. I’m admittedly predisposed to like it because of my love of his father’s work, but I think I can fairly say the son is entertaining.

In a scene beginning around page fifty, our narrator and his friend are getting high with a couple of girls they just met. One of the girls picks up a book and starts reading an essay about, of all people, George Herbert. Of his best-known work with a giggly title, she says “in an indignant monotone, ‘It bugs me when these guys start trying to hang on ‘The Temple’ this kind of structuaralized [italics his] didactic trip when it’s all the hang-ups and anxieties that make it so… integrated.’” So, there’s that.