Salt, Hope, and Symmetry
On the poetry of George Herbert
As Christian publishing goes, devotionals—books with bites of scripture, reflection questions, and tips for prayer and application—are legion.
Even in the age of Christian bookstores having gone the way of Tower Records, readers devour them. Publishers make returns. Editors and agents take devotional manuscripts as regular submissions. And like anything with the taste and voice of an actual human (sorry ChatGPT), somebody writes them.
If this sounds too obvious, bear with me; it’s one of my takeaway from last month’s Vision Christian Writers Conference, where agents, publishers, and the editor of a hundred thousand subscriber-strong kid’s magazine don’t mind telling you how the sausage is made—or what kind of sausage keeps the lights on.
As far as millions of Christians readers go, popular devotion / spiritual living / self-help hybrid like The Purpose Driven Life towers over everything else… and just beats the stuffing out of Amish romance.
This goes with the rule of thumb you generally hear in publishing: with few exceptions, non-fiction outsells fiction by leaps and bounds.
With that in mind, Christian devotion and devotion writing stakes a huge claim in the history of literary activity. In an unbroken tradition going back to man of the hour George Herbert (an early seventeenth century Cambridge orator, member of parliament, and Anglican pastor) devotionals constitute for more reading, for more believers, and across more times and places than you might think. The more Herbert I read, the more I’m convinced that his potent, brief, fully Christian but finely chiseled poetry is among the best of it.
So this month, and with Resurrection Sunday still in the rearview, Noah David Elkins’ dives into the visual and narrative symmetry of Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings.’
Ham that I am, I can’t resist, I’ll introduce Herbert, sample a few stanzas, and give my take on why this devotion-minded, metaphysical poet sparkles for all readers, believing or not.
Scroll down to Noah if you must. But first…
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Sampling the Goods
Regardless of whether you move in a Christian circles or not, Herbert’s wit, wordplay and figurative mind—like that of fellow wordsmith John Donne—is rich and challenging. While it often takes several reads and working through an old, defunct word or two, watching Herbert’s great themes and intensely personal pathos lock into place is a rare reward.
As far as old poets go, he’s often painfully clear.
In ‘The Sacrifice’ no-nonsense tercets follow Christ’s point of view through the crucifixion, starting with Gethsemane:
Therefore my soul melts, and my hearts deare treasure
Drops bloud (the onely beads) my words to measure:
O let this cup passe, if it be thy pleasure:
Was ever grief like mine?
With slight variations, the fourth, non-rhyming line was ever grief like mine? tops off sixty-three stanzas. Each stanza calls Christians to, (you guessed it), devotion. With each tercet and each hanging question, we sink deeper, and more fully, into another dimension of the savior’s suffering and passion.
On a lighter note, and when he’s defending his own verses, Herbert gets salty.
The poem ‘Jordan,’ defends (among many other things) the right to depict faith, beauty, and the plain truth of Christianity in poetic wordplay:
Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines passe, except they do their dutie
Not to a true, but painted chair?
The rhetorical question—is there no room for beauty, craft, and structure outside of everyday furnishings—is something that anyone familiar to the Christian culture’s frigid, apoplectic relationship with the arts can relate to. Can we imagine Herbert being just as exasperated with the Christian-art binary (Hallmark movies on the one hand and worldly edginess for the sake of worldly edginess on the other) as some of us?
At the same time, and almost in the vein of Ray Bradbury telling off readers for asking him to plop more female and minority characters in his books, Herbert pounds his own drum.
Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envie no mans nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.
In effect: ‘So what if I’m a Christian poet? Let everyone else do what they want, but by God, I’ll write like one.’
And how.
With that, and having delineated Herbert’s subject while (hopefully) not narrowing his audience… here’s ‘Easter Wings.’
George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’
A Reflection by Noah Elkins
The first thing to notice about this poem is its shape1. Herbert was very experimental with his poetry, inventing new forms to mirror the content of his foes. Here, the dual hourglasses follow a pattern of narrowing and widening, which corresponds to the positives and negatives of the poem. But when taken as a whole, we see these highs and lows run together to appear together as wings.
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
In these progressively shortening lines, we begin with a reference to the universal state of humanity after the fall of Adam and Eve.
As has often been said, the Fall in Genesis Chapter Three was neither a singular, nor a self-contained event. The Fall began with the eating of the forbidden fruit, then led to the first murder, then the invention of war, to Noah’s flood, and culminated in the crucifixion of Christ. It was less of a single Fall and more of a Falling. This poem seems to indicate some awareness of that as each line shortens.
Then we have the first turn, as the poem begins to widen out again.
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
The poem suddenly goes from the universal to the personal. The poem begins to open up again with the line O let me rise. Then we see a nature image, looking forward to the Edenic paradise being regained, and also using the image of a lark to pull together the dual image of rising in flight and rising in song.
The line Then shall the fall further the flight in me establishes the theme for the entire poem. Through the risings and fallings of our lives, and of history as a whole, though we experience them line-by-line, if we could step back and see those movements as God does, we would see a great and triumphant narrative that would look to us like the rising and falling of angel wings.
My tender age in sorrow did beginne
And still with sicknesses and shame.
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
The second stanza remains in the personal, but mirrors the first stanza in that it returns to a beginning, this time recalling the speaker’s own past. He seems to be referring to some specific instance, but leaves this open to interpretation, likely so that the reader can share in the experience as well. Many of us can imagine a time in our lives when we felt Most thinne; And if we are unsure what exactly this means, just call to mind Bilbo in the Lord of the Rings when he says “I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.” But then, just when everything is Most thinne, both emotionally and literally within the poem itself, the poem once again turns with the powerful words With thee.
It is often said that the words But God (Ephesians 2:4) are the most powerful words in the Bible because they are the point on which all of history turns, our own lives included. The same kind of turn shows up in the Book of Common Prayer which Herbert, famously called The Country Parson of the Church of England, would have known by heart.
From the General Confession of the Book of Common Prayer:
Almighty and most merciful Father, We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep….And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou those, O God, who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind In Christ Jesus our Lord….
Notice here too, the shortest of the phrases is the one in which everything seems most hopeless. And there is no health in us. But then the confession turns dramatically, But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.
In the same way, this poem, when everything seems most brief and hopeless, turns with the words With thee. Then the poem begins to climb once again toward its final resolution.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
Instead of asking for the suffering to pass, he says Let me combine, that is, let him take both the highs and the lows of his experience, And feel thy victorie. You cannot feel victory without struggle. You cannot fly unless you start on the ground.
The penultimate line is the most antiquated so it often leaves people stumped. The word imp, in this context, means to repair the wing of a bird that has been damaged. In other words, if God repairs the speaker’s wing, like a falconer might repair the wing of his bird, then the affliction he felt before from his broken wing will advance the flight in him.
This metaphor does two things: it returns to the lark image used at the end of the last stanza which draws them together, and allows him to conclude with a line which echoes the last line of the previous stanza: Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
Both of the stanzas end in very similar lines, and both stanzas look identical at first glance. The ups and downs of our lives often leave us feeling like we’re being tossed on the waves of anxiety and depression, spiraling and always returning to a place we feel we have been before, without any real progress.
But if we could step back and see with Easter eyes, we would see that the time will come when these birth pains bring about new life within us. For resurrection will always follow death, just as the night will always be followed by the morning.
*A quick note on the original format of this poem. The two stanzas are meant to look like wings, and the opening and closing of the book is intended to simulate the flapping of wings. Herbert’s poems are often strangely interactive or literal in their form, this being one of the most obvious examples. If you wish to read a version of the poem which does not include antiquated spelling, you will find it here.
That was delicious, thank you! George Herbert is my favorite Renaissance poet.