Meetings Monday, April 18th and Monday, April 25
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Dear All Souls Book Group,
Enclosed below you will find several poems by the English poet, George Herbert (1593 - 1633). These are the poems we'll be discussing across our next two meetings, that on Monday, April 18th, and Monday, April 25th. So there's a change here to the meeting on the 25th. Instead of talking about the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, we'll discuss George Herbert's poetry a second time. As I explained to those book group members in attendance last night, I've opted for a second Herbert meeting so as to give those wanting to read explicitly prayerful and/ or Christian literature during Holy Week the chance to do so. It should also be said that Herbert's poetry amounts to vastly more than its Christian-ness, as many of you know.
So, enclosed below, are, A) a schedule of meeting times, locations, and assigned poems, B) a website about George Herbert, and C) the texts of the poems. I will send the poems a second time just to make sure everyone gets them. Also, those of you who read George Herbert with the Book Group back in 2008 may still have your copy of George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets, ed. Mario Di Cesare, which is the text we worked with then. All of the poems enclosed in this e-mail you will find in that anthology.
For those wishing to acquire a collection of Herbert's poetry, below is a link to the Di Cesare anthology -- the text we used back in 2008. Di Cesare's footnotes will help you navigate individual poems, and at the back are essays about Herbert-as-religious-poet, Herbert as a formal innovator: and the readers here are poets: T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, etc.
And here's a link to a Penguin collection of Herbert, also available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Complete-English-Poems-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140424555/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302623775&sr=1-1
Also, please plan on bringing your poems to the meeting (s). This will save the time it takes to make photocopies.
So, here's the Herbert Plan:
A) Schedule
••Monday, April 18th, 7 PM, Conference Room of the Warner Building (note changed location here): First George Herbert Meeting. Poems to be discussed: "Life," "The Flower," "The Temper (I)", and "The Pulley." We'll spend the most time (I think) on "Life," "The Flower," and "The Temper (I)." "The Pulley" we will read together out loud and then, on the meeting on the 25th, discuss within the context of an essay by Seamus Heany, which will be handed out on the 18th. The essay is called "The Redress of Poetry," and in it, Heany reads "The Pulley" in terms of an argument he makes about poetry as a form of "redress." We began our course in poetry back in early March 2011 with excerpts from this excellent essay.
••Monday, April 25th, 7 PM, Conference Room of the Warner Building: Second George Herbert Meeting. Poems to be discussed: "The Pulley" (again), "Artillery," "The Collar," and "Love (III)." We will try and get to all four. At this meeting we will also discuss an essay by Seamus Heany called "The Redress of Poetry," which will have been distributed at the meeting on the 18th. So please plan on making time to read that essay and the poems.
B) Herbert Website
Here is a website about George Herbert: http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herbert/ , which is very pleasingly organized...and scored!
C) POEMS
THE PULLEY
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.
Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,
Contract into a span.”
So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.
“For if I should,” said he,
“Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature;
So both should losers be.
“Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.”
The Flower
How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown,
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an hour;
Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
We say amiss
This or that is:
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
Oh that I once past changing were,
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
Many a spring I shoot up fair,
Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither;
Nor doth my flower
Want a spring shower,
My sins and I joining together.
But while I grow in a straight line,
Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own,
Thy anger comes, and I decline:
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone
Where all things burn,
When thou dost turn,
And the least frown of thine is shown?
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing. Oh, my only light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flowers that glide;
Which when we once can find and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us where to bide;
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.
LIFE
I made a posy, while the day ran by:
“Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie
My life within this band.”
But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away,
And withered in my hand.
My hand was next to them, and then my heart;
I took, without more thinking, in good part
Time’s gentle admonition;
Who did so sweetly death’s sad taste convey,
Making my mind to smell my fatal day,
Yet, sug’ring the suspicion.
Farewell dear flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit, while ye lived, for smell or ornament,
And after death for cures.
I follow straight without complaints or grief,
Since, if my scent be good, I care not if
It be as short as yours.
The Collar
I struck the board, and cried, No more.
I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the win, as large as store.
Shall I still be in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it: there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.
Is the year only lost to me?
Have I no bays to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? all basted?
All wasted?
Not so, my heart: but there is fruit,
And thou has hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
And be thy law
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
Away; take heed,
I will abroad.
Call in thy death’s head there: tie up thy fears.
He that forbears
To suit and serve his need
Deserves his load.
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child:
And I replied, My Lord.
The Temper (I)
How should I praise thee, Lord! How should my rhymes
Gladly engrave thy love in steel,
If what my soul doth feel sometimes,
My soul might ever feel!
Although there were some forty heav'ns, or more,
Sometimes I peer above them all;
Sometimes I hardly reach a score;
Sometimes to hell I fall.
O rack me not to such a vast extent;
Those distances belong to thee:
The world's too little for thy tent,
A grave too big for me.
Wilt thou meet arms with man, that thou dost stretch
A crumb of dust from heav'n to hell?
Will great God measure with a wretch?
Shall he thy stature spell?
O let me, when thy roof my soul hath hid,
O let me roost and nestle there:
Then of a sinner thou art rid,
And I of hope and fear.
Yet take thy way; for sure thy way is best:
Stretch or contract me thy poor debtor:
This is but tuning of my breast,
To make the music better.
Whether I fly with angels, fall with dust,
Thy hands made both, and I am there;
Thy power and love, my love and trust,
Make one place ev'rywhere.
Artillery
As I one evening sat before my cell,
Methought a star did shoot into my lap.
I rose and shook my clothes, as knowing well
That from small fires comes oft no small mishap;
When suddenly I heard one say,
Do as thou usest, disobey,
Expel good motions from thy breast,
Which have the face of fire, but end in rest.
I, who had heard of music in the spheres,
But not of speech in stars, began to muse;
But turning to my God, whose ministers
The stars and all things are: “If I refuse,
Dread Lord,” said I, “so oft my good,
Then I refuse not ev’n with blood
To wash away my stubborn thought;
For I will do or suffer what I ought.
“But I have also stars and shooters too,
Born where thy servants both artilleries use.
My tears and prayers night and day do woo
And work up to thee; yet thou dost refuse.
Not but I am (I must say still)
Much more obliged to do thy will
Than thou to grant mine; but because
Thy promise now hath ev’n set thee thy laws.
“Then we are shooters both, and thou dost deign
To enter combat with us, and contest
With thine own clay. But I would parley fain:
Shun not my arrows, and behold my breast.
Yet if thou shunnest, I am thine:
I must be so, if I am mine.
There is no articling with thee:
I am but finite, yet thine infinitely.”
LOVE (III)
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd any thing.
"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.