Today’s Poem: Jordan (I)

George Herbert and the limited subject matter of the infinite

Sophie Gengembre Anderson, Shepherrd Piper, 1881 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Jordan (I)

by George Herbert

Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover’s loves?
Must all be veil’d, while he that reads, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing;
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for prime;
I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, my God, my King.
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As we’ve perhaps remarked before, T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), in his 1946 Sewanee Review essay “What Is Minor Poetry,” takes up the “very interesting case” of George Herbert (1593–1633). What is it about Herbert that makes him so “very interesting” — let alone, in the instance of “Jordan (I),” actually witty?

Eliot’s theme in this essay is that of the “anthologized poet,” the poet whose work many people know in the typical anthology’s presentation of poems like bite-sized tapas at a Spanish bar. Herbert, he says, might readily be dismissed as a minor poet on the basis of the eccentric small-plate works with which people are likely to be familiar as anthology pieces: “Easter Wings,” for example, or “Love (III).”

George Herbert (Wikimedia Commons)

Given only that exposure to Herbert, the reader may come away with a sense of him as a mildly striking religious oddity, with none of the dazzling range of his sophisticated contemporary, John Donne, let alone the suavity of a Robert Herrick. Eliot asserts that this perception is a mistake; to read the whole body of Herbert’s work in his great opus, The Temple, is to read the religious mind of an entire era. Even so, in some quarters, Herbert might present as a poet of narrow range, a poet obsessed with a limited subject matter, never mind that his subject happens to be (as Herbert believed, at any rate) the ineffable and infinite God.

And, says Herbert himself, in Today’s Poem, what about it? “Who says,” he protests at the poem’s opening, what makes a poem and what does not? In pentameter quintains, rhymed ababa, each stanza resolving on a tetrameter line, he asserts that truth itself, and not decorative artifice, “fictions . . . and false hair,” constitutes beauty. The simplest believer — “Shepherds are honest people,” after all — in concert with his own Good Shepherd, may yet be a singer. His “Jordan” of baptism is a truer, and therefore more beautiful, river than any fancifully “purling stream.” And his God is a subject, however restricted, to raise any verse, however “plainly” it speaks, to the level of the sublime.

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