Today’s Poem: Love (III)

George Herbert and the vast scope of divine intimacy

Foot-Washing (detail), Bernhard Strigel, c. 1520 (Wikimedia Commons)

In a 1946 Sewanee Review essay, “What Is Minor Poetry,” T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) takes up the “very interesting” case of George Herbert (1593–1633). The general theme of Eliot’s essay is that of the anthologized poet, the poet whose work people chiefly know in the context of a selected and limited presentation, like the small-bite items that make up a tapas-bar menu. But what is it about Herbert in particular that makes him, in Eliot’s view, so very “interesting?”

Herbert, Eliot says, might too easily be dismissed as a minor poet on the basis of the eccentric small-plate offerings of his work which anthology readers are likely to know. “Easter Wings,” for example, with its odd pattern-poem formatting, is the sort of poem a reader might run his or her eyes over, attracted by its shape on the page, then — not having read it that carefully — quickly forget. Given only that exposure to Herbert, one might well come away with a sense of him as a mildly striking religious oddity, with none of the suavity of, say, his contemporary Robert Herrick (1591–1674). But this is a mistake, says Eliot.

Chiefly the mistake lies in not considering Herbert’s poetry as a whole. His complete body of work, collected as The Temple and published following his death in 1633, represents, as Eliot puts it, “a continued religious meditation within an intellectual framework,” and an articulation of the religious thought of an entire age. Unlike his own contemporary, the poet and critic Yvor Winters (1900–1968), Eliot — perhaps not surprisingly, given his Christian commitment, firmly established by 1946 — does not hold this articulation of religious thought to be marked by “a cloying and almost infantile pietism.” Rather, he believes that the whole, greater than the sum of its parts, reflects a coherent, important, large poetic vision. 

George Herbert, by Robert White, 1674 (Wikimedia Commons)

But what about those parts? Read with attention, any single poem of Herbert’s feels inseparable from that large, coherent vision. That these poems, such as “Love (III),” are often small and intimate in their scale should not, and does not, diminish their scope. Even if we entertain the idea of God as only an idea, can that idea ever be small? “Love (III),” in three ababcc stanzas, with its metrical shifts from pentameter to trimeter, enacts a dramatic dialogue between a penitent soul and God, figured as “Love” and presented as the host at a very select banquet.

In fact, the poem’s speaker appears to be the only guest — and a reluctant guest at that, feeling himself to be unworthy. The poem’s drama centers on this guest’s attempts to reject the hospitality offered him. In each stanza, the host parries his objections with a resolute tenderness, until at last, in the final line, the guest surrenders and accepts this divine self-giving. The whole scene is, again, intensely eccentric, intensely personal, and intensely intimate. Yet, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, the carriage holds but just themselves — and all eternity. In its very smallness, the vision is vast. 

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Love (III)

by George Herbert

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
                              Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
                             From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                             If I lacked any thing.

 A guest, I answered, 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 marred 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.

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