[Gail White]

I'd like to share with the group a poem I discovered while looking through old college textbooks. I'd completely forgotten this one -- and perhaps I had to see a few gray hairs before I could appreciate it properly.

A few word definitions:
1) "harbingers" - servants sent ahead of a royal procession to reserve accommodations by chalking the doors of houses.
(Here, of course, white hairs).
2) "dispark" - turn out of a park, usually spoken of deer.
3) "I pass not" - I care not.

THE FORERUNNERS (George Herbert, 1593-1633)

The harbingers are come. See, see their mark;
White is their color, and behold my head.
But must they have my brain? Must they dispark
Those sparkling notions which therein were bred?
Must dullness turn me to a clod?
Yet have they left me, "Thou art still my God."

Good men ye be to leave me my best room,
Even all my heart, and what is lodged there;
I pass not, I, what of the rest become,
So "Thou art still my God" be out of fear.
He will be pleased with that ditty,
And if I please Him, I write fine and witty.

Farewell, sweet phrases, lovely metaphors.
But will ye leave me thus? When ye before
Of stews and brothels only knew the doors,
Then did I wash you with my tears, and more,
Brought you to church well-drest and clad:
My God must have my best, even all I had.

Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane,
Honey of roses, whither wilt thou fly?
Hath some fond lover 'ticed thee to thy bane?
And wilt thou leave the Church, and love a sty?
Fie! thou wilt soil thy broidered coat,
And hurt thyself and him that sings the note.

Let foolish lovers, if they will love dung,
With canvas, not with arras, clothe their shame;
Let Folly speak in her own native tongue.
True Beauty dwells on high; ours is a flame
But borrowed thence to light us thither.
Beauty and beauteous words should go together.

Yet if you go, I pass not; take your way.
For "Thou art still my God" is all that ye
Perhaps with more embellishment can say.
Go, birds of spring; let winter have his fee;
Let a bleak paleness chalk the door,
So all within be livelier than before.

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Gail

Thank you for posting this. George Herbert is one of my favourite poets - and one of the greatest exponents of traditional iambic metres and of rhymed stanzaic verse.

One of several remarkable aspects of his 1633 collection, The Temple, is that he seems to have invented a new stanzaic pattern for each poem, a stunning technical achievement

Back in December, I posted three poems by him in a thread on "heterometricity". Here is the link: http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...L/000156.html.

Superb!

Clive Watkins

[ewrgall]

Originally posted by Gail White:

A few word definitions:
1) "harbingers" - servants sent ahead of a royal procession to reserve accommodations by chalking the doors of houses. (Here, of course, white hairs) You are right in that "harbingers" were servants sent ahead to reserve accommodations but to the best of my knowledge they did not mark the doors of houses. In "The Phoenix and the Turtle" (see past thread on Musing On Mastery) Shakespeare uses the term in reference to a lawyer (lawyers were called in to write a will when it looked certain a man was getting ready to kick the bucket--lawyers were the harbingers of death). Doors were marked with chalk to indicate sickness within (red was the plauge---yellow sickness other than plauge). Herbert has to specifically identify the color of the chalk and what he is referring to (hair) telling me that white chalk had no particular meaning. Harbinger seems (by Shakespeares and Herberts time) to have picked up the poetic meaning of "forewarners of approaching death". Literaturally (pun) the allusion became the meaning of the word.

Herbert destroyed all his secular poetry and that is what he is talking about in the poem. He shall from now on only write religious poetry. He died of consumption, slowly over a period of years. He had a somewhat "wayward" youth (Herbert probably had a lower opinion of his behavior than his contemporaries had) and finally became an Anglican priest (to the surprise of nobody but himself--his vocation was obvious to everyone but him).

ewrgall

[Robert Swagman]

ewrgall

Thanks for the interpretation. Puts more feeling to the piece.

Jerry

[Robert J. Clawson]

Our present president's father, former president, George Herbert Walker Bush, was named after the poet under discussion in this thread.

[Nigel Holt]

Bob,

Both, it seems, eager to meet their maker.

N

[Roger Slater]

One of my very favorite poems, by Herbert or anyone else, is this one:



<FONT >

THE FLOWER


How fresh, O 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 shrivelled 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 love and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
and relish versing. O 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.


</></FONT f>

[hector]

The first two lines of The Forerunners are the Epigraph to the marvellous Sarabande on Attaining the Age of Seventy Seven in Hecht's The Darkness and the Light. I hadn't read Herbert for years, but ended up reading him by that route.

[Terese Coe]

First, Clive: the link you posted is dead. Or something. I wonder if it can be revived?

Next, I have a question about Herbert. I find the following poem as mysterious as it is mystical.

Love (III)

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 anything.

"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.

Question: Love and God are synonymous here, but that does not help to interpret the final four lines.

1. What is the answer to the question, "who bore the blame?" Himself? Only oneself is to blame for shame; someone said that. I may have answered my own question, but I'm curious to know what others think.

2. Since he feels he is to blame, I imagine, the speaker says he will serve.

3. The speaker is not allowed to serve, but must sit. A metaphysical poem which bypasses the Christian idea of service. Does anyone else feel the final line fades away, is not sufficient to the poem? Lends new meaning to "free love."

4. I suppose Herbert is referring to the magnanimousness and generosity of Love and God. Are there other interpretations? Calling all aficionados of GH!

Terese

[Jan D. Hodge]

Terese, I know you addressed this specifically to Clive; I hope you won't mind terribly if I offer an answer.

[quote]Originally posted by Terese Coe:
Love and God are synonymous here, but that does not help to interpret the final four lines.

1. What is the answer to the question, "who bore the blame?" Himself? Only oneself is to blame for shame; someone said that. I may have answered my own question, but I'm curious to know what others think.

The speaker in the poem--which not coincidentally is the final poem in The Temple, and the third poem entitled "Love"; hence the "Love(III)"--moves from separation to reconciliation, but only when he is able to overcome his own pride. He initially refuses the invitation because he feels unworthy, even though he is assured otherwise by "Love" [God]. When he finally does accept (L16), he does so on his own terms rather than God's, agreeing only to "serve" rather than to participate. "Love" is (fortunately) patient, but nonetheless insistent: "You <u>must</u> sit down . . ." Only in the poem's final line does the speaker accept the invitation on "Love's" terms.

The answer to your first question is: "I ["Love"/Christ] bore the blame"--the core of Christian theology: human beings are all sinners, but Christ died for their/our sins.

2. Since he feels he is to blame, I imagine, the speaker says he will serve.

Yes. That is, he still cannot believe himself worthy to accept the invitation to sit and eat. He is in a very real sense opposing his will (and judgment) to God's -- a sin of pride, and a rejection of God's gift through Christ.

3. The speaker is not allowed to serve, but must sit. A metaphysical poem which bypasses the Christian idea of service. Does anyone else feel the final line fades away, is not sufficient to the poem? Lends new meaning to "free love."

It doesn't so much "bypass" it as transcend it. Far from being a letdown, the final line to the poem (and the volume) is incredibly profound in its stark simplicity and final triumph of acceptance over ego. Hardly a "new" meaning to "free love" at all, it is the very essence of divine grace (and the heart of the Protestant Reformation of a church which Luther and others had come to see as corrupt precisely because it put a price tag on that divine love freely offered to those who were willing to accept it rather than trying to buy it).

4. I suppose Herbert is referring to the magnanimousness and generosity of Love and God. Are there other interpretations? Calling all aficionados of GH!

Yes. (But I suppose there are others who might read it some other way.)

A footnote: some of the language here (esp. LL3-5) is pretty explicitly sexual. Some are offended by this suggestion, but the use of the terms of secular for divine love and vice versa was common in that era (and others; cf. e.g. "Song of Songs"), as anyone familiar with Donne would recognize.

Cheers,
Jan