Wit and Metaphor in George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)" [by David Lehman]

Like John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, though not as flamboyant as the first or as metrically inventive as the second, George Herbert proved that devotional poetry can generate high intellectual excitement.

Born in Wales in 1593, Herbert distinguished himself at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was elected to Parliament twice. In 1630, a year after he married, Herbert took holy orders. He served as rector in Bemerton near Salisbury, delivering sermons and writing poems, for the rest of his short life. Before he died in 1633 he entrusted a gathering of his poems, The Temple, to a friend. The poems won an immediate audience.

Herbert is one of the so-called “metaphysical” poets, who rely on cunning wit and use elaborate, sometimes incongruous metaphors to explore complex themes. He has a poem, “The Pulley,” in which God pours all his pleasures on man except “rest.” Anyone who doubts that the lowly pun can perform sublime feats need only consider these two lines in which “rest” meaning “remainder” and “rest” meaning “repose” are entangled to their paradoxical enhancement: “Yet let him keep the rest, / But keep them with repining restlessness.”

Where Herbert is most obviously innovative is in his use of carmen figuratum – shaped or patterned poems. He has one in the shape of an altar and another, “Easter Wings,” that demands to be viewed as a pair of winged birds in flight. Herbert was also an inveterate compiler of proverbs. To him we owe that durable cliché: “His bark is worse than his bite.”

But Herbert is most dear to us because his poems suggest an intimacy of discourse between the poet and his creator.  Not for Herbert the attitude struck by Donne, who can begin a poem by telling off a heavenly body (“Busy old fool, unruly sun”). The speaker in Herbert’s poems is marked by an unforced humility – he may be the only poet in the body of English poetry who is believable not only when he addresses the divinity but when he transcribes the responses he gets.

Among my favorites is “Love (III),” the most admired of three Herbert poems with that title:

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.

The poem is the record of a dialogue. The key metaphor is the personification of “Love” at the door welcoming an invited but trepidatious guest to enter and dine. The guest is not the speaker exactly but one part of him, “my soul,” who bears the guilt “of dust and sin.” To have a body is to participate in human nature, universally understood as selfish and competitive. And so the soul, thus tarnished, tarries at the door.

Here we cannot help feeling that Love the host is not an abstraction in an allegorical parade of proper nouns.  No, “Love” as presented by Herbert is “quick-eyed,” confident (“drew nearer to me”), even romantic (“sweetly questioning”).

Is Herbert’s Love, then, female, a goddess like Athena? And is “Love” not simply “caritas,” or Christian “charity,” but something almost sensual?

The second stanza complicates matters further. The speaker confesses himself unworthy, an ingrate, but Love is infinitely patient.  To “I cannot look on thee,” Love responds, “Who made the eyes but I?” With the majestic pun of “eyes” and “I,” the answer is as irrefutable as the statements Job in the Bible hears when he complains of his lot– with the difference that it is difficult to picture the God of Job except as a fierce patriarchal authority whereas the Christian Love depicted here takes the sinner’s hand like a “dear” friend. .

          The would-be guest’s sense of guilt is not easily abated. Herbert – who elsewhere depicts himself as “A wonder tortur’d in the space / Betwixt this world and that of grace” -- fears he should enter not this house but a place where “shame” receives the punishment it “deserves.”

          Is the house, then, not the church but the divine afterlife? Do we stand at heaven’s gate? If so, is the poem as much about death as about love?

          The poem is resolved in its last four lines. The guest must be reminded that the God who speaks is capable of triple form and that in one of them, he is the son of God, who dies on the cross for humankind, accepting all the “blame.” The argument carries the day and the guest, in a fit of enthusiasm, volunteers to “serve” the Lord – as Herbert himself did as the rector of a church. The word “serve” is beautifully chosen, reviving the image of the dinner party, in which waiters serve guests. But, then, look how much is conveyed by the rhyme words alone of the last stanza.

          Herbert’s deity is an unfailingly good host – and here we cannot overlook the religious meaning of “host” as the body of Christ in the ritual of the Eucharist.

          Love says, in effect, eat me and be whole. In this poem of communion, Love defeats not sin but guilt. Love overlooks shame. Love is a feast and even the “unkind, ungrateful” may partake.

           I am proposing a way of reading “Love” that would help explain its appeal to the secular reader, whose enjoyment of the poem depends less on its structure of orthodox Christian belief than on its brilliance as verse. But let it also be noted that more than a few former atheists have found their way back to God’s good graces through George Herbert’s poetry.

Ed note: This article first appeared in The Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2014 under the headline "A Feast for the Guilt-Ridden Guest" and sub-hed "Exploring complex themes with cunning wit and elaborate metaphors in George Herbert’s ‘Love (III)." For other readings of great poems, click on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html

Comments

[Terence Winch]

A lucid and insightful reading of the poem. I haven't looked at Herbert's work in about 50 years, but liked it back then, and still do. (I'm also impressed by your astute grasp of the whole Christianity thing.)

[Jack Skelley]

David Lehman: No exaggeration that this explication of Herbert -- and the tenderness/rigor of the poem itself -- made me tear-up. Beautiful. I shall share.

[David Lehman]

I greatly appreciate your comments, Terence and Jack. It's enjoyable to revisit poems I have loved and to do my best to elucidate them. And appreciative comments keep me motivated.