1 April 2008¶ Poetry Tuesday: Herbert's "Prayer (I)"

Prayer the Church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinners’ tower,
Reverséd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The Milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

Update: (April 2) I’ve reached some new conclusions since writing this and am working them in below…

I told my students that they should plan to spend at least as much time working on a short poem as they would a sudoku puzzle: you don’t read through a poem once and get what you need out of it. But that’s the difficulty, too, because I do read through it once and think that since I’ve discovered all the words there that I’m somehow finished. I have to remind myself that the words are not the poem: the words only communicate the poem. Man, that sounds so fluffy and new-agey. I hate poetry-speak almost as much as I hate poetry-voice.

Sometimes I find Herbert especially easy to dismiss.1 At skim-pace, he’s got only one note and it’s the same note that makes me sometimes look for excuses to skip out on church. I’ve heard this one before, George; it was in your last poem, too. There’s really no excuse for this thinking, not when there’s something so loopy as lines 5-8 of this poem. I mean: what? I’ll look at them one by one, adding italics where I want to add italics, because typography is fun:

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinners’ tower

Wait: is my goody-two-shoes Herbert somehow positioning prayer in opposition to God? It is a place of refuge and glory for the sinner? That makes no sense. That’s not prayer: that’s, um, not-prayer.

Updated thoughts: Thanks to a smart comment from a student, I have a couple of ideas about this line that I didn’t have before. Students: you rock!

Considering the engine as an object of violence, this line begins a major shift in tone in which the object of prayer becomes doubtful, angry, tense, and violent. In prayer, a Christian can complain to God, can rail against God, can shake his fist at heaven. Like the tower of Babel, it won’t help (it is futile because God is, well, All Mighty).

Reverséd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The thunder rolls out not from heaven but from beneath: it rolls out from underground, from Hell. And then prayer is the spear that kills Christ. Prayer hurts God: am I reading this correctly?

Updated thoughts: Thunder makes noise but doesn’t actually do anything. The bitter, angry, violent prayer from the previous line is, like thunder, bluster without any effectual force.

One student read the next phrase brilliantly: the spear was used to verify Christ’s death, and prayer, in similar fashion, might be used to verify God’s existence. Either way, it is a violent act that counters the nature of prayer described in the first four and last six lines.

This line now seems a lot cooler than it did last night.

The six-days world transposing in an hour,

This is one of those weird lines, sure. The creation is transposed — that is, re-figured, relocated, construed again — into an hour. Well, at least this isn’t undoing the creation. Instead, it is personalizing it, making it the matter of personal experience. The metaphor is pretty straightforward: my hour of prayer [has the power of or can feel like] the whole six-day creation. Big power, tiny package. Herbert is doing some good selling, here. But how does it connect to the earlier lines? It’s not yet clear.

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear,

To think about God’s power as a fearful power is uncontroversial: his terrible, swift sword and all that. But this tune isn’t God’s power (though that’s what I read when I do my skim-speed read, sadly), it’s my prayer. My prayer is music that is heard by all things and they fear it? Why should anything fear my prayer? What is so awful about my prayers?

Or are prayers — my prayers — a manifestation of “God’s breath in man returning to his birth” and that’s what’s so scary? Does that imply that all things, which hear the prayer, are the evil that fears righteousness? I am prayer, hear me roar.

I recognize that the first connotation of “sounding” in line 4 is in the survey sense, using the plumb-bob2 or throwing over the shell-studded line to scrape the bottom to gauge the makeup. In my mind, a deckhand on The Surprise calls out, “white sand and shell, sir!”

But the thunder and the music in the next long phrase invokes (evokes?) the aural quality of the sounding: it explores the depths of heav’n and earth and broadcasts them as well.

Who explores; who broadcasts? Now I notice it: I’m not in this poem at all. I, an offerer of prayer, one who prays, am conspicuously absent. The poem is about the noun prayer not the individual pray-er. That much is pretty obvious from the outset, but it is a shock to discover that I do not play the tune in line 8: I hear and fear it; I am lumped into the “all things.”

Am I? I can’t tell: there’s no verb to guide me along. I’m stuck unable to really tell. There seems to be movement — we do depart from the opposition to God in line 5 to “something understood” in line 14 — but without the verb I see it without feeling it. Herbert moves, the poem moves, but I do not. Or rather, I am not moved. (I’m getting back into poetry-speak again, aren’t I?)

I would love to love this poem. I would love to be able to say that it speaks to me in some deep personal way, but instead it just kinda lies there inert. A couple of lines shimmer a bit, but it doesn’t seem like the kind of magic that deserves to be widely anthologized. What am I missing here?

Updated thoughts: I see the poem in three parts in which Herbert models the flow of a prayer. It begins with a return: the banquet, God’s breath. When the orator3 begins to sound heaven and earth in line 4, the prayer becomes intense, dark, questioning. The orator questions, probes, doubts, aches. This is Jacob’s wrestle with God.

After fear (line 8), comes the hearts-and-flowers: softness, peace, joy, blah-blah. I see now that the juxtaposition of fear and softness isn’t accidental (duh). And that leads to the understanding in the poem’s conclusion. So there is movement in there after all. Dang, that’s subtle.

One of my students today (April 2) said that perhaps this also mirrored the prayerful life of the Christian: bright acceptance and banqueting of the (literal or figurative) child followed by some doubt and questioning, which finally resolves into a recognition and understanding. The “heaven in ordinary” line is particularly nice in this reading.

As often happens, my students say smart things that illuminate and sometimes reveal stuff I hadn’t discovered myself. And then there’s some kind of magic that unlocks only when I’m in front of a class and I’m suddenly much, much smarter than I am otherwise. I found things myself while I was teaching that I didn’t see in my first ten readings of the poem. Somehow being on-the-spot, feeling the pressure to say something smart and to be a not-idiot opens passageways in my brain that I become much less-idiot than I otherwise am.

Maybe I should teach my dissertation before I write it.

——

1 I know, Renaissance Girl: there’s no excuse for this. You have just lost half of your respect for me. I admit that I haven’t read nearly enough Herbert and I’m sure I’ll come to love him and all his devotional brethren. Someday. And you’ll have to excuse me just a teensy bit of dramatic license, hokay?

2 If they don’t call it a plumb bob anymore, they should be ashamed of themselves. I do not know who they refers to in this footnote (people who do not use the term “plumb bob”?), but they should beware of colorful disappearing terminology, just in case it really is disappearing, which it might not be doing at all.

3 If my Portuguese is acting as an accurate guide to the latinate roots to words, an orator should be literally, one who prays. (Orar: to pray)

Comment

  1. I wasn’t going to take you to task for not digging Herbert! You get to appreciate a poet by wrestling with him, which is what you’re doing here. Herbert is less showy than Donne, works in less obvious fireworks, and a lot of people find him bored. The genius of Herbert lies in part in his subtlety—that it requires the kind of picking apart that you’ve done here, which leads you to the realization that prayer is not, after all, an entity over which the pray-er has ownership. And since Herbert’s project is, in part, to undermine assertions of his own will, especially as it is expressed in the audacious act of speaking, that recognition is simultaneously humbling and harrowing.

    Really, Herbert takes more work than Donne, though it doesn’t appear so on the surface.

    — renaissance girl · Apr 2, 10:07 AM · #

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