England's Antiphon

A GRACE FOR A CHILD

  Here a little child I stand,  Heaving up my either hand;  Cold as paddocks though they be, frogs.  Here I lift them up to thee,  For a benison to fall  On our meat, and on us all. Amen.

I shall now give two or three of his longer poems, which are not long, and then a few of his short ones. The best known is the following, but it is not so well known that I must therefore omit it.

HIS LITANY TO THE HOLY SPIRIT

  In the hour of my distress,  When temptations me oppress,  And when I my sins confess,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When I lie within my bed,  Sick in heart, and sick in head,  And with doubts discomforted,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When the house doth sigh and weep,  And the world is drowned in sleep,  Yet mine eyes the watch do keep,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When the artless doctor sees without skill.  No one hope, but of his fees,  And his skill runs on the lees,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When his potion and his pill,  His or none or little skill,  Meet for nothing but to kill,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When the passing-bell doth toll,  And the furies in a shoal  Come to fright a parting soul,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When the tapers now burn blue,  And the comforters are few,  And that number more than true,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When the priest his last hath prayed,  And I nod to what is said,  'Cause my speech is now decayed,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When God knows I'm tossed about,  Either with despair or doubt,  Yet, before the glass be out,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When the tempter me pursu'th  With the sins of all my youth,  And half damns me with untruth,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When the flames and hellish cries  Fright mine ears and fright mine eyes,  And all terrors me surprise,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.  When the judgment is revealed,  And that opened which was sealed;  When to thee I have appealed,    Sweet Spirit, comfort me.

THE WHITE ISLAND, OR PLACE OF THE BLEST

  In this world, the Isle of Dreams,  While we sit by sorrow's streams,  Tears and terrors are our themes,    Reciting;  But when once from hence we fly,  More and more approaching nigh  Unto young eternity,    Uniting;  In that whiter island, where  Things are evermore sincere;  Candour here and lustre there,    Delighting:  There no monstrous fancies shall  Out of hell an horror call,  To create, or cause at all,    Affrighting.  There, in calm and cooling sleep  We our eyes shall never steep,  But eternal watch shall keep,    Attending  Pleasures such as shall pursue  Me immortalized and you;  And fresh joys, as never too    Have ending.

TO DEATH

  Thou bid'st me come away;  And I'll no longer stay  Than for to shed some tears  For faults of former years;  And to repent some crimes  Done in the present times;  And next, to take a bit  Of bread, and wine with it;  To don my robes of love,  Fit for the place above;  To gird my loins about  With charity throughout,  And so to travel hence  With feet of innocence:  These done, I'll only cry,  "God, mercy!" and so die.

ETERNITY

  O years and age, farewell!    Behold I go    Where I do know  Infinity to dwell.  And these mine eyes shall see    All times, how they    Are lost i' th' sea  Of vast eternity,  Where never moon shall sway    The stars; but she    And night shall be  Drowned in one endless day.

THE GOODNESS OF HIS GOD

  When winds and seas do rage,    And threaten to undo me,  Thou dost their wrath assuage,    If I but call unto thee.  A mighty storm last night    Did seek my soul to swallow;  But by the peep of light    A gentle calm did follow.  What need I then despair    Though ills stand round about me;  Since mischiefs neither dare    To bark or bite without thee?

TO GOD

  Lord, I am like to mistletoe,  Which has no root, and cannot grow  Or prosper, but by that same tree  It clings about: so I by thee.  What need I then to fear at all  So long as I about thee crawl?  But if that tree should fall and die,  Tumble shall heaven, and down will I.

Here are now a few chosen from many that—to borrow a term from Crashaw—might be called

DIVINE EPIGRAMS

  God, when he's angry here with any one,  His wrath is free from perturbation;  And when we think his looks are sour and grim,  The alteration is in us, not him.* * * * *  God can't be wrathful; but we may conclude  Wrathful he may be by similitude:  God's wrathful said to be when he doth do  That without wrath, which wrath doth force us to.* * * * *  'Tis hard to find God; but to comprehend  Him as he is, is labour without end.* * * * *  God's rod doth watch while men do sleep, and then  The rod doth sleep while vigilant are men.* * * * *  A man's trangression God does then remit,  When man he makes a penitent for it.* * * * *  God, when he takes my goods and chattels hence,  Gives me a portion, giving patience:  What is in God is God: if so it be  He patience gives, he gives himself to me.* * * * *  Humble we must be, if to heaven we go;  High is the roof there, but the gate is low.* * * * *  God who's in heaven, will hear from thence,  If not to the sound, yet to the sense.* * * * *  The same who crowns the conqueror, will be  A coadjutor in the agony.* * * * *  God is so potent, as his power can that.  Draw out of bad a sovereign good to man.* * * * *  Paradise is, as from the learn'd I gather,  A choir of blest souls circling in the Father.* * * * *  Heaven is not given for our good works here;  Yet it is given to the labourer.* * * * *

One more for the sake of Martha, smiled at by so many because they are incapable either of her blame or her sister's praise.

  The repetition of the name, made known  No other than Christ's full affection.

And so farewell to the very lovable Robert Herrick.

Francis Quarles was born in 1592. I have not much to say about him, popular as he was in his own day, for a large portion of his writing takes the shape of satire, which I consider only an active form of negation. I doubt much if mere opposition to the false is of any benefit. Convince a man by argument that the thing he has been taught is false, and you leave his house empty, swept, and garnished; but the expulsion of the falsehood is no protection against its re-entrance in another mask, with seven worse than itself in its company. The right effort of the teacher is to give the positive—to present, as he may, the vision of reality, for the perception of which, and not for the discovery of falsehood, is man created. This will not only cast out the demon, but so people the house that he will not dare return. If a man might disprove all the untruths in creation, he would hardly be a hair's breadth nearer the end of his own making. It is better to hold honestly one fragment of truth in the midst of immeasurable error, than to sit alone, if that were possible, in the midst of an absolute vision, clear as the hyaline, but only repellent of falsehood, not receptive of truth. It is the positive by which a man shall live. Truth is his life. The refusal of the false is not the reception of the true. A man may deny himself into a spiritual lethargy, without denying one truth, simply by spending his strength for that which is not bread, until he has none left wherewith to search for the truth, which alone can feed him. Only when subjected to the positive does the negative find its true vocation.

I am jealous of the living force cast into the slough of satire. No doubt, either indignant or loving rebuke has its end and does its work, but I fear that wit, while rousing the admiration of the spiteful or the like witty, comes in only to destroy its dignity. At the same time, I am not sure whether there might not be such a judicious combination of the elements as to render my remarks inapplicable.

At all events, poetry favours the positive, and from the Emblems named of Quarles I shall choose one in which it fully predominates. There is something in it remarkably fine.

PHOSPHOR, BRING THE DAY

  Will't ne'er be morning? Will that promised light  Ne'er break, and clear those clouds of night?      Sweet Phosphor, bring the day,          Whose conquering ray  May chase these fogs: sweet Phosphor, bring the day.  How long, how long shall these benighted eyes    Languish in shades, like feeble flies  Expecting spring? How long shall darkness soil    The face of earth, and thus beguile  Our souls of sprightful action? When, when will day    Begin to dawn, whose new-born ray  May gild the weathercocks of our devotion,    And give our unsouled souls new motion?        Sweet Phosphor, bring the day:            The light will fray  These horrid mists: sweet Phosphor, bring the day.* * * * *  Let those whose eyes, like owls, abhor the light—    Let those have night that love the night:      Sweet Phosphor, bring the day.        How sad delay  Afflicts dull hopes! Sweet Phosphor, bring the day.  Alas! my light-in-vain-expecting eyes    Can find no objects but what rise  From this poor mortal blaze, a dying spark    Of Vulcan's forge, whose flames are dark,—  A dangerous, dull, blue-burning light,    As melancholy as the night:  Here's all the suns that glister in the sphere    Of earth: Ah me! what comfort's here!      Sweet Phosphor, bring the day.        Haste, haste away  Heaven's loitering lamp: sweet Phosphor, bring the day.  Blow, Ignorance. O thou, whose idle knee    Rocks earth into a lethargy,  And with thy sooty fingers hast benight    The world's fair cheeks, blow, blow thy spite;  Since thou hast puffed our greater taper, do    Puff on, and out the lesser too.  If e'er that breath-exiled flame return,    Thou hast not blown as it will burn.      Sweet Phosphor, bring the day:        Light will repay  The wrongs of night: sweet Phosphor, bring the day.

With honoured, thrice honoured George Herbert waiting at the door, I cannot ask Francis Quarles to remain longer: I can part with him without regret, worthy man and fair poet as he is.

CHAPTER XIII

GEORGE HERBERT.

But, with my hand on the lock, I shrink from opening the door. Here comes a poet indeed! and how am I to show him due honour? With his book humbly, doubtfully offered, with the ashes of the poems of his youth fluttering in the wind of his priestly garments, he crosses the threshold. Or rather, for I had forgotten the symbol of my book, let us all go from our chapel to the choir, and humbly ask him to sing that he may make us worthy of his song.

In George Herbert there is poetry enough and to spare: it is the household bread of his being. If I begin with that which first in the nature of things ought to be demanded of a poet, namely, Truth, Revelation—George Herbert offers us measure pressed down and running over. But let me speak first of that which first in time or order of appearance we demand of a poet, namely music. For inasmuch as verse is for the ear, not for the eye, we demand a good hearing first. Let no one undervalue it. The heart of poetry is indeed truth, but its garments are music, and the garments come first in the process of revelation. The music of a poem is its meaning in sound as distinguished from word—its meaning in solution, as it were, uncrystallized by articulation. The music goes before the fuller revelation, preparing its way. The sound of a verse is the harbinger of the truth contained therein. If it be a right poem, this will be true. Herein Herbert excels. It will be found impossible to separate the music of his words from the music of the thought which takes shape in their sound.

  I got me flowers to strow thy way,    I got me boughs off many a tree;  But thou wast up by break of day,    And brought'st thy sweets along with thee.

And the gift it enwraps at once and reveals is, I have said, truth of the deepest. Hear this song of divine service. In every song he sings a spiritual fact will be found its fundamental life, although I may quote this or that merely to illustrate some peculiarity of mode.

The Elixir was an imagined liquid sought by the old physical investigators, in order that by its means they might turn every common metal into gold, a pursuit not quite so absurd as it has since appeared. They called this something, when regarded as a solid, the Philosopher's Stone. In the poem it is also called a tincture.

THE ELIXIR

  Teach me, my God and King,    In all things thee to see;  And what I do in anything,    To do it as for thee;  Not rudely, as a beast,    To run into an action;  But still to make thee prepossest,    And give it his perfection. its.  A man that looks on glass,    On it may stay his eye;  Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass,    And then the heaven spy.  All may of thee partake:    Nothing can be so mean,  Which with his tincture—for thy sake– its.    Will not grow bright and clean.  A servant with this clause    Makes drudgery divine:  Who sweeps a room as for thy laws,    Makes that and the action fine.  This is the famous stone    That turneth all to gold;  For that which God doth touch and own    Cannot for less be told.

With a conscience tender as a child's, almost diseased in its tenderness, and a heart loving as a woman's, his intellect is none the less powerful. Its movements are as the sword-play of an alert, poised, well-knit, strong-wristed fencer with the rapier, in which the skill impresses one more than the force, while without the force the skill would be valueless, even hurtful, to its possessor. There is a graceful humour with it occasionally, even in his most serious poems adding much to their charm. To illustrate all this, take the following, the title of which means The Retort.

THE QUIP

  The merry World did on a day    With his train-bands and mates agree  To meet together where I lay,    And all in sport to jeer at me.  First Beauty crept into a rose;    Which when I plucked not—"Sir," said she,  "Tell me, I pray, whose hands are those?"98    But thou shall answer, Lord, for me.  Then Money came, and, chinking still—    "What tune is this, poor man?" said he:  "I heard in music you had skill."    But thou shall answer, Lord, for me.  Then came brave Glory puffing by    In silks that whistled—who but he?  He scarce allowed me half an eye;    But thou shall answer, Lord, for me.  Then came quick Wit-and-Conversation,    And he would needs a comfort be,  And, to be short, make an oration:    But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.  Yet when the hour of thy design    To answer these fine things, shall come,  Speak not at large—say I am thine;    And then they have their answer home.

Here is another instance of his humour. It is the first stanza of a poem to Death. He is glorying over Death as personified in a skeleton.

  Death, thou wast once an uncouth, hideous thing—          Nothing but bones,        The sad effect of sadder groans:  Thy mouth was open, but thou couldst not sing.

No writer before him has shown such a love to God, such a childlike confidence in him. The love is like the love of those whose verses came first in my volume. But the nation had learned to think more, and new difficulties had consequently arisen. These, again, had to be undermined by deeper thought, and the discovery of yet deeper truth had been the reward. Hence, the love itself, if it had not strengthened, had at least grown deeper. And George Herbert had had difficulty enough in himself; for, born of high family, by nature fitted to shine in that society where elegance of mind, person, carriage, and utterance is most appreciated, and having indeed enjoyed something of the life of a courtier, he had forsaken all in obedience to the voice of his higher nature. Hence the struggle between his tastes and his duties would come and come again, augmented probably by such austere notions as every conscientious man must entertain in proportion to his inability to find God in that in which he might find him. From this inability, inseparable in its varying degrees from the very nature of growth, springs all the asceticism of good men, whose love to God will be the greater as their growing insight reveals him in his world, and their growing faith approaches to the giving of thanks in everything.

When we have discovered the truth that whatsoever is not of faith is sin, the way to meet it is not to forsake the human law, but so to obey it as to thank God for it. To leave the world and go into the desert is not thus to give thanks: it may have been the only way for this or that man, in his blameless blindness, to take. The divine mind of George Herbert, however, was in the main bent upon discovering God everywhere.

The poem I give next, powerfully sets forth the struggle between liking and duty of which I have spoken. It is at the same time an instance of wonderful art in construction, all the force of the germinal thought kept in reserve, to burst forth at the last. He calls it—meaning by the word, God's Restraint—

THE COLLAR

  I struck the board, and cried "No more!—                I will abroad.    What! shall I ever sigh and pine?  My lines and life are free—free as the road,    Loose as the wind, as large as store.            Shall I be still in suit?    Have I no harvest but a thorn    To let me blood, and not restore    What I have lost with cordial fruit?            Sure there was wine  Before my sighs did dry it! There was corn          Before my tears did drown it!    Is the year only lost to me?          Have I no bays to crown it?  No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?                All wasted?    Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,                And thou hast hands.    Recover all thy sigh-blown age  On double pleasures. Leave thy cold dispute  Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,                  Thy rope of sands,  Which petty thoughts have made—and made to thee    Good cable, to enforce and draw,                  And be thy law,    While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.                Away! Take heed—                I will abroad.  Call in thy death's-head there. Tie up thy fears.                He that forbears            To suit and serve his need,                Deserves his load."  But as I raved, and grew more fierce and wild                At every word,      Methought I heard one calling "Child!"          And I replied, "My Lord!"

Coming now to speak of his art, let me say something first about his use of homeliest imagery for highest thought. This, I think, is in itself enough to class him with the highest kind of poets. If my reader will refer to The Elixir, he will see an instance in the third stanza, "You may look at the glass, or at the sky:" "You may regard your action only, or that action as the will of God." Again, let him listen to the pathos and simplicity of this one stanza, from a poem he calls The Flower. He has been in trouble; his times have been evil; he has felt a spiritual old age creeping upon him; but he is once more awake.

  And now in age99 I bud again;  After so many deaths I live 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!

Again:

  Some may dream merrily, but when they wake    They dress themselves and come to thee.

He has an exquisite feeling of lyrical art. Not only does he keep to one idea in it, but he finishes the poem like a cameo. Here is an instance wherein he outdoes the elaboration of a Norman trouvère; for not merely does each line in each stanza end with the same sound as the corresponding line in every other stanza, but it ends with the very same word. I shall hardly care to defend this if my reader chooses to call it a whim; but I do say that a large degree of the peculiar musical effect of the poem—subservient to the thought, keeping it dimly chiming in the head until it breaks out clear and triumphant like a silver bell in the last—is owing to this use of the same column of words at the line-ends of every stanza. Let him who doubts it, read the poem aloud.

AARON

        Holiness on the head;    Light and perfections on the breast;  Harmonious bells below, raising the dead,    To lead them unto life and rest—        Thus are true Aarons drest.        Profaneness in my head;    Defects and darkness in my breast;  A noise of passions ringing me for dead    Unto a place where is no rest—        Poor priest, thus am I drest!        Only another head    I have, another heart and breast,  Another music, making live, not dead,    Without whom I could have no rest—        In him I am well drest.        Christ is my only head,    My alone only heart and breast,  My only music, striking me even dead,    That to the old man I may rest,        And be in him new drest.        So, holy in my head,    Perfect and light in my dear breast,  My doctrine turned by Christ, who is not dead,    But lives in me while I do rest—        Come, people: Aaron's drest.

Note the flow and the ebb of the lines of each stanza—from six to eight to ten syllables, and back through eight to six, the number of stanzas corresponding to the number of lines in each; only the poem itself begins with the ebb, and ends with a full spring-flow of energy. Note also the perfect antithesis in their parts between the first and second stanzas, and how the last line of the poem clenches the whole in revealing its idea—that for the sake of which it was written. In a word, note the unity.

Born in 1593, notwithstanding his exquisite art, he could not escape being influenced by the faulty tendencies of his age, borne in upon his youth by the example of his mother's friend, Dr. Donne. A man must be a giant like Shakspere or Milton to cast off his age's faults. Indeed no man has more of the "quips and cranks and wanton wiles" of the poetic spirit of his time than George Herbert, but with this difference from the rest of Dr. Donne's school, that such is the indwelling potency that it causes even these to shine with a radiance such that we wish them still to burn and not be consumed. His muse is seldom other than graceful, even when her motions are grotesque, and he is always a gentleman, which cannot be said of his master. We could not bear to part with his most fantastic oddities, they are so interpenetrated with his genius as well as his art.

In relation to the use he makes of these faulty forms, and to show that even herein he has exercised a refraining judgment, though indeed fancying he has quite discarded in only somewhat reforming it, I recommend the study of two poems, each of which he calls Jordan, though why I have not yet with certainty discovered.

It is possible that not many of his readers have observed the following instances of the freakish in his rhyming art, which however result well. When I say so, I would not be supposed to approve of the freak, but only to acknowledge the success of the poet in his immediate intent. They are related to a certain tendency to mechanical contrivance not seldom associated with a love of art: it is art operating in the physical understanding. In the poem called Home, every stanza is perfectly finished till the last: in it, with an access of art or artfulness, he destroys the rhyme. I shall not quarrel with my reader if he calls it the latter, and regards it as art run to seed. And yet—and yet—I confess I have a latent liking for the trick. I shall give one or two stanzas out of the rather long poem, to lead up to the change in the last.

  Come, Lord; my head doth burn, my heart is sick,

    While thou dost ever, ever stay;  Thy long deferrings wound me to the quick;    My spirit gaspeth night and day.        O show thyself to me,        Or take me up to thee.  Nothing but drought and dearth, but bush and brake,    Which way soe'er I look I see:  Some may dream merrily, but when they wake    They dress themselves and come to thee.        O show thyself to me,        Or take me up to thee.  Come, dearest Lord, pass not this holy season,    My flesh and bones and joints do pray;  And even my verse, when by the rhyme and reason    The word is stay,100 says ever come.        O show thyself to me,        Or take me up to thee.

Balancing this, my second instance is of the converse. In all the stanzas but the last, the last line in each hangs unrhymed: in the last the rhyming is fulfilled. The poem is called Denial. I give only a part of it.