George Herbert, "Prayer (I)" (25th Friend)

Today, we’ll meet Fr. George Herbert. Our friend was born in 1593, and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He served briefly in Parliament (1624-5), but retired from public life in 1626, due to health problems that plagued him for the rest of his life. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1630.

I’ve only looked up a very broad overview of Fr. Herbert’s life, but Mario A. Di Cesare, editor of George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets (my primary source for this post), says that Izaak Watson’s 1670 biography, “recounts many edifying tales which, if not strictly true, probably should be,” which certainly piques my interest in that book.

In any case, he’s best known for his collection of poems, The Temple, published shortly after his death in 1633. This book was well regarded in its day, and though his reputation has had its ups and downs over the centuries, his admirers include no lesser poets than S. T. Coleridge, W. H. Auden, and T. S. Eliot, perhaps among other writers who favour using their first two initials. I wouldn’t say that he’s a personal favourite poet of mine, but I am quite glad to have made his acquaintance because his work is truly excellent, enough so that, though all of his work is on religious themes, you don’t necessarily need to be a Christian to get something out of these poems.

The poem I decided to memorise is “Prayer (I).”

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s 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, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed 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 drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

Now, this is a sonnet, and often that means a poem will be relatively easy to memorise. After all, a regular metre and rhyme scheme are great aids to memorisation, and sonnets aren’t particularly long. However, the other half of how easy a poem is comes down to how logical the development is. This entire sonnet is one long sentence, almost all of which is a series of images and metaphors.

Despite the difficulty, though, I do enjoy this poem, precisely because of those images. First, there’s a motif of food and nourishment throughout in “banquet,” “manna,” “spices,” possibly “ordinary” since, according to Di Cesare, the term could refer to daily meals. “Ordinary” can also refer to daily prayers used in liturgy or the Divine Office (or the Book of Common Prayer, since Fr. Herbert was an Anglican).

The most striking image here, and one of the most striking I’ve read in any poem, is the description of prayer as “Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r.” In Scripture, we are urged to pray ceaselessly, as in the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18, but this aggressive image is far more aggressive than that. I suppose we do often hear the phrase “storming heaven with prayer,” but that particular saying is a cliché and so doesn’t carry a lot of weight anymore. When I hear the phrase “sinner’s tower,” my first thought is the Tower of Babel. What I think Fr. Herbert is getting at is the audacity of prayer in asking anything of God - without, of course, going too far down this road. This is, again, alongside images of care and nourishment.