POEM OF THE WEEK

What is prayer? Here George Herbert gives us 27 magnificent answers in 14 lines. A lesser poet would have come up with “reversed thunder” and taken the rest of the day off. The torrent of clashing-yet-complementary metaphors is the point; he is describing the indescribable.

Some of his images prompt a double take. Prayer as a weighted plumb line sounding the depths of heaven and Earth? Sure, OK – but isn’t there something faintly outrageous about calling it a siege-engine against God? It’s the kind of daring metaphor associated with Herbert’s fellow 17th-century metaphysical poets, such as John Donne. And yet, “In Donne thought seems in control of feeling, and in Herbert feeling seems in control of thought,” as T S Eliot once wrote. For him, Donne offered “wit”, while Herbert offered “the kind of poetry which [...] may be called magical.” Eliot saw magic in this poem’s closing couplet (those famous final words, pinched for the title of a Radio 4 programme). For me, it’s there too in the startling simplicity of the ninth line – the sonnet’s traditional volta, or turning point – a calm eye in the storm of ingenious metaphors, complexity suddenly giving way to “peace, and joy, and love, and bliss”.

Born in 1593, Herbert studied and taught at Trinity College, Cambridge, and served (like his father) as an MP. In 1630 he became a priest for the marvellously named parish of Fugglestone-cum-Bemerton, in darkest Wiltshire. He published a book of tips for clergymen and an anthology of 1,000 Outlandish Proverbs, but it was only when dying of consumption that he decided to print his poems. The story goes that Herbert sent a friend his sole collection, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, instructing him:

“[If ] it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul, let it be made publick: if not, let him burn it: for I and it, are less than the least of God’s mercies.” It was “made publick” in 1633, the year of his death, at just 39.

Tristram Fane Saunders