Herbert and Modern Poetry: A Response

Abstract

ions — Anger, Jealousy, Love, Justice, and so on. I said to him, Oh, just like George Herbert! Really? he said, I've never got around to reading Herbert. But he had re-invented Herbert's notion, and has since written those poems. The Herbert of today would chew the cud of past expression and story; nothing pleased Herbert more than ruminating on something he had read — an adage, a story, a parable: My I read this day, he begins, and tells us what he read (Affliction [V]); or he re-does the topic of the happy man in Constancie — Who is the honest man? Or he interprets inadvertent words of his own: when he exclaims, O God, he says, By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief (Affliction [III]). One misses this sense of re-interpretation of a past story or word in some contemporary poets; but, as Professor Sacks points out, many others, Bidart and Graham and Gluck among them, reinterpret Augustine or Greek myth, Christian matins or the School of Athens, in order to attain, like Herbert, the transpersonal. Our Herbert of today would be above all musical in Herbert's way, which is almost always the way of seduction. Herbert is often ironic in his thematics (as in the contemplation of the deceived self by the enlightened self in Affliction [I]) but he is not ironic in his music: in Affliction (J) the deceived self has as sweet as — sometimes sweeter than — the of the enlightened self. Even Herbert's sternest moments have a sonic lilt: Who would be more, / Herbert and Modern Poetry: A Response87 Swelling through store, / Forfeit their paradise by their pride (The Flower). This is of course Herbert's greatest charm of style, as it is Merrill's. Herbert's greatest charm of substance — and here I return to both Professor Summers' and Professor Sacks's insistence on thematic seriousness — is the seriousness with which he regards moral effort, the effort to be one's own best self. That effort was immensely difficult for him because of his exhaustions and illnesses, and I wonder if our present-day Herbert would not have to be someone with a wasting disease or a chronic illness. Herbert's tuberculosis was probably contracted fairly early, and his consequent mental and physical frustrations are a major force in the poetry. Of course, such frustrations would only be felt by one with the highest conception of a life striving toward saintliness, a saintliness originally conceived by Herbert as a parallel case to aesthetic concord. Herbert's greatest aesthetic leap, as Joyce Brewster in her unpublished Yale dissertation (The Music of George Herbert's 'Temple' [1973]) showed us, was to recognize the aesthetic possibilities of discord, that groans themselves could be music for a king. Our present-day Herbert would admix discord with concord, as in that tantalizing move, familiar in The Temple, by which a poem of anger slows into a sudden peace. The amplitude of the conceivable moral self in Herbert is his sternest attraction: he believed in the perfectibility (with God's help) of the life. Finally, the Herbert of today would be intimate, addressing the great as warmly and tenderly as a member of his or her own family. The contemporary poet who comes nearest to this inter-human tenderness is, to my mind, Allen Ginsberg, whose youthful socialism and later Buddhism are leveling social forces serving the same tonal ends as Herbert's Christ-centered doctrine. And the modern poet who conceives of moral perfectibility humanly voiced is for me the Berryman of the Dream Songs, where Henry's unnamed fellow endman — reminding Henry of an unarguable realm of law and value — is none other than Herbert's dialogue-Christ in blackface: Tween what we see, what be, / is blinds. Them blinds' on fire (#64). Yet of all the modern American poets, the one who seems to me most to resemble Herbert is Wallace Stevens. This resemblance, though I feel it deeply, is hard for me to articulate, even to myself, since it does not appear at the levels of comparability one sees in Merrill or Bishop or Gluck; there are no overt echoes, no asserted