Sitting down with Love

· Faith expressed beautifully ·

August 24, 2016 2 Comments
IMG_2513Love
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back.
Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.
A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungrateful? Ah, my deare,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

       —George Herbert

I had never read anything of his and asked Laurel who he was: “Love (III) is the most well known poem by George Herbert. He was a seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, a generation after John Donne. T. S. Eliot brought both Donne and Herbert back to prominence. In 1971, while I was visiting England (on $5.00 a day), I made a little pilgrimage from London down to Salisbury, and from there to Herbert’s little stone church in nearby Bemerton. Unlike Donne, Herbert wrote only religious poems, and arranged them beautifully in his book, The Temple. Ralph Vaughn Williams’s Five Mystical Songs is from The Temple. George Herbert has been my favorite poet since my teens.”

Laurel Hicks, you are making my day!

IMG_0995

August 25, 2016

friderikeheuer@gmail.com

2 Comments

  1. Reply

    Martha Ullman West

    August 24, 2016

    Like Laurel, I am deeply fond of the poems of George Herbert, but I’d like to expand a bit on her statement about T.S. Eliot bringing him and John Donne, whose work I love even more, back to prominence. I’m quite sure the course I took at Barnard College in 1957 in Milton and Seventeenth Century poets had been offered since the founding of the college. Milton, I must admit, made me feel like Eliot’s “patient etherised upon a table,” but Herbert and Donne fed my soul.
    Never mind, what matters is the wonderful pairing of the lovely photograph of the chairs and Herbert’s tribute to agape.

  2. Reply

    Philip Bowser

    August 24, 2016

    Powerful combination of ingredients, proving text and imagery can marry.

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