Love

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!