This week’s analysis reflects on Christmas, devotional poetry, and the particular contribution of George Herbert to this genre, whose work informed the composition of last week’s poem, “Joy”:
Joy conquered? No. She is not vincible.
Crush her as fruit-in-fist clenched: juice pours out.
Pin her to a shame-wrought tree: forests rise
To bear the glory, adorned with festive light.
Death and Sorrow met in the fouling place
And schemed how best to catch Joy on her way.
“Suppose we trick and trap her in a tomb?”
And so they sought, inviting Joy to dwell
First in a womb, but she found it spacious
And hospitable. Then Sorrow fixed a trough
As Joy’s first bed to make a meal of her,
But Joy laughed and shared herself with all
As bread and wine transposed from hand to hand.
Then Death, impatient, led Joy to his house
And sealed the stony door. A gracious guest,
Joy tasted full the meal and company,
But as the hour grew late, politely bid
Her host “good morn” and lightly turned the key,
Greeting the gardener with a brighter smile,
Since Dawn was rising mirthful in the east.
This piece was inspired by the title of a sermon delivered at my church – “Temporary Sorrow, Invincible Joy” – which brought to mind the Latin vinco, vincere, meaning “to conquer”. The first four lines were hastily scrawled during the service, after which the rest of the poem, which launches into a narrative explanation of the opening, came to life at home.
What sort of thing is Joy? Emotion? Yes, but as the poem suggests (building on C.S. Lewis’ reflection in Surprised By Joy), Joy also appears to be a person toward whom our whole life leads. It is both satisfaction and longing – true happiness which never ceases to satisfy without consuming the craving.
This paradox is described in two metaphors in the opening: attempts to crush joy produce wine; attempts to fix it in place cause it to spread. Both, of course, are allusions to Christ (communion and cross).
The rest of the poem participates in the tradition of devotional poetry in which an abstract noun is personified, exploring Christian truth via the imagination. George Herbert’s poetry frequently deploys personification of this type, as in “The Quip”:
First, Beautie crept into a rose,
Which when I pluckt not, Sir, said she,
Tell me, I pray, Whose hands are those?
But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.Then Money came, and chinking still,
What tune is this, poore man? said he:
I heard in Musick you had skill.
But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.Then came brave Glorie puffing by
In silks that whistled, who but he?
He scarce allow’d me half an eie.
But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.Then came quick Wit and Conversation
And he would needs a comfort be,
And, to be short, make an oration.
But thou shalt answer, Lord, for me.
Herbert’s poem “Time” also partakes in this style:
Meeting with Time, slack thing, said I,
Thy sithe is dull; whet it for shame.
No marvell Sir, he did replie,
If it at length deserve some blame:
But where one man would have me grinde it,
Twentie for one too sharp do finde it.
By “devotional” we mean poetry that nourishes love, dedication, fervour, affection or thankfulness to God, or produces a state of reflection in which these feelings are cultivated. Typically, this is achieved by placing some aspect of God’s character or work before the reader with various degrees of plainness or fineness. Some poems present familiar truths of scripture directly so that very little intellectual digestion or reflection are required to grasp the devotional force. Other poems offer a subtle or baroque (jarring, vivid) experience, causing us to be surprised or challenged by new connections not previously encountered. In each case, the goal of devotional poetry is to establish or enhance fervour for God.
As is often the case with Herbert (and many devotional poems written throughout history), his writing assumes a quasi-lyric form – meaning it expresses the speaker’s personal experience or inner struggles. Lyric originates from the musical accompaniment of the chorus in ancient Greek drama on a kithara (a stringed instrument that looks like a small harp held in the hand, related to the lyre). The chorus was used to articulate the inner thoughts of the character on stage (like our Shakespearean soliloquies), and thus, poetry spoken during the chorus of a play was associated with emotion and self-expression. This type is contrasted with narrative poetry, which develops a story in 3rd-person (epic) or poetry spoken as dialogue in a drama.
The above poems lean more toward dialogue than pure lyric, though the lion’s share of Herbert’s English poetry (and most of his Latin and Greek poems) exhibit lyric tendencies, as in “Affliction”:
Broken in pieces all asunder,
Lord, hunt me not,
A thing forgot,
Once a poore creature, now a wonder,
A wonder tortur’d in the space
Betwixt this world and that of grace.My thoughts are all a case of knives,
Wounding my heart
With scatter’d smart,
As watring pots give flowers their lives.
Nothing their furie can controll,
While they do wound and prick my soul.
We tend to conflate the speaker of a poem with the author in our reading of lyric due to long-standing cultural habits of listening to verse as if emotion and self-expression are necessarily linked to the author. Contemporary pop music, as well as large swathes of other musical genres (love songs, for example) are written to express the author’s personal emotions, which is perfectly acceptable, but this fact may lead us astray when interpreting poetry more generally, falling into what literary critics of the 1950s called the Personal Fallacy or Personal Heresy, the main question of which is: are poets always writing themselves?
In my poem “Joy”, the devotional element is not linked to a lyric form. Rather, it pairs a brief epic flourish (employing gnomic phrases to signal a habitual state or reflection on Christian custom) with a dramatic scene. What is going on in this scene?
Sorrow and Death are personified as enemies of Joy hatching a plot to destroy her. Their scheme involves three dramatic ironies in which they achieve precisely the opposite of their intention.
The womb appears, from the inside, to be a place of darkness fit for sorrow, and the labour of bearing children is a site of much sorrow and agony. Sorrow suggests they begin here, confident pain and strife will overwhelm Joy. But of course, in the natural course of bearing children, though there is great pain and agony, as Scripture reminds us in John 16:21: “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.”
Sorrow tries to correct this mistake, attempting to consume Joy by substituting a feeding trough in place of a suitable home for the fragile infant. This, of course, conjures the Christmas scene and Christ’s advent, but also points ahead to a greater problem for Sorrow and Death: if you try to consume Joy, it spreads, alluding to the profound experience of communion, in which all Christians partake of God and are nourished eternally by his presence. Joy is experienced and passed along and yet, like the loaves and fish, produces leftovers that far exceed the original.
Death shoves Sorrow out of the way and tries a direct approach – attempting to kill Joy outright by burying her in a tomb. But, as with the other ironies, in taking Joy to the grave, Death seals itself up (the death of Death) and causes the very event that inaugurates and sustains Joy in the Christian life – the assurance of the resurrection, without which, as the Apostle Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 15:14: “our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”
But, as Paul says later in the chapter, “death is swallowed up in victory.” Joy cannot be conquered or overcome, and this should give us a profound sense of peace this Christmas as we remember the advent of our Lord. He is not troubled by sorrow and death. May this Christ-like joy and certainty fill your heart this season.
Todd Anderson (Stuff of the Rind, Sand and Sail, Collected Poems) writes the newsletter Mirth to share a behind-the-scenes look at his writing process as well as to offer readers the first fruits of his poetry and reflections. He grew up in the forests of small-town Ontario, contending against nature in all its beauty and harshness. His training as a literary scholar of Latin and English literature inflects his love of poignant turns of phrase, but it is the influence of his family and their myriad adventures together that infuses his story-telling and poetry with its substance and power. Todd lives and writes in Ottawa with his wife and six children. If you are interested in supporting Todd’s work, please follow the links below to donate or buy his books.
Todd Edward Anderson 