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Poetry Off the Shelf: For the Love of God

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, October 15th, 2014. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, “For the Love of God.” In the learning lab section of the Poetry Foundation's website, there are dozens of what we call learning poems. What that means is that there is a poem, generally a well-known poem, along with a poem guide, exploring how the poem does what it does. There's a poem guide on George Herbert's poem “Love (III)” by Hannah Brooks-Motl, for example. She’s a poet and critic who lives in Chicago, where she joins me from the recording studio at the Poetry Foundation. Hannah, George Herbert lived in the 17th century and he died fairly young. Those are the brief facts that I know about George Herbert. But tell us a little more about him and his book The Temple, which may be one of the greatest books of lyric poetry in the language.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: So, George Herbert was born into an aristocratic family. And he had a well-off young life and went to Cambridge and was public orator and knew the king.

Curtis Fox: He knew King James, right?

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Yep, he knew King James. He was an accomplished musician and had a very cozy existence. And then didn't really think about God or didn't feel called to the church, I guess they would say, until he was 31. And then he did something pretty radical, which was leave Cambridge, leave his cushy post, and take up a congregation in a small parish called Bremerton. And then served a small congregation of mostly rural people who often couldn't read, and did that for the rest of his life. And it was during that time, although I think he might have been writing poems, he definitely was writing poems before, but I think it was, you know, during his time at Bremerton that he wrote the poems that comprise The Temple, which is his only book of poetry and was published posthumously within 40 years of his life. It had sold something like 20,000 copies. So, it was a really…

Curtis Fox: And that's back in the 17th century.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Yeah, that's a very, yeah, a very, very popular book. But, so, he's known really as a devotional poet. Coleridge said that, you know, you had to be an Anglican to really appreciate what George Herbert was saying. And I don't know that that's true. I think actually rereading some of the poems from The Temple for this podcast, I noticed how, and this maybe has to do with why he continues to be popular, but how many of his poems are about writing. And he's very concerned with how to write to God. A lot of his poems are kind of self-castigating. So, he's looking back at his worldliness and his desires to be famous, or his desires for wealth. And he's striving to be a subject of God and to be in the grace of God. But he's also really concerned with how to write poems and with the writing of his own poems.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, that is very contemporary actually.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Yeah, right.

Curtis Fox: So, “Love (III)” is the last poem in his book The Temple. We're going to listen to it shortly. But what would be helpful to know about it? Other than that it's a dialogue between the speaker and love, what else do we need to know about this poem?

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Well, it might be helpful to note that there are two previous “loves” in The Temple.

Curtis Fox: Yes, “Love (I)” and “Love (II).”

Hannah Brooks-Motl: “Love (I)” and “Love (II),” which are concerned with trying to reclaim immortal love or godly love from secular love. So, here is God. And, also, that the end of this collection is of often tortured lyrics. And, so, whether or not this is a speaker who has come to the end of his journey and is, you know, taking his rightful place at God's table, or if this is just another sort of iteration of the struggle, is the question that I've been thinking about with this poem.

Curtis Fox: OK, let's listen to the poem. We recorded several years ago, the poet Forrest Gander reading it. When we acquire poets, we often ask them to read one of their favorite poems. And here's how he explains why he chose this particular poem.

Forrest Gander: What I love about this poem is the struggle between the ego and its sublimation, its humility. And how that's acted out in the verbs, that there's this amazing transformation that takes place towards the end of the poem as the poem shifts from past tense into present tense.

Curtis Fox: OK, let's listen to Forrest Gander's reading of “Love (III)” by George Herbert.

Forrest Gander:

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back

                              Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack

                             From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

                             If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:

                             Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,

                             I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

                             Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame

                             Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

                             My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

                             So I did sit and eat.

Curtis Fox: One of the great endings of any poem in the language.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: So, very early in this poem we get the sense that, obviously, this isn't love in a secular sense. This is God. But isn't he playing with the secular tradition of love poetry here?

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I think there is a kind of coyness, the back-and-forth, or the seesaw, that you get visually represented on the page because the lines start sort of halfway in. So, it looks like a flirtation even between the lines, let alone between the two characters in the poem.

Curtis Fox: Mm-hmm. Let's go through the poem a bit. He begins almost as if in a very domestic scene with the speaker entering into God's presence or love's presence.

Forrest Gander:
Love bade me welcome, but my soul drew back. / Guilty of dust and sin

Curtis Fox: Love or God is a good host.

Forrest Gander:
But quick-eyed love, observing me grow slack / from my first entrance in, / drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, / if I lacked any thing.

Curtis Fox: This is a very homely domestic drama taking place in front of us, isn't it?

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Right. Yeah. They're literally playing out the conventions of guest and host. And there is something conventional about it. Although I will say that “quick-eyed love” kind of alerts you. I mean, to me, I think that there's a lot that troubles me about this poem. I find it really creepy. “Quick-eyed love” is the thing that sort of alerts me to the fact that there's possibly more sort of squirming underneath the surface of some of these choices.

Curtis Fox:
“Quick-eyed love”—what does this suggest? Why does it creep you out?

Hannah Brooks-Motl: It's knowing maybe it's flirtatious, but it's also hawk-eyed. I mean, quick-eyed, hawk-eyed, that he's sort of too knowing-all, which, you know, of course, God is omniscient. But the all-knowingness, I don't know, there's something strange…

Curtis Fox: Some roleplaying going on here.

Hanna Brooks-Motl: Yeah, definitely.

Curtis Fox: So God or Love asks if he lacked anything. And the response is…

Forrest Gander:
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here.

Curtis Fox: That's an incredibly…so, he's the typical Protestant sinner who feels totally unworthy to be in God's presence. And then Love said...

Forrest Gander: You shall be he.

Curtis Fox: And what does he mean by that? You shall be he. He is or will be?

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Right. Well, I think that that's the first sort of modal verb that happens in this poem. So, I mean, it's interesting that Forrest Gander is tracking the verbs because I was tracking the verbs too. And, you know, so modal verbs are these verbs that have to do with, like, likelihood or ability or permission obligation. And it's unclear, it's ambiguous, it's sort of unresolvable in what sense shall is being used here. And I think that's why it's followed up with...

Forrest Gander: I the unkind, ungrateful.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Yeah. So I don't know what sense it is. And I'm not sure that the poem is interested in resolving that question either.

Curtis Fox: So the speaker of the poem asks, he still doesn't feel himself to be worthy. He says, I the unkind, ungrateful.

Forrest Gander: I cannot look on thee.

Curtis Fox: He can't even look on Love or he can't even look on God because he still feels terribly unworthy. He's supplicating God. He wants something in the situation. And he gets it.

Forrest Gander: Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, / who made the eyes but I?

Curtis Fox: So this is when we know in the poem that this is not a love poem. This is more than love. This is a God who made the eyes that he's looking out of.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: And this is another moment where I get a little creeped out. So, and maybe, you know, maybe it's just that I'm not a good Anglican, but there's something in these rhymes that's slithering almost. The smiling reply, the eyes, but I. I think that it's the indefinite article in front of I. So, it's not who made your eyes, but who made all eyes, who made the idea of the eye, which then becomes the eye of God, which is, you know, inflected back into the eyes of the speaker. I'm a little unnerved or I feel like there's unsettled tones at work in this poem. And, you know, Herbert was really famous for being a moody poet, a poet able to create these really intense moods. Aldous Huxley called him “the poet of inner weather.”

Curtis Fox: What's odd about that passage is that the speaker is saying, I am unworthy and I cannot look upon you, God. And God's response is basically saying, well, look how powerful I am. Because I made you. I don't know if that's supposed to be comforting or what? But the speaker's response is...

Forrest Gander: Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame / go where it doth deserve.

Curtis Fox: He's in a bad way. He's full of shame to this. He still doesn't feel worthy of anything.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: And then again, God responds with a rhetorical question.

Forrest Gander: And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

Hannah Brooks-Motl: If we kind of go back to thinking about the opening as this conventional guest-host scenario, this is like the situation in which you have a guest who doesn't want anything. He's fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. And the host keeps kind of trying to get them to, you know, have a glass of wine, have some water. And so we're in kind of stasis for most of the poem, right? It's like nobody's making a move. It's all kind of like fainting and almost-arguments. And then at the end...

Forrest Gander: You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: And, again, must as a modal verb is pretty unresolvable. Is it you have to sit down, or, please, you must sit down? It's hard to know, especially at the end of a poem that has been stuck in this kind of equivocation or this back-and-forth.

Curtis Fox: But when he says know you not, says Love, who bore the blame, he's really saying: Jesus took our sins on. So, in other words, don't feel so bad about yourself because Jesus has already done this work for you. The poem ends in a kind of Eucharist.

Forrest Gander: You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / so I did sit and eat.

Curtis Fox: It's a very carnal Eucharist, you know what I mean? It's normally not meat. It's usually wine and then a cracker.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Bread, right.

Curist Fox: What do you make of it? Is he just going for the rhyme at that point or…? There’s something very powerful about the carnality of that meat.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Well, in the Catholic, I mean, so Anglican is akin to Catholicism, which it is the body and blood of Jesus, right? That's what the...

Curtis Fox: Eating the body of Christ. Yes.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Right, right. And, so, in that way, so, meat for body, it's almost a weird secularization of it, right? That our bodies are meat as Jesus's body was meat as this is meat that this speaker is about to consume. It's sort of moving it out of its register. The effect is, again, it unnerves me and is probably meant to.

Curtis Fox: It is unnerving. And the ending is even more unnerving because it's unresolved in a way. “So I did sit and eat.” He's obeying. He's obeying God. But one doesn't know the spirit in which he sits and eats. Is he doing this from kind of meek submission? Is he doing it with pleasure and pride of being accepted by God? What do you make of that?

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Yeah, it's very, very troubling. And I think it's the fact that he does it.

Forrest Gander: So I did sit and eat.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: I guess it's like with the emphatic use of do. But it also doesn't allow us into a present tense, right? This could be kind of him reflecting on what happened in the past. We're in this sort of weird time. And so I think that also creates a kind of unresolved or you're denied kind of being with the speaker at the moment of communion.

Curtis Fox: So I don't want to ask you a personal question about your own religiosity or things like this. But let me just put it this way. I am not a religious person, but I'm deeply moved by this poem and by the struggle within it. And there's many ways to read it non-religiously as far as Gander said, as a struggle between ego and something else. Something more powerful than oneself. But how do you take it in and what effect does it have on you?

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Well, I mean, I think, yeah, I'm not incredibly religious either. But I do think that the sense of struggle is profound and doesn't simply have to be answerable to religious struggle. I think the, you know, the struggle with meaning, with ego, with pride, with one's past, all of these things are, for me, contained in this. And actually, Herbert's pretty famous for his shape poems. And as I was reading this poem more and more, it struck me that it's kind of a shape poem too. The way that it looks maybe like a dialogue or sort of seesaw lines. But, like, you know, one of the questions it raises for me is, it's a poem at the end of the book. So it's somehow about closure maybe, or finality. But, you know, there are all these lines where you're like, where is the first part of the line? Like, why does it start in the middle of the page? And so then it becomes a question about form, and form is all our lives. Like why do things begin here? Why do they end here? So, in that sense, when I look at it on the page, just as a kind of visual object, it also makes me wonder about origins and all sorts of things.

Curtis Fox: Hannah, thanks so much.

Hannah Brooks-Motl: Thanks, Curtis.

Curtis Fox: You can read Hannah Brooks-Motl's poem guide and dozens of other poem guides in the learning lab section of the Poetry Foundation's website. Let us know what you think of this program. Email us at [email protected]. The theme music for this program comes from The Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.