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Stephen Guy-Bray on George Herbert ("Prayer [I]")
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Stephen Guy-Bray joins Close Readings to talk about one of the most beautiful sonnets in the English language, George Herbert's "Prayer (I)." Stephen's most recent book is Line Endings in Renaissance Poetry (Anthem, 2022). In the episode we also refer in passing to a recent academic article of his called "Notes on the Couplet in the Sonnet" and to a recent talk he gave on "Aboutness in Shakespeare's Poetry." Follow Stephen on Twitter here.
Stephen Guy-Bray is a professor at the University of British Columbia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of four earlier monographs: Shakespeare and Queer Representation (Routledge, 2020), Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come From (Toronto, 2009), Loving in Verse: Poetic Influence as Erotic (Toronto, 2006), and Homoerotic Space: The Poetics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Toronto, 2002).
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Transcript
Introduction & Poem Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Close Readings podcast. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's my great pleasure to be talking today with Stephen Guy Bray about a poem that I've loved for a long time, a poem by George Herbert called Prayer, or sometimes you'll see it printed as prayer and then in parentheses one.
00:00:25
Speaker
And in a moment, I'll ask Stephen to read the poem aloud, but remember that you can find the text. If you'd like to be looking at it, I'll put a link to the text of the poem in the show notes and in the newsletter that will go out with the episode.
00:00:47
Speaker
as well. And I'll put some other links there that might be useful and keyed into the conversation that we have today. I also want to remind people that if they're enjoying the podcast, please do follow or subscribe on whatever podcast service you use, leave a rating and
Stephen Guy Bray's Expertise
00:01:08
Speaker
a review. I think it helps others find the podcast as well.
00:01:12
Speaker
So today, Stephen Guy Bray is a professor at the University of British Columbia and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
00:01:24
Speaker
which is a distinct honor, I'm sure. He specializes in Renaissance poetry, queer theory, and poetics, and increasingly it sounds like poetry and poetics across periods, which is an exciting development for all of us. And he's the author of, if I've got it right, five books from most distant up to the present, they would be the following, the first,
00:01:52
Speaker
homoerotic space, the poetics of loss in Renaissance literature, then loving and verse, poetic influence as erotic, then against reproduction, where Renaissance texts come from. It's an intriguing and lovely subtitle, I think, Stephen. Then somewhat more recently, Shakespeare and Queer Representation, and most recently, a book called Line Endings,
00:02:22
Speaker
in Renaissance poetry. Links to all of these will appear in the episode notes. So please do check out Stephen's work there. Of course, he's also published in all the kinds of academic journals that someone of his stature would appear in.
Philosophy of Poetry
00:02:41
Speaker
I was just talking to Stephen before we started recording that I'd been reading and admiring an article of his that appeared in the journal Shakespeare on the couplet.
00:02:50
Speaker
in sonnets, which I think we might talk about today. Steven is someone I got to know over Twitter and during the pandemic.
00:03:02
Speaker
which is both of which are funny things to say as ways of knowing someone. It's also to say though that this conversation, this particular conversation, today's conversation is for me one manifestation of the wish that is encoded in this podcast project, namely to go on talking with people about poetry
00:03:30
Speaker
to continue a conversation that's begun online and to make it part of the texture and experience of my everyday life. Stephen is someone I admire even, of course, in those blessedly offline spaces. He's someone I admire principally because
00:03:54
Speaker
He gives me the very sure sense that he thinks of the poem as the place where things happen.
00:04:03
Speaker
He thinks of the poem as the place to pay attention to. Poems not as a way of talking about other things, but poems as a way of talking about poems. In a lecture he gave recently, he said, poetry is the subject of poems, and then encouraged audience members to get that line tattooed on their bodies.
00:04:28
Speaker
That is both a sentiment that I think is a good one to have, but also expressed in a way that I think it gets both at the kind of seriousness with which Stephen Guybury thinks and talks about poetry.
00:04:43
Speaker
and also at the lovely insuissance, the kind of delightful spirit that Stephen brings even to things that he feels quite serious about and with good reason.
Reading and Interpreting 'Prayer'
00:04:59
Speaker
So Stephen Guybury, welcome to Close Readings. How are you doing today? I'm very well. I'm glad to be here. Thanks so much for asking me.
00:05:08
Speaker
Well, it was my pleasure, of course, you're one of the first people I thought of when I conceived of this thing. And I would like, speaking of the poem itself, to get to that poem as swiftly as I can. So perhaps I can ask you to begin the conversation today by reading the Herbert poem that you've selected for us. And just as a reminder to people who are
00:05:35
Speaker
for whom this is the first episode, or who have not studiously noted the method of the podcast. Remember, I'm inviting people on to the podcast whom I admire, but I'm making the choice of the poem entirely theirs. So Stephen has chosen prayer for us today, and we'll begin by listening to him read it aloud. Take it away, Stephen.
00:06:00
Speaker
Prayer as a church's banquet, angel's age, God's breath and man returning to his birth, the soul in paraphrase, heart and pilgrimage, the Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth. Engine against the almighty, sinner's tower, reverse and thunder, Christ's sight-piercing spear, the six days' world transposing in an hour, a kind of tune which all things hear and fear.
00:06:26
Speaker
Softness and peace and joy and love and bliss. Exalted manna, gladness of the best. Heaven and ordinary, man well-dressed. The Milky Way, the bird of paradise. Church bells beyond the stars heard. The soul's blood, the land of spices, something understood.
00:06:49
Speaker
Thank you, Stephen. I'm sure it's a poem you know very well. I wonder reading it here for this conversation, reading it aloud just now.
00:07:02
Speaker
if there's anything new that you're noticing about it, anything new that occurs to you when you give it voice. I mean, it occurs to me that prayers are speech acts of a kind, right? So to speak the poem aloud, what do you notice in it that maybe thinking about it idly or looking at it on the page doesn't present itself to you as readily?
Sonnet Form and Historical Context
00:07:32
Speaker
Well, I think, just to pick up something you said, I think that one of the things Herbert wants us to think about when we read the poem, and perhaps especially if we read it out loud, is, is reading the poem a form of prayer in itself? So is the poem about prayer? Or is it itself prayer as well? The other thing I notice, when I teach this, I normally get a whole hour out of it, and I could get more, there's so much in it.
00:08:01
Speaker
Reading it out loud all at once, it makes you realize how it's actually a short poem. It's a solid only 14 lines. It just seems so much bigger because it is so packed with these weird and somewhat disorienting images, many of which are actually hard to understand.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sure we'll come to some of those images. I mean, I don't do anything like write down whole questions that I want to ask my guest. But I do have notes in front of me. And many of my notes for today's conversation are just phrases from the poem that I want for you to pay some attention to and help me with. And we can come to those in a minute. As you note, the poem is a sonnet. And I wonder, apart from that being
00:08:49
Speaker
a signal of its relative brevity, is it significant to you that it's a sonnet in some way that you can address? I know that you're someone who's written about the sonnet form before. Does it matter that this poem is a sonnet to you in a way that is easy to describe? Yes, very much. Herbert writes all sorts of poems, and he writes poems in stanzas.
00:09:19
Speaker
If you're writing a poem in stanza, it can go on forever, like the rhyme of the ancient mariner or something. It can be really long. A sonnet is really bounded. They're very strict rules about the form. And in the English form, they're very strict rules about the rhyme scheme and the length of the lines. And so I think it's significant that prayer, in a sense, at least for Protestants, is supposed to be somewhat impromptu, somewhat free form.
00:09:48
Speaker
But the sonnet is one of the most highly determined forms of poetry. And so I think he wants to set up that contrast between
00:09:58
Speaker
a really concrete, bounded form, and these sort of unbounded things that he's talking about. And prayer of self, of course, is supposed to be transcendent, as he says, it's a link between the earth and heaven. What I like that he chooses the sonnet form. I think also when he wrote this, sonnets were past the peak at this point of the popularity of the sonnets.
00:10:27
Speaker
Maybe. Go ahead, please. I think it
Prayer vs. Poetry
00:10:30
Speaker
seems perhaps a slightly dated form. And I think these are important historically because then Milton uses the song that's also to talk about religion and politics. The song that is most famous is a love poem. That's what the most famous song that's in England were. But they were all published around the time Herbert was born. So he's, in a sense, this is a slightly dated form, which I think is interesting too.
00:10:55
Speaker
So Herbert, for people who know very little or even nothing about Herbert, and I understand probably, or I'm guessing, that your interest in this poem is not primarily to do with things like biography or literary history. Having said that, maybe a little bit of context is useful. You say Herbert was born at the sort of heyday of the sonnet form in English.
00:11:21
Speaker
So, born in the late 16th century, right, in the 1590s? 1593. Which would have meant, relative, say, to Shakespeare's career then, Shakespeare would have been producing plays when Herbert was born. And
00:11:45
Speaker
the sonnet tradition that Herbert would have known or read, is that something that we can do more than speculate about? Yeah, I mean, the most famous ones, of course, were Shakespeare's, which were first published in 1609. The 1590s themselves are really the heyday of the sonnet. And I think they would have formed a basic part of the reading of an Englishman interested in poetry.
00:12:14
Speaker
And so I did not myself grow up with any kind of prayer tradition in my household. I'm not someone who prays regularly. I was interested to hear you describe.
00:12:31
Speaker
the kind of difference between the impromptu or unpremeditated nature of prayer in the Protestant tradition with the boundedness of the sonnet form and the kind of cramped feeling that a sonnet can give here. Is it useful to know anything about Herbert's
00:12:54
Speaker
relationship to prayer, aside from poetry, I mean, to be thinking about Herbert's own experience of religion. Herbert was a minister. I mean, he was someone whose career was somewhat unsettled in the early days, but eventually he takes holy orders, as they say, and he became a minister. And he died when he was only 39. He was the minister of a small parish near Salisbury, an apparently very good minister.
00:13:22
Speaker
All his poems are religious poems. I didn't grow up with a prayer tradition either. I was an atheist and I was raised an atheist, so I had to look all this up. But certainly people will say that one of the big differences between Catholicism and Protestantism at the level of prayer is that Protestants are encouraged to find their own modes of prayer, their own forms of prayer, and to have a more personal relationship to what they're doing.
00:13:50
Speaker
So if we were to imagine a kind of analog in poetry, we might think that Protestant prayer is something like free verse. I like that. And it makes the juxtaposition, since of course this poem is anything but free verse, it makes the juxtaposition there between the mode or the spirit of prayer and the form that that
00:14:19
Speaker
that the poem called Prayer takes all the more striking. It's a highly, as you described it a moment ago, a highly condensed utterance, this poem. One way to describe that, I guess, would be to say, to count the number of words in it or to say that it's 14 lines long and that's it.
00:14:47
Speaker
Another thing to say is that grammatically, it's not even a real sentence, right? That is, it's even more radically condensed than some other sonnets might be, which might have kind of syntactical or grammatical twists and turns. This feels like everything's sort of drawing or settling down to a single point.
Analyzing Key Phrases
00:15:11
Speaker
Yeah, sonnets are generally, at this point, poetry in general, is written in sentences. And as you say, this is technically not a sentence because there's no finite verb. There are participles, but there's no finite verb, which means technically it can't be a sentence. So in that respect, then, it seems somewhat deficient.
00:15:37
Speaker
I think that's part of Herbert's point, that his poem is going to be deficient because you can't really describe prayer, and prayer is itself deficient given the discrepancy between humans and God. So I think he likes that. But yeah, it's
00:15:56
Speaker
A lot of the criticism of the poem is focused on what the verb would be. I see. And in fact, there was a version of this set to music where they just kept putting is in. I'm going to go ahead and guess that you think that that's not a satisfying translation of the poem. Have I got that right? It's terrible. I mean, the obvious choice of the verb is
00:16:22
Speaker
is is. Prayer is the church's banquet, and so on. But in fact, a lot of people have talked about how it's much more complex. Sometimes it seems to be a subjunctive. Perhaps it's, let prayer be the church's banquet. And sometimes also there seems to be an opposition. Prayer is this, but not this. Or prayer is not this, but this. And so in a sense, that gives the reader a way into the poem
00:16:52
Speaker
we kind of have to figure out for ourselves when we read it the relationship of all these words.
00:17:00
Speaker
the relationship and from a grammatical point of view, the verb. So if we have a poem that is a collection of nouns, let's say, it's not just that we have to understand prepositionally how they fit in relation to each other, but how they act upon each other or how they
00:17:24
Speaker
relate to each other. Maybe this is a good moment to start in on some of the phrases that are odd or striking and try, if we can, to think of what verb might be implied or if you have some way you prefer to
00:17:45
Speaker
get into what these phrases suggest. I'm, of course, all ears. And I could start with the church's banquet. I have no idea how to take that phrase, Stephen. Is that an important one for you? It is. I think it's actually one of the tough ones. Some are more straightforward, prayer the church's banquet. But it's the idea that, and again,
00:18:13
Speaker
Is it the banquet of the church or the church as a banquet? It's so much in the poem, just at that level of grammatical relationship is unclear. But one way to understand it is that Herbert is saying, prayer is the banquet the church gives. It's something that fills you up and gives you a sense of repletion. It's a feast in a metaphorical sense.
00:18:36
Speaker
Also, a banquet is something you have to celebrate something. So prayer then is, I would say, tacitly also presented as a celebration here. Having a moment.
00:18:52
Speaker
pause here because now I want to ask you about Angel's age and it occurs to me this could be a very worrisome approach if I just say okay Stephen here are the next two words in the poem now tell me how to think about those I take it that Angel's age perhaps I mean well let me say this and then you tell me if I've got it right or if you'd put it somewhat differently and
00:19:17
Speaker
angels are ageless, aren't they?
Herbert's Influences
00:19:19
Speaker
So that itself seems a kind of paradox that points to something you were describing earlier, which is the hope that prayer might be a limitless form of prayer.
00:19:39
Speaker
What do you make of angels age? As you say, angels are ageless. And I think the easiest way to take this is to think of age in the sense of a big period of time, like the Middle Ages, right? So the angels age is a time that is actually, as you say, beyond time, because angels are eternal. So one way to understand this would be saying that prayer then
00:20:06
Speaker
gives us potentially at least access to this sort of timeless existence beyond time. So that in prayer, we are in a sense partaking of the nature of angels. So when you said one way to take age was as a period of time, I immediately thought something which turns out not to be quite right, or maybe it's not quite right in the end though, it's fine as a way in, which, so I was thinking,
00:20:36
Speaker
that perhaps angels age referred to a time before humanity. But if that's the case, maybe it began before humanity, but it's from Herbert's point of view or from the poem's point of view, it persists even now that it's not just going back to a better time, it's going to a point in time which is somehow itself timeless.
00:21:04
Speaker
Yeah, this is all clearer if we think of Paradise Lost. That's what I was doing. I was thinking of Paradise Lost. But yeah, the idea is that when God creates our world and everything around it, he's also creating time. Whereas God and the angels live outside of time. I would say that's what's going on. But I think in some ways the most important thing
00:21:32
Speaker
to notice about the phrase is that it's actually difficult. It's not one that's immediately apparent. Like the next line, God's breath in man returning to his birth, that to me seems fairly straightforward. But I think it's interesting. He ends the first line then with this perplexity. And as you say, when you first read it, you think this doesn't make sense. Angels don't have an age. Angels are ageless.
00:21:59
Speaker
The second line you say is simpler. Well, what I notice about the second line is a kind of play on breath and birth just verbally. Does the fact that the second line seems simpler and more straightforward to you mean that you're also less interested in it as a reader?
00:22:19
Speaker
No, I think it's significant because, of course, he's referring to the idea that God creates humans by breathing into them. That is the breath of life that humans have now. The important thing to me about the second line is the reciprocal motion that God breathes into man, and then man's breath here coming out as prayer returns to the origins, returns to the time of initial sinlessness.
00:22:49
Speaker
So that when we pray according to the poem, the wind that comes out of our mouth is, as it were, a return of the breath that gave us life in the first place. Yeah. And it gives us a different kind of life. This is the idea. It gives us eternal life.
00:23:15
Speaker
which does, the prayer. Well, living a proper Christian life in general, the ideas will give us, give the individual Christian eternal life after death. Right. So a strategy to evade the boundedness, not only of something like the sonnet form, but mortality.
00:23:39
Speaker
Okay, so with all of that in mind, then help me with the phrase that I always find myself thinking about with respect to this poem, which is the soul in paraphrase.
00:23:51
Speaker
Now, I don't know if my mind is just sort of polluted by the, when I see the word paraphrase anywhere in proximity to a poem, I think about things like the New Critics and the heresy of paraphrase and so forth. But of course, I've got the literary history backwards here. So what do you have in mind when you read the soul in paraphrase?
00:24:13
Speaker
They're very much the same, I think, of Kleensbruch and the heresy of paraphrase. Well, we should tell people what that is, who don't know. Kleensbruch was an American critic in the middle of the 20th century, associated with a movement called the New Critics, and his most famous work is the heresy of paraphrase, where he says that
00:24:32
Speaker
Any sort of prose description of a poem, of how it works or its themes or so on, is actually a betrayal of the poem. That's why it's a kind of heresy. He uses the strong religious term. Because poems, he says, can actually only be understood on their own terms, how they work as poems, not how reduced to a prose paraphrase, a point they make in an argument or something.
Nature of Poetry and Prayer
00:24:57
Speaker
I'm just going to take, you know, I have the mic now, so I'm just going to point out that Cleanth Brooks was completely right. Yeah, that's fine. You know, one thing I have, I want to come back to what it would mean then to think of the soul and paraphrase in a moment. But while we're on the topic of paraphrase and poetry, one exercise I often give students, and I'm sure it's not an original one, is to write a prose paraphrase of a poem.
00:25:24
Speaker
and then to write an essay about what try as they might, they had not been able to capture in their paraphrase. But it's more foolish and sadistic. Yeah, it's a fun thing to do. This is the analogy I give my students, and so I'll give it here too. There is a movie which is mostly forgotten, I think, these days called Smoke, in which
00:25:53
Speaker
Something was described which may or may not be apocryphal, and it occurs to me as I say that now that you are the sort of person who might be able to tell us whether or not it's apocryphal. But in the story that's relayed in the movie, Queen Elizabeth wanted to know how much smoke weighed.
00:26:09
Speaker
I think I've got this right. And one member of her court, I forget who it was, devised the following experiment. He said we would weigh a cigar and then smoke the cigar, carefully tapping the ash back onto the scale, and then measure the difference between the weight of the ash cigar and the original cigar, and the difference would be the weight of smoke.
00:26:38
Speaker
that which it escaped in. Yeah, it's a nice idea. And so the paraphrase, the poem idea is similar. It's like the poetry is the smoke that got away. The thing that you can't translate, in other words, into prose. Okay, enough about the heresy of paraphrase. What would it mean then to say the soul in paraphrase? I would think that if poetry can't be paraphrased, then neither can the soul.
00:27:08
Speaker
No. And again, I think this is something that Herbert is aware of throughout the poem and something he chooses to focus on is, as I think I said, insufficiency, the fact that he's not really going to be able to define poetry. But this is another phrase that is sort of can be read in more than one way. Is prayer a paraphrase of the soul or is prayer the soul in the act of paraphrasing? In other words, who's the act of party here? Is it the person praying or is it the soul?
00:27:39
Speaker
The image can go either way. And where would it lead you if you followed either of those two paths? Can you say more about... Well, if you think of it's the person praying who's paraphrasing the soul, then yes, you have that idea of insufficiency and so on.
00:27:59
Speaker
If you have the soul in paraphrase though, you have a more active soul, which I think is an interesting image and potentially a troubling one. I'm not sure. It's really hard. Yeah. Okay. So, but in the first branch of that tree, let's say I'm the praying subject and we'll take it out of the context of the poem just for the moment. And then we can return to it. There's something I'm praying for.
00:28:28
Speaker
my prayer represents a kind of orientation of my soul or a desire that my soul has. And in praying, what I'd be trying to do in that way of thinking is to take that kind of mess of spiritual matter and put it
00:28:50
Speaker
into the insufficient form of a paraphrase for the purpose of transmitting that wish to God and receiving some kind of reward for having done so. In the second of
Sonnet Structure and Imagery
00:29:05
Speaker
the two branches that you've described, prayer is like the soul that is trying to do the thing that I was just describing. Is that it?
00:29:17
Speaker
Yeah. And something to keep in mind, of course, is that according to Christianity, you don't have to paraphrase your soul. God knows your soul because God knows everything. Right. So why do we have to pray at all, Stephen?
00:29:32
Speaker
I don't know, you'd really have to ask a religious person. Does the poem have an answer to that question? Does the poem suggest an answer to that question to you? I think it does. I think that, as I say, Herbert is concerned with the insufficiency of prayer and of his poem. What he sees is the insufficiency of it, although to me it seems one of the most sufficient poems ever written. But it's also a necessary insufficiency. You have to do it.
00:30:02
Speaker
I want to say something else about paraphrase if I can. Of course you can. One way to think about this poem is that it's structured in a sense according to two practices that Herbert and all the other educated European man of his day would have learned in school when they were young. One is the paraphrase, frequently from one classical language to another, where they would reduce the text into a paraphrase
00:30:31
Speaker
And they would show off then their skill at ancient Greek composition or whatever, but also their understanding of the original text. And the other is the definition, which is a very formal, elaborate, rhetorical thing back then. And I'm not going to go into all that. The important thing, it seems to me,
00:30:52
Speaker
is that a definition such as we still have them, if you look something up in the dictionary, relies on something that has to be defined and what defines it. So a sonnet has to be defined and you say it's a poem in 14 lines, for instance.
00:31:09
Speaker
And because of the title, then we think, okay, so he's defining prayer. But a number of critics have commented that prayer seems to be seen on both sides of that line. Sometimes it's the thing that has to be defined. Sometimes it's actually the thing that is doing the defining.
00:31:27
Speaker
So prayer is something we do, but it also does things for us. It makes things clear for us in a way. Well, I think so. And with respect to the soul in paraphrase, maybe it's the case that
00:31:45
Speaker
prayer is something that we do to our soul or that we try to do with our soul. But then to see things the other way around, maybe what I'm hearing you say is that when we pray, we're making our soul in some primary sense, that the soul is the product of prayer, not the thing that
00:32:16
Speaker
Or our soul is remaking us. I think that's the point of religious rituals in general. It's a kind of disciplining of the self.
00:32:30
Speaker
As I look over the poem, Stephen, I have lots of questions, as we've already heard evidence of, about its first lines. And I know that I have lots of questions about its final lines. And in the middle of the poem, I get a bit more lost. I wonder, and maybe rather than sort of laboriously moving line by line, it would be fun, and I would like to do it with you.
00:32:59
Speaker
Can I ask you for a moment to zoom out with us just a little bit from the poem, maybe thinking of its structure as the sonnet is useful in this regard, maybe describing the kind of sonnet that it is would be useful, but the real question I have for you is what's going on in the middle of the poem, or does it even make sense to talk about this poem as having a middle as a distinct section in itself?
00:33:30
Speaker
That's a good question. Yeah, it's an English sonnet, which means that it's three quatrains, three units of four lines, and then a couple at the last two lines. The second quatrain is the one that people always find strange, because in this quatrain, prayer is suddenly bad. Yeah, engine against the Almighty. Yeah, and the sinners' tower, so it's like the Tower of Babel where they tried to get to heaven,
00:34:00
Speaker
It's the reverse of thunder, Christ's sight's piercing spear. I love that compound adjective. The six-days world transposing in an hour. So God's creation of the world takes six days in the Bible, and here in an hour, in the brief space of a prayer, it's all undone.
00:34:24
Speaker
So these are the ways in which prayer can be bad, that a prayer can be an act of presumption. And it is kind of in the middle of the poem. On the other hand, I think that this is not, to return to what you're saying, this is not so much a poem that has a beginning and a middle and an end. It's a poem in which all parts exist at the same time, even though when reading it, of course, you have to read it in a certain order.
00:34:54
Speaker
Yeah, but it's as though you'd want to be able to perceive it from the angel's perspective or something like that. Yeah. This is the way they tell us that angels and God see time. They see it all happening at once. Whereas for us, of course, we have to have sequence and in a poem that's line one, line two, and so on. That follow a certain rhyme scheme and so on as they do in this poem, right?
00:35:20
Speaker
Yeah, so the quatrains, the poem is very firmly, it follows the rhyme scheme of the English sonnet, and the division between one quatrain and the next, or the one before it, is always very clear. So, you know, we were saying how a sonnet is sort of a bound form, and it's a set form, and he's actually increased that. If you read a lot of sonnets, you see that frequently the quatrains are not so separate, but they are very separate here.
00:35:50
Speaker
Yeah, here I noticed that the third quatrain, and I'm perhaps about to admit some ignorance, which is embarrassing about the sonnet form, but the first two quatrains have the A, B, A, B, you know, C, D, C, D rhyme scheme. The third one has E, F, F, E, doesn't it? So bliss and then best and dressed rhyme, but then bliss is rhyming with paradise, I guess, right?
00:36:19
Speaker
Yes. Is that unusual or is that one of the varieties of the English sonnet that we see often enough? It is unusual. It's not unprecedented. It is odd. I have no way of accounting for it. Fair enough. At least you've reassured me that I'm not noticing something that is absolutely typical and not worthy of comment at all. If you wanted to account for it, you could say that what it is
00:36:46
Speaker
is Herbert taking the rigid form of the English sonnet, which he assumes all his readers will know and which he swallowed very carefully for the first eight lines, and he's refashioning it, which is also, you could say, his point about prayer. It's something that the church tells people to do when there's, you know, the Lord's Prayer and various ones set out, but ultimately you're supposed to come up with a more personal form of it. You know, a phrase that I love comes
00:37:14
Speaker
at the end of the second quatrain, the first words of the, sorry, what would be the eighth line of the sonnet, a kind of tune. I like that phrase so much because it's so homely and plain and I'm curious about it for that reason as well. What would it mean? Let's assume as a starting place, though, maybe there's a more sophisticated way of understanding
00:37:43
Speaker
assertion, if that's even the right word for it that's being made there. But let's assume for the sake of beginning that the assertion here is something like prayer is a kind of tune. What would that mean? Well, the first thing I noticed, and of course this is a big part of the ending of the poem, is
00:38:03
Speaker
It's magnificent vagueness, I mean, a kind of tune, what kind of tune? In the context of a poem about prayer, we think a kind of tune like a hymn, some sort of piece of religious meaning, music. And of course, in the second last line of the poem is the reference to church bells, which are a kind of tune that we associate specifically with religion. But this is actually vaguer, a kind of tune, and I think the vagueness is important to Herbert because it's,
00:38:32
Speaker
It's a way for him to show how this definition is not going to work, how you can't be precise, you can't really say what prayer is. You can say it's a kind of tune, but you can't say what kind of tune. And I think it's also important because
00:38:52
Speaker
music then, of course, there was no recorded music. So music is something temporary, and the temporary nature of prayer and of sound generally is something that's really important to the poem. It underpins a lot of the poem's metaphors, I would say. So if you're at home back then, I think this is a point that's worth emphasizing, though it's such an obvious one as soon as one says it,
00:39:17
Speaker
in order to hear music, you have to play it, or you have to have someone over who will. There's no such thing as sitting down and listening to recorded music, right? No, and once you hear, let's say you go to your harpsichord and play something, but as each note is sounded, the sound disappears forever. Right. Well, that's beautiful and also poignant.
00:39:48
Speaker
When I think of a kind of tune, for some reason what I have in mind is that line from Robert Frost, the tone of meaning but without the words, the sense that there is a
00:40:08
Speaker
formal ordering or sequence that is somehow other than or prior to or independent of the particular content that's carried by that formal arrangement. So that in other words, I could say to you, though I wouldn't, Stephen,
00:40:28
Speaker
sing me something to the tune of Jingle Bells or whatever, right? But put new words to it. That's the kind of game that children play all the time.
Complexity and Interpretation
00:40:39
Speaker
My daughter asked me this morning, Daddy, what's your favorite version of Jingle Bells? And I realized she knew the official one and the Batman Smells version, you know, and wanted to know which I preferred. I preferred the second, for the record. But I wonder if there's something like that that happens
00:40:58
Speaker
at least in Herbert's imagination, when we pray, which is that there's a tune we have in mind, and we're sort of improvising words to go along with it, but there is something necessarily imperfect about that approach to music. Well, yeah, one thing you could say is that a prayer is perhaps going to follow
00:41:21
Speaker
the pattern, the prosodic pattern even, of a formal prayer read in church by a minister. So that's our model. So when we pray for ourselves, we follow the rhythms and cadences of the prayer that we've heard in church.
00:41:43
Speaker
Tell me about the line 11, heaven in ordinary, man well dressed. The phrase in ordinary trips me up. So maybe that's a simple difficulty to resolve.
00:42:00
Speaker
The line is about clothing, so heaven and ordinary. Ordinary, it's really sort of in terms of, if you think of it, of how servants dress. So in ordinary are sort of everyday clothes. But man is well-dressed, so man is wearing, humans are wearing the kind of fancy clothes you wear, for instance, to a banquet.
00:42:24
Speaker
or to church, maybe. Yeah. And for the banquet, of course, the servants would also be well-dressed in their servant-like way. But here, what he's talking about is that humans are presenting themselves in the best possible way
00:42:42
Speaker
Whereas heaven has taken itself down a notch. In other words, they're kind of meeting in the middle or they're closer to each other. And this idea of this sort of the golden mean or golden mediocrity, which doesn't have the bad sense than it has now, is really important to Herbert and it's a point he makes about
00:43:01
Speaker
that the Anglican church that he was a member of as opposed to Catholicism on the one hand and the sort of more extreme Protestantism on the other. So this idea of meeting in the middle is something that he feels a church should do and a religion should do and that's something that prayer can do. So heaven comes down slightly by being in ordinary man and being well-dressed has actually elevated himself. Is that similar to or how is that similar to the
00:43:30
Speaker
The relation between the two halves of the line that immediately follows that line, which I think on its own just seems like a staggeringly beautiful line. The Milky Way, the bird of paradise. Those two phrases separated by a comma appear together on the final line of the final quatrain of the poem, right up to the point
00:44:01
Speaker
that the couplet begins. What's the relation between the Milky Way and the bird of paradise, and what relation does either have to prayer as we've been talking about it so far?
00:44:17
Speaker
I think, well, the reference to the Milky Way, of course, sets up the reference to the stars in the next line. And Herbert here is drawing on the older idea of the structure of the universe, which is that the stars that we see at night are the outer limit of our universe, and heaven itself is actually beyond the universe. So it's not, you can't get to it by going through the universe.
Poem's Conclusion and Impact
00:44:41
Speaker
So the Milky Way then,
00:44:43
Speaker
It's seen as something beautiful and it represents sort of the limits of the human world. And then the bird of paradise, that's actually a more ambiguous reference than you might think or hope. One way to take it is that a bird of paradise is a bird, of course, associated with flight. The bird is a symbol of
00:45:12
Speaker
beauty on a human scale in our human world, as opposed to something unutterably distant, like the Milky Way itself. But it seems to me your question is, in many ways, the basic question that we all have reading the poem that I have every time I reread it, which is, what is the relationship of all these images? Some heavenly ordinary man well-dressed, those two actually go really well together.
00:45:39
Speaker
They're both about clothing. The Milky Way, the bird of paradise, the connection. I mean, I made a case for a connection between them, but I think it's more tenuous. Right. There's celestial in both cases, right? Yeah, it was the idea of celestial. So there's an association. But then if you look at the first line of that quatrain, softness and peace and joy and love and bliss,
00:46:03
Speaker
I really like that line, but that's also vague. That's almost as if he's sort of given up coming up with images. He's just saying, here are things we like. But then he returns to the images.
00:46:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean that line on its own, which I do like too, especially like hearing it in your voice. But just if I were to abstract that line from the poem, that would seem like something that could be, you know, needle pointed, framed and put on the wall of a cabin or something like that. That is, it seems to be all, you know, so vague as to become kind of meaningless or disposable.
00:46:45
Speaker
In the context of the poem, it seems anomalous in a way, and therefore interesting, and in some interesting relation to these images that come in the poem. I guess in the bird of paradise, we focus naturally on the word bird and the word paradise, but maybe it's the word of, which is especially interesting there. In what sense is it of paradise? From paradise? Is it made out of paradise?
00:47:15
Speaker
Well, it's like the soul in paraphrase. You realize that once you look at the phrase, you can actually paraphrase it in various ways. And my point about the relationship between line 11 and line 12, as I said, is that in line 11, the two parts of the line work well together. They don't really in line 12. And that to me is one of the important things about the poem.
00:47:37
Speaker
Herbert has not written a poem which teaches us how to read it. A lot of poets write poems that are difficult often, but they actually, in a sense, contain instructions for how to read it and how to put them together. With Herbert, that labor of putting it together begins in the first line. What exactly is the relationship between prayer, the church's banquet, and the angel's age? That labor is renewed constantly in the poem. We never actually, I don't think this is the kind of poem where
00:48:08
Speaker
get anywhere, where we think, okay, now I see how it works. Well, that sounds absolutely right to me, and yet there's doubtless irony in the fact that given what you just said, the poem ends with the phrase, something understood, which if you were just to say, well, here's a sonnet, the final words are something understood,
00:48:33
Speaker
you might think, well, this is a poem that is making a definitive argument, a point that is distillable in some way. Maybe we could wind towards a conclusion here by my asking you to say something about the concluding couplet of the poem. I take it from your work and elsewhere, particularly in an English sonnet, a couplet often
00:49:02
Speaker
sums up the argument that has preceded it, or sometimes it does a kind of ironic about face on that argument. What is this couplet doing here? And maybe we should just read it one more time so it's fresh. Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood, the land of spices, something understood.
00:49:29
Speaker
Perhaps it's the best ending of any poem ever. I don't know, I just really love it. Something understood. So something understood, as I said, it's like a kind of tune in that it's really vague. You think something understood, okay, but what understood? What's understood? And then the other question, of course, is who's understanding it? And we don't really know either. In the religious context, of course, everyone's thinking of St. Paul's epistle to the Philippians.
00:49:59
Speaker
not under that name, but I think everyone knows the quotation, perhaps, where he talks about the peace of God that passeth understanding. So that's central to Christianity, and I think to most religions, which are sort of the core of the religion is something that our puny human minds can't understand, because it's so much bigger than humanity. So something is as close as you're going to get. Something's understood, but he can't tell us what it is, and
00:50:27
Speaker
Perhaps when he prays, he still doesn't know what it is, but he knows that something has been understood. And I would say understood goes both ways. It's something understood by God to whom he prays, but it's something Herbert understands about himself and about God through the act of praying.
00:50:50
Speaker
It's a high-risk ending, but I think it's really good. I want to point out some of the other images. So church bells, I see as a more specific version of a kind of tune, but these church bells are heard beyond the stars. In other words, they're heard in heaven. So a church bell is a manifestation of Christianity that is heard in heaven.
00:51:17
Speaker
The soul's blood is kind of the outlier here, but just as the body depends on blood, and Herbert is writing, this is a footnote, Herbert is writing it about the time that the Englishman, William Harvey, first in the whole world described how the heart works to pump blood. But so blood is necessary for the body. Prayer is necessary for the soul. It's the thing that nourishes it and makes it possible. The land of spices is
00:51:47
Speaker
Currently, every time I read this poem, I've been reading it a million times. Every time I read this one, I have a new favorite image. And I think The Land of Spices is my favorite one. And I think what he's referring to is that travelers accounts that Europeans made sailing
00:52:04
Speaker
into the Indian Ocean near India and Sri Lanka and Arabia and so on, where they could actually smell the spices, which were what they had come to take, and that's what made Europe so rich. But the scent of the spices could be perceived many, many kilometers across the waters. And I think what Herbert is doing here is gesturing towards something which is
00:52:31
Speaker
A big deal of Renaissance poetry, and every now and then I think I'm going to have to write about this, but it's the idea of poetry as insubstantial because it is just breath. So it's often presented as a kind of perfume, either the smell of a flower or an artificially made perfume.
00:52:51
Speaker
But it goes back to what we're saying about sound, which is that if there's no recording technology, sound, you hear it, and then it's over. And it's the same thing with the smell of a flower. If you're not right by the flower, you can't smell it.
Closing Thoughts and Humor
00:53:05
Speaker
Depends on proximity. On the one hand, he's written a poem that was printed. It's still being printed today. It's on the internet. On the other hand, as a speech act, it's like prayer in that
00:53:19
Speaker
it's there and then it's gone, which is, of course, strictly speaking, how Christianity thinks about the lives of humans, that they're also insubstantial in their earthly form. But understood, perhaps. Yeah, something understood. Yeah, it's such a bold ending.
00:53:47
Speaker
And as I say, it's typical of Herbert and of this poem that he ends with this ambiguity, this double ambiguity. A, what is something? B, who's doing the understanding?
00:54:02
Speaker
So the poem refuses to answer our questions, our presumed desire to be able to write a short prose paraphrase where we say, in this poem, Herbert says prayer is X. We're never going to do that. The paraphrase would just be, in this poem, Herbert says prayer is something understood. We've gotten no further. I like that.
Conclusion & Future Episodes
00:54:25
Speaker
Stephen, I have a final question for you, and it's a silly one. Can I ask it? Of course. I guess I didn't really give you the option just to decline. I think I've heard you say that you often encourage your students, was this in a Milton class, to choose a favorite line for Milton and have it tattooed onto their body? Yeah. Which is a delightful suggestion. If you were to take your own advice, but I restricted you to lines in this poem,
00:54:55
Speaker
Have you already given me your answer then? Is it the land of spices, something understood? Or what would you tattoo and why? I think I'm taking this as a dare. No, I think I would not the land of spices, just something understood because then.
00:55:14
Speaker
something understood is really vague in its position in the poem. If you take it out of the poem, it's even vaguer. And so I like that. So a tattoo is something permanent, unlike a poem, we could say, unlike a prayer. But what it records
00:55:33
Speaker
is this moment of not knowing, this something understood. Yeah. Well, good. That's lovely. I won't ask you where on your body the tattoo would sort of appear. Well, Stephen Guybury, I want to thank you very much for coming onto the podcast. It's been an absolute delight, of course. And I just want to remind people listening to subscribe, follow the podcast, leave a review and a rating that would help.
00:56:00
Speaker
help us reach more listeners, and I will be back in touch with you before long. Take care, everyone.