Poetry to See Again (and Again) Easter's Glory

Poetry for the Week before Easter
By Philip Sasser

One of the purposes of great art is to bring the overwhelming realities of life and thought within reach of normal, distracted, minds like ours. Without it, the gap between my own wisdom and the wisdom necessary to properly comprehend the wonder and mystery of birth, the changing of seasons, a fire in the hearth, sickness, and death is too wide to measure.

But art, and especially literature, closes the gap and marshals to the aid of average minds like mine the greatest minds God’s common grace has ever gifted.

Literature teaches us how to be more fully human. It teaches us how, and what, to feel and when to feel it. To be without poetry is to be seated at life’s banquet without ever having learned how to taste food - or even what fork to use. To be cut off from the Psalms, Keats, Milton, Millay, and Eliot is for each of us to be marooned on the islands of our minds, alone with our own native emotions, and the tragic assumption that the coincidence of our own life’s experiences represents the ordinary sum experiences of the lives of others. It is hard to love your neighbor well if you have never read a novel about what goes on in your neighbor’s heart.

God’s creation and His providential acts in our lives are simply too important, too vast, too tragic, and beautiful to be allowed to drift through our minds with only our own thoughts to give them homage. So we pay homage to God’s gift of spring each year by reading Virgil’s Georgics. We pay homage to His hawks that circle outside by having the Gerard Manly Hopkin’s poem “Windover” close at hand (“My heart in hiding, stirred for a bird”).

And now it is the week before Easter. Will we let the season slip past with only our own mind and the cultural clutter of bunnies and children in pastels to give it honor? How will we remember freshly the resurrection of Christ? How will we again celebrate with proper voice the central moment in all of human history? Who will teach us how to taste the feast laid before us? The hymnist wrote, “O for a thousand tongues to sing our great redeemer’s praise.” This Sunday we will use our voices, but behind the voices lies the mind - boorish and banal, most of the time - processing the words we sing with only a fraction of the reverence and awe that they deserve. Surely we need a thousand tongues, but we need a thousand minds, too, armed with pen and paper, expositing the multifoliate rose of Christ’s resurrection with all the force of their imagination to aid us.

George Herbert is one such mind. A country parson in seventeenth century England between Shakespeare’s death and Milton’s birth, Herbert pastored his church and quietly wrote the greatest body of devotional poetry in the English language. Our language was at its finest, then: alive and breathing, still being invented by writers who were less professors with dusty books than smiths bending to their genius a language that still glowed red-hot from the forge. Hamlet was still wet on the page, Paradise Lost was in the birth-canal, and the King James Bible was hot off the press.

Below are six of Herbert’s Holy Week poems, taken from his volume of one hundred and eighty poems he called, collectively, “The Church.” The passion and resurrection of Jesus is many fathoms deep. With Herbert’s poetry, we find our measuring line extended at least a fathom deeper.

THE AGONY

Philosophers have measured mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heaven, and traced fountains
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

Who would know Sin, let him repair
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man, so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments, bloody be.
Sin is that Press and Vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through every vein.

Who knows not Love, let him assay,
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

THE SINNER

Lord, how I am all ague, when I seek
What I have treasured in my memory!
Since, if my soul make even with the week,
Each seventh note by right is due to thee.

I find there quarries of piled vanities,

But shreds of holiness, that dare not venture
To show their face, since cross to thy decrees:
There the circumference earth is, heaven the centre.

In so much dregs the quintessence is small:
The spirit and good extract of my heart
Comes to about the many hundredth part.
Yet, Lord, restore thine image, hear my call:

And though my hard heart scarce to thee can groan,
Remember that thou once didst write in stone.

GOOD FRIDAY

O my chief good,
How shall I measure out thy blood?
How shall I count what thee befell,
And each grief tell?

Shall I thy woes

Number according to thy foes?
Or, since one star show'd thy first breath,
Shall all thy death?

Or shall each leaf,
Which falls in Autumn, score a grief?
Or cannot leaves, but fruit, be sign,
Of the true vine?

Then let each hour
Of my whole life one grief devour;
That thy distress through all may run,
And be my sun.

Or rather let
My several sins their sorrows get;
That, as each beast his cure doth know,
Each sin may so.

Since blood is fittest, Lord, to write
Thy sorrows in, and bloody fight;
My heart hath store; write there, where in
One box doth lie both ink and sin:

That when Sin spies so many foes,
Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes,
All come to lodge there, Sin may say,
No room for me, and fly away.

Sin being gone, O fill the place,
And keep possession with thy grace;
Lest sin take courage and return,
And all the writings blot or burn.

REDEMPTION

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th' old.

In Heaven at his manor I him sought:

They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.

I straight return'd, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.

SEPULCHRE

O blessed body! whither art thou thrown?
No lodging for thee, but a cold hard stone?
So many hearts on earth, and yet not one
Receive thee?

Sure there is room within our hearts good store;

For they can lodge transgressions by the score:
Thousands of toys dwell there, yet out of door
They leave thee.

But that which shows them large, shows them unfit.
Whatever sin did this pure rock commit,
Which holds thee now? Who hath indited it
Of murder?

Where our hard hearts took up of stones to brain thee,
And missing this, most falsely did arraign thee;
Only these stones in quiet entertain thee,
And order.

And as of old, the Law by heavenly art
Was writ in stone; so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find'st no fit heart
To hold thee.

Yet do we still persist as we began,
And so should perish, but that nothing can,
Though it be cold, hard, foul, from loving man
Withhold thee.

EASTER

Rise, heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delays,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him may'st rise
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, Just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part

With all thy art.
The cross taught all wood to resound his name
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day.
Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
Pleasant and long:
Or since all music is but three parts vied,
And multiplied;
O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
And make up our defects with his sweet art.

I got me flowers to strew thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought'st thy sweets along with thee.

The Sun arising in the East,
Though he give light, and th' East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.

Can there be any day but this,
Though many suns to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we miss:
There is but one, and that one ever.