This is one of my favourite poems, but from a poet I don't much get on with. I've got a wee soft leather bound Victorian book called Devotional Poets of the 17th Century, and Herrick gets most pages ahead of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw and Traherne. Nowadays I guess 17th Century devotional poetry should be labelled with the nutritional traffic light system. Too sentimental sweet like ladles of condensed milk, too many degree of difficulty semantic gymnastics, too spiritually voyeuristic of others and narcissistic of the inner self with an unhealthy fascination with personal spiritual performance….and so on.
Certainly, compared with modern religious poetry, the seventeenth century spoke to a a different world, one that seems a solar system or two distant from where we all live now. The leading devotional poets of the 17th Century were coming to terms with civil war and new approaches to military tactics, weaponry and political possibilities beyond absolute monarchy and bloody conflict. It's the difference between the newly effective musket volley, and the laser guided bomb and uranium enriched shell and flechette and cluster bombs. Forget globalisation, they were only discovering the extent of the world, its place in our own solar system post Copernicus, and centuries ahead the importance of international co-operation in economics, collaboration of resources and knowledge in science, technological exploitation of the earth, and capacities for communication that were simply unimaginable. Think Cromwell using social media to make the case against the King, or the international media reporting regicide and a generation later the Restoration.
And yet. Even Herrick, when he got it right, wrote about God in words that still make sense, at least theologically. That's why Herrick's poem on God's Boundless Mercy is such a favourite, because at their best, some of those old 17th C poems give richness to our praise, images to our worship, and a rootedness in the sacraments of creation which communicate the depths of God beyond words.
Maybe it's living beside the North Sea, replenished up here by two rivers, but this poem works for me:
God's boundless mercy is, to sinful man,
Like to the ever-wealthy ocean:
Which though it sends forth thousand streams, 'tis ne'er
Known, or else seen, to be the emptier;
And though it takes all in, 'tis yet no more
Full, and fill'd full, than when full fill'd before.
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