Therefore my soul lay out of sight,
Untuned, unstrung:
My feeble spirit, unable to look right,
Like a nipped blossom, hung
Discontented.
O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favours granting my request,
They and my mind may chime,
And mend my rhyme.
If you have felt the anxiety that comes when a trusted friendship seems threatened by a distancing you can't explain, and known the inner foreboding caused by the prolonged silence of someone who matters in your life, then you have an important key to this poem.
Inexplicable silence when conversation is expected, erodes confidence and quickly undermines the security and support on which we have come to depend. So God's silence feels like a problem; and the problem is how we feel.
Herbert's way of describing such spiritual anxiety and disabling neediness comes naturally to a songwriter and skilled player of stringed instruments. He feels like a discarded instrument, a lute with broken strings. Made for music and harmony and the fulfilment that comes from skilled playing, he is now unused, neglected and sad.
His inner spirit is untuned, unstrung and hangs discontented like a frost damaged bud. Just as the reader's mind is getting used to the broken instrument image, Herbert derails expectation by changing to a botanical metaphor. Because there is no music his potential is nipped in the bud. Frosted blossom means later fruitlessness.
These last two verses of 'Denial' spell out the felt consequences of God's silence, the inner tensions created by God's apparent absence and deliberate inaccessibility. This is what it feels like when prayer is unanswered, and God is unobtainable. And it may be that such denial of access, such refusal of our neediness rooted in insecurity, is the only way we grow in that deeper faith we call trust.
To grow into the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ requires a growing away from childish dependency. The view of God in this poem is of One who refuses to be coerced by our neediness, or compliant with our complaints. In fact this poem can be read as a calling in question of those forms of spirituality based on feeling, emotion, and intensity of inner experience. It sometimes takes desert silence for us to trust, in the wilderness times, the promise of God's presence rather than the feeling of God's absence. It's a hard lesson to learn.
'O cheer and tune my heartless breast' moves the entire poem into prayer as direct appeal. Herbert is so distressed he hardly knows what part of him needs fixing first. Soul, heart and mind, are either broken or out of tune. They are synonyms for the inner life, but subtly different in their sound, but they are so disordered, that his whole inner equilibrium is out of tune.
Amongst the skills of Herbert the poet is the ability to visualise and evoke the content of a poem by its form on the printed page. This poem is all over the place, just like Herbert's inner life. Only when God picks up the instrument that Herbert is, and restrings and begins to play God's music again, only then will there be harmony between his need and God's grace, and so will be restored the heart and mind and soul of the man.
On an entirely different literary zone, I wonder if growing up in faith, and having a grown up view of God, is similar to the coming and going of Nanny McPhee: “When you need me, but do not want me then I must stay. But when you want me but no longer need me, I have to go.” Now there's an interesting essay assignment topic!
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