'Colossians 3:3'
Our life is hid with Christ in God.
My words and thoughts do both express this notion,
That Life hath with the sun a double motion.
The first Is straight, and our diurnal friend,
The other Hid, and doth obliquely bend.
One life is wrapped In flesh, & and tends to earth:
The other winds towards Him, whose happy birth
Taught me to live here so, That still one eye
Should aim and shoot at that which Is on high:
Quitting with daily labour all My pleasure,
To gain at harvest an eternal Treasure.
That Life hath with the sun a double motion.
The first Is straight, and our diurnal friend,
The other Hid, and doth obliquely bend.
One life is wrapped In flesh, & and tends to earth:
The other winds towards Him, whose happy birth
Taught me to live here so, That still one eye
Should aim and shoot at that which Is on high:
Quitting with daily labour all My pleasure,
To gain at harvest an eternal Treasure.
In the 17th Century this verse must have been a trigger for a type-setters migraine. We are so used to multiple fonts, print software and graphic designs, we have little conception of how to produce different font sizes, italics, bold face using only lead characters on fixed print plates. And with no cut and paste, edit or delete!
The complex process of printing this poem mirrors the complexity of its content and the cleverness of the poet in creating the diagonal of the (paraphrased) biblical text. The actual text as Herbert read it in his Bible reads,
"If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,
where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. …
For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God."
The text is embedded, 'hid' in the verse, but emphasised in the printing. It means each line is stitched together with the Christocentric emphasis which occupies the centre of the poem, lines five and six "In Him". One of Herbert's familiar puns makes the point explicit: sun/Son. Just as the sun sets and rises, to the Son becomes incarnate and crucified, then risen and ascended. And the Christiian follows the same trajectory
So for the Christian reader, where is the centre of the Christian life? What trajectory does daily life follow? What is the aim and goal of existence? Herbert's answer is that we live every day on two levels, different but inextricably linked. We live in ordinary time, daily duties, within the limits of human effort and achievement. But there is a double movement in every Christian's existence, 'one is wrapt in flesh', the embodied person getting on with human life with all its vicissitudes, while the other is hid and 'doth obliquely bend', like a diagonal, as does the text in the poem.
But how does all this work? Well first, we get on with life, wrapt in flesh and tending towards the earth; we get our hands dirty while trying to make the world better; every day the journey goes on, step by step; we love and laugh, weep and struggle, in companionship or loneliness. When it goes well we rejoice, when it doesn't we still try to get on with it, sometimes hopeful, sometimes not so much.
But in bold italics across the lines that make up the poetry of our lives, "your life is hid with Christ in God." Herbert has produced a poem for those who don't think they're very good at this Christian thing. And that's true especially for those most aware of the two levels on which we live our lives. We try to get on with life here and now, but with an eye on Christ as the one whose life is both our hope and our location.
Herbert goes to some technical trouble as a poet to point Christians to their ultimate, eternal and secure location "in Christ", as the source of their hope, while we each seek to make all we can of our earthly, embodied existence in time and place, now and here.
Leave a Reply to Allan Taylor Cancel reply