“These are thy wonders, Lord of love, / To make us see we are but flowers that glide:”

Every year I step out the front door around the beginning of March, and this happens. For two or three weeks, when the sun shines, there is this concerto in purple, the floral equivalent of Vivaldi's Spring. This year they are of special interest, because I'm currently designing and working a tapestry based on some lines from George Herbert's poem 'The Flower'. (Full text below – probably best to read it before the rest of this post.)

While the poem deliberately avoids naming a particular flower, I've been intrigued trying to figure out which flowers might be candidates that inspired Herbert's wondering question:

             "Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart

Could have recovered greennesse?"

However, at the time Herbert wrote, the crocus as we know it was still to be introduced to the English Garden, and therefore would probably be unknown to him as a perennial corm. Still, its spectacular resurrection every Spring makes the crocus a telling example of the metaphor Herbert exploits in his exploration of the rhythms of spiritual life. Soon after the flowering of crocuses, the flower fades, the greenery wilts, shrivels, and the plants go "quite underground" where "dead to the world," "[they] keep house unknown."

Herbert has known times of "recovered greennesse" but also the inevitable aftermath of flowering – withering and shriveling down to the "mother root." The poem is a complex interrogation of the ways of God with a human soul. There is the longing to be past and finished with the inevitability of change, with its rising and declining, of faith and doubt, of gratitude and complaint, of contentment and resentment. There is also perplexity that try as he will to grow towards flowering, even when well watered and plenty of sunshine, nevertheless the cycle of the seasons of the soul relentlessly brings change, inconstancy, and impermanence. So for Herbert there is the added disappointment of unfulfilled longing, and frustrated desire for a settled intimacy and secure sense of loving and being loved.

There is so much more to this poem, most of which evades analysis and is more easily apprehended in readers who recognise in Herbert's experience much of  their own spiritual struggle. I mention this here because like all of Herbert's serious readers, I recognise in myself something of Herbert's ache and longing towards God, and how regularly and at times inexplicably, the spiritual life is a struggle of life and death, growth and decline, the heart now all "greennesse" and soon all "shrivel'd".

Twice Herbert pulls himself together with a good theological talking to.

"These are thy wonders, Lord of power, / killing and quickning, bringing down to hell".

There is in the being and actions of God that which is inscrutable, a mystery of divine purpose that human reason will never penetrate or reduce to a comfortable conformity whereby God does what we want or expect.

But Herbert is too good a theologian, and too fine a pastor, to leave it there. The last stanza reconfigures the basis of the divine human relationship by qualifying the nature, scope and purpose of the "Lord of power."  

"These are thy wonders, Lord of love, / To make us see we are but flowers that glide:"

In Herbert's poetry God's love is a cantus firmus, the underlying and integrating rhythm and beat of Gods ways with the world and with each Christian soul. There is warning and severity in this poem, as Herbert acknowledges there are experiences of divine anger and withdrawal, of personal anguish and inner dying. The life of the soul is mirrored in the flowers' dying in autumn, the apparent death of winter, and these before the promised resurrection of spring and the full flowering of summer. Christian sanctity and growth towards God requires a four seasonal cycle, bgoing on for the years of a lifetime.

 Herbert's choice of metaphor, a flower's fortunes through the annually recurring seasons, allows him a level of frankness in expressing his own spiritual vicissitudes and inner frustrations. The veil of metaphor also preserves some distance between Herbert's own disappointed affections and longings, his "shrivel'd heart", and the Lord of power who is also the Lord of love.

Within the story of his soul's struggles there is a sub-text of complaint that surfaces here and there in the poem, Herbert doesn't always know with which one he is dealing, the Lord of power or the Lord of Love. He is at the mercy of both the power and the love of God, but that word mercy is the theological key to the poem, and to many other poems in The Temple.  

This poem would require a much longer exposition to begin to do justice to its lyrical power and spiritual integrity. As I live with it and read it each day, it helps to frequently come face to face with a cluster of purple crocuses, a sacrament in colour, bearing witness to Herbert's hopefulness and wonder at "recovered greennesse." And travelling towards Easter with this poem, the slow work on a tapestry based on that phrase begins to take shape.

Incidentally the second photo is of irises, also from our front garden, though in North East Scotland they are some weeks later in flowering. Irises were certainly around in the gardens of Herbert's time, and they have a long history as symbols of resurrection. I don't think Herbert had any flower in particular in mind, at least no such hint is given in the poem. That is the strength of the image he has chosen, the changing seasons in a seventeenth century English garden provides a scene of ubiquitous examples of the soul's progress come rain or shine, frost or wind.