Temper (1)
That first stanza. It has two exclamation marks, no question marks. But the entire poem is an agitated rhythm of self-questioning.
If only I could always be my best self, complains the poet. Herbert is at it again, giving himself a hard time. Praise is spasmodic because the emotion and feeling of gratitude comes and goes. If only he could be consistent, constant, dependable, his praise would be predictable, and his relationship with God as durable as a signature etched in steel. If only. Two words of a heart wounded by regret.
The rest of the poem is spent wishing it were otherwise. The second stanza stumbles and stutters over the word 'Sometimes. Not never, not always, but sometimes, that middle of the road word that makes no unbreakable promises, but does what it can. For Herbert, it's never enough to do quite well; anything short of excellence verging on perfection exposes what he truly is, 'a crumb of dust.'
That word 'sometimes'; at the risk of committing culpable incongruity, it recalls a song I heard countless times when our son was a certain age, and his music invaded the entire house space. 'Sometimes' by the rock band James is a bleak and defiant anthem against a world of elemental power, danger, loss of meaning, reduced significance and diminishing hope. At the core of the song the refrain,
Sometimes, when I look deep in your eyes I swear I can see your soul,
Sometimes, when I look deep in your eyes I swear I can see your soul.
This 90's song is a universe removed from Herbert's Seventeenth Century metaphysical poem. But those lines speak of a generation's urgent search for reality, authenticity, significant identity, self-knowing, looking for whatever it is that used to be called the soul. Herbert's more restrained discontent and existential dissatisfaction, given the religious intensity of his age, has the same sense of searching and being searched, of God looking deep inside and seeing the soul, and the human recoil from such a searching, searing stare.
I told you it was incongruous, James from Manchester, and Herbert from Bemerton. There's the best part of four centuries between them, but that sense of searching and being searched remains as one of the most disconcerting of all human anxieties.
Herbert finishes the poem with a resolution, an affirmation of faith that is part resignation to the divine will, part surrender of his own will, whether he is angel, dust or angel's dust, he is in God's hands:
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