Dancing Before the Ark

...You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat...

...George Herbert, whom he describes as "that man of primitive piety" (meaning a piety such as the Early Christians and Fathers of the Church were believed to have had...

...By amplifying, rather than reducing...

...Stein refers to this combination of Christian feeling and classical eloquence as "the uneasy but fruitful marriage of Athens and Jerusalem...

...Herbert may be limited, but there is a perfection in what he can do that makes him the equal of Donne and Marvell...

...As for George Herbert, his archetype is Aaron, the Poet-Priest, whose harmonious music, be we Christian or lover of poetry, translates us...

...My dear, then I will serve...

...One of Herbert's strengths is his ability to confront the real issues of his vocation, and Stein shows him tackling the most difficult problem for the Christian writer—man's relation to God: Thy Life on earth was grief, and thou art still Constant unto it, making it be A point of honor, how to grieve in me, And in thy members suffer ill...

...With Stein's combination of clarity, wit, insight, and scholarship, it is probably the best book of criticism to appear this year and a valuable contribution to scholarship...

...His final pages are a tribute to Herbert's marvels, themes "limited in range, though not in depth," "freedom-indiscipline," "a splendid master of that basic illusion upon which his poetry depends, that the language and forms of art are only another, if better, way to talk naturally...

...Stein's own style is clear and concise, and his writing often seems elevated by its subject...

...I will bewail, approve: And all my sowre-sweet dayes I will lament and love...

...In one image he becomes quite poetic himself: "[Herbert's] artistic and personal seriousness combine gravity and grace in deliberate play—not seldom as if he were David dancing before the Ark...

...I have only the highest praise for George Herbert's Lyrics...

...Stein comments: ". . . as a poet he is a profound observer only when he is a passionate observer...

...The third section, "Complaint, Praise, and Love," discusses Herbert's themes and arguments...

...and stops: God writeth Loved...

...Stein ends his book with "Questions of Style and Form...

...Now Arnold Stein, the noted critic of 17th century poetry, and author of two books on Milton and one on Donne, argues the case for Herbert in a new study, George Herbert's Lyrics...

...this does violence to Herbert's intention...

...How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit, offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the Living God," says that Epistle, perhaps Herbert's text for this poem...

...He hoped, humbly, for the easier path of inspiration—one does not need to be poetic or religious to feel the attraction of that course...

...His one fault is an occasional tendency not to evaluate, thus seeming to make a poem work better than it does...

...Although he often mentions the possibility of ambiguity and alternate readings of poems, I am sorry that Stein did not mention the possible ambiguity in the final stanza of the beautiful "Love (HI)": And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame...

...In the second, he studies versification, showing how Herbert's techniques for making words move are significant in themselves, apart from meaning...

...In dealing with a poet like Herbert there is a temptation to insist (as did Rosemund Tuve) that he can only be understood in the full context of his tradition, thus making him inaccessible to anyone not steeped in it...

...Stein sums up Herbert's confrontation beautifully: "Nor does Herbert underestimate the human difficulties in making way for God...

...Stein goes on to demonstrate his point by analyzing "A True Hymn," in which Herbert uses the metaphor of writing a poem for loving God: Whereas if th' heart be moved, Although the verse be somewhat scant, God doth supply the want...

...He took his pastoral duties very seriously, and believed in catechizing his parishioners often because of the instructive and entertaining delights of questioning...

...The Christian must try to establish light and order in a dark and chaotic world, and so must the poet...

...In the first, "The Art of Plainness," he deals with Herbert's poetics...

...Each of his four chapters represents a different approach to Herbert's work, each building on previous ones...

...We are reminded of Walton's quotation about Herbert among sinners, translating himself—not only transcending, but transforming...

...The more usual reading of this dialogue sees the narrator as offering to serve—essentially the role of Peter trying to refuse the foot-washing in John's Gospel...

...However, it seems to me that there is an intentional ambiguity, and that Love may be offering to serve in the combined role of Priest and Sacrificial Victim in An Epistle to Hebrews...

...The fact that Herbert wrote only devotional poetry makes him less immediately accessible to the 20th century than his two famous contemporaries, John Donne and Andrew Marvell, whose broader range and more universal sense do not require the knowledge of their period for at least a superficial understanding of their poems...

...Herbert was a younger son in a remarkable family (his mother, Magdalen Herbert, was John Donne's patroness...

...He is a passionate observer chiefly of those recesses of the mind and heart from which his own decisive actions emerge...

...Stein's critical method is pluralist...

...Reviewed by PHOEBE PETTINGELL In the early decades of the 17th century, under a king famous for his interest in the arts and in religion, there was an English renaissance which produced the metaphysical school of poets...

...Stein believes that Herbert's most distinctive poetry—and his most personal—is about the love between man and God...

...Herbert writes in "Bitter-sweet": / will complain, yet praise...

...A portrait of this time is admirably given by Izaak Walton in his Lives, and nowhere so admirably exemplified as by his Life of Mr...

...Concerning Herbert's own view of the creative process as Heavenly Inspiration, Stein says: "I am convinced that the religious lyric, though it must fulfill special conditions, must also, and does, answer all the questions we ask of other lyrics...

...They who lament one crosse, Thou dying dayly, praise thee to thy losse...

...Stein puts Herbert in a tradition of Christian plain style writing stemming from the Pauline Epistles and St...

...I have only a few quarrels with Stein...

...He pleased God, and was beloved of him: so that whereas he lived among sinners, he translated him[self...

...Human grief becomes a creative form of loving God, in that it is an Imitatio Christi...

...I am not suggesting the second reading as an alternative to Stein's, but rather that Herbert meant the line to carry both possibilities, bridging two important Christian traditions...

...As for his love of music and his poetry, Walton exclaims, "Thus he sang on Earth such Hymns and Anthems as the Angels and he . . . now sing in Heaven...

...Another temptation is to oversimplify—for example, to take the poem above merely as a metaphor for art...

...Inspiration is, of course, the kind of concept that can easily cross the line from the secular to the sacred, and for Herbert so too does the act, or the metaphor, of writing poems...

...Herbert's life was so pious that he came to be regarded as almost a saint, and Walton sums up his life with a quotation from Ecclesi-astes...

...Stein remarks wryly: "However, we do not therefore think Herbert believed that this was the way to write poems, and that the individual details of thought and expression might safely be ignored because they would leap intervening stages if only 'th'heart be moved.' Herbert knew better, both as a poet and as a man of God...

...Affliction (III)"] Here, as Stein rightly shows, man's suffering is identified with Christ's...

...The majority of them scarcely survived the Civil War, and thus seem to be, in retrospect, a product of that Christian sweetness of spirit in the English Church before Calvinism took over...

...Herbert, the consummate craftsman, as described by Stein, is certainly more Athens than Walton's pious clergyman (Jerusalem), but Stein displays great sensitivity to and understanding of the poet's religion...

...He devotes 12 pages to the analysis of "Mortification," without any judgment of its quality (in my opinion, it is a very bad poem...

...His final evaluation of Herbert's great poems is that "They convince us that they are imaginative expressions by which the poet confronts and attempts to master his own life or death...

...Social ills, faults of the flesh, the lesser passions—these do not move him to distinguished expression...

...His best poems do not evade or divert violence, they transform it...

...In spite of the brilliant beginnings of a secular career at Cambridge, George decided to take holy orders and his advancement was very rapid indeed...

...As when th'heart says (sighing to be approved) Oh could I love...

...Stein admirably manages to make many of Herbert's poems more widely available...

...Augustine, based on both the rhetorical necessities of a religion where the Word is God and the classical influence of Plato and Horace...