Monday’s Verse 1-14-08

And we’re BAAACK! (pronounced à la Jimmy Fallon‘s a-hole, cheezball, FM DJ in an SNL skit).

Well I’m sorry that break was so long but it was, from my own personal point of view, quite necessary. I wish all a happy 2008.

A couple weeks ago Stanley Fish wrote a column in the Times about the uses of the humanities as a discipline. He actually defended the occupation for its LACK of a practical justification. His column got a huge response, and he’s continued it with a sequel this week–which begins with the poetry analysis quoted here. If you want to check out the whole article, then check out:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/the-uses-of-the-humanities-part-two/index.html?ref=opinion

I include it not for its overall argument, but because in a couple paragraphs he lays out the kind of thing I should be doing each week with the poems we read. I will try better. Of course Fish can, and likely does, do this in his sleep. I actually have to think about it, and the farther away I’ve gotten from coursework in literature, the harder it’s been. But I think he explains the basic GOAL succinctly. Poem* first, then analysis. And yes, Dr. Fish does end with an open question…

-ed.

*(Remember George Herbert, 1593-1633, Welshman, member of Parliament, Anglican priest, poet? Sure you do.)

MATINS

I cannot ope mine eyes,

But thou art ready there to catch

My morning-soul and sacrifice:

Then we must needs for that day make a match.

 

My God, what is a heart?

Silver, or gold, or precious stone,

Or star, or rainbow, or a part

Of all these things, or all of them in one?

 

My God, what is a heart?

That thou should it so eye and woo,

Pouring upon it all they art,

As if that thou hadst nothing else to do?

 

Indeed, man’s whole estate

Amounts (and richly) to serve thee:

He did not heaven and earth create,

Yet studies them, not him by whom they be.

 

Teach me thy love to know;

That this new light, which now I see

May both the w rk and workman show:

Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee.

***

“ In a poem titled “Matins,” the 17th century Anglican poet George Herbert says to God, If you will “teach me thy love to know . . . Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee.” But the dynamics of the proffered bargain – if you do X, I’ll do Y – are undercut by the line that proposes it, and especially by the double pun in “sunbeam.”

“Sun” is a standard pun on Son; it refers to Jesus Christ; “beam” means not only ray of light, but a piece of wood large enough to support a structure; it refers to the cross on which a crucified Christ by dying takes upon himself and redeems (pays the price for) the sins of those who believe in him. So while “by a sunbeam” seems to specify the means by which the poem’s speaker will perform a certain act – “I will climb to thee” – the phrase undercut his claim to be able to do so by reminding us (not him) that Christ has already done the climbing and thereby prevented (in the sense of anticipating) any positive act man mistakenly thinks to be his own. If the speaker climbs to God, he does so by means of God, and cannot take any personal credit for what he “does.” If he truly knows God’s love, he will know that as an unconditional and all-sufficing gift it has disabled him as an agent.