As Far as Poetry Can Go: The Genuine
Religious Poetry of George Herbert and
Elizabeth Bishop
Christine Perrin
MESSIAH COLLEGE
Elizabeth Bishop bought her first volume of George Herbert’s poems
on a field trip to a Provincetown secondhand bookstore; the fourteen yearold poet read some of his work and liked it. When she was twenty-four,
having graduated from Vassar, Herbert appeared to her in a dream where
she had a long conversation about meter with him. They spoke about
Dante’s metrical patterns, as well as those of Marianne Moore, and
Herbert. He was wearing a red satin coat and said he would be useful to
Bishop.1 Her response to this encounter, “Praise God,” comprises a rare,
perhaps singular, utterance for her and probably not without irony.2
Almost twenty years later, when Robert Lowell sends Bishop a family
edition of Herbert, her reaction suggests that she kept Herbert’s The
Temple near her like a sacred text. She tells him “I’ve been reading a lot
in Herbert—this is the first time I’d ever gone travelling without him so its
nice to have him again.”3
Herbert was an abiding presence in Bishop’s life, with greater
longevity than her closest friends and lovers. In a letter to Marianne
Moore, Bishop comments on a popular contemporary book, The Neurotic
Personality of our Time, that she would “infinitely rather approach such
things from the Christian viewpoint myself—the trouble is I’ve never been
able to find the books, except Herbert.”4 What was it about Herbert’s work
and reckoning that made him useful to Bishop and a constant companion?
Even the term “useful” is peculiar given Bishop’s commitment to
“useless” concentration which she belies in a letter to Anne Stevenson:
“What one ought to want in art…is the same thing that is necessary for its
creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.”5 It is possible
to look at the history of art as a dialogue of lovers or brothers and sisters
over time—one artist dwelling richly in another’s mind, mouth,
perceptions, such that a kinship between two otherwise unlikely figures
emerges. We see this in the pairing of Elizabeth Bishop and George
Herbert—an agnostic and a priest separated by over 300 years. On the
surface of their poems their aesthetic is considerably different, but just
beneath it their poetic methods and their movement through suffering to
reconciliation demonstrates the influence Herbert had on Bishop. Two
poems of many demonstrate the terms of this dialogue—“The End of
March” (Bishop) and “The Flower” (Herbert).
The discourse between the two poets is particularly curious given
Herbert’s depth of commitment to institutional Christianity; he was an
Anglican priest, his work is thoroughly religious and firmly within the
tradition of devotional poetry. Stanley Fish argues, in fact, that Herbert’s
interest was in catechizing the reader—a didactic practice.6 Bishop, to the
contrary, though raised between the Baptist and Presbyterian churches in
her nomadic childhood, and a great lover of hymns, found the church and
its devotees unappealing: “I am not a believer … I dislike the didacticism,
not to say condescension of the practicing Christians I know.”7 It would
appear that what she disliked about Christians characterizes Herbert’s
poetry exactly.
Many who have written about this surprising companionship point to a
variety of aesthetic and even rhetorical affinities—the two poets share a
penchant for allegory, a metaphysical interest in watching the process of
thought, a reverent attention to the world, and both seek access to matters
of the spirit through the finite. Both privilege a distinct naturalness of tone
and tend toward plain speech, wit, epiphanic revelations that come as
reversals at the end of poems. But how can two people who
fundamentally disagree in their conclusions agree closely in their
perceptions? How did Herbert delight a reader whose religious
sympathies were fiercely different? Two seminal poems related to the
liminal period of winter into spring when “tempests f(a)ll” and “rackety”
“icy” winds are strong—help us to understand the perplexing relationship
of influence.
Bishop’s spring poem locates itself firmly in Duxbury, Massachusetts,
a coastal town close to Boston, where she spent much time in her later
years while she was teaching at Harvard. As with all of Bishop’s poems,
we understand that the literal, in this case weather, becomes an adequate
symbol, even an allegory, for the soul’s pilgrimage. Anyone who has
passed time in New England on the coast in March knows the particular
longing, memorialized in poetry, for spring, for the stormy dark to abate,
for warmth and light after the long winter. This speaker does the external
weather justice describing a landscape of misery: cold, windy, withdrawn,
indrawn, numbing, steely, dark. The wind is so strong that it disrupts the
order of the geese formation. This excursion comes as the end of a long
March. March, of course, suggests not only a transitional month but also
an extended, compulsory, measured walk.
This is the penultimate poem in Bishop’s last published book,
Geography III. It was written toward the end of her life and we see in it a
mastery of her approach. Bishop admired Herbert’s insistence on the
physical and its inseparable relation to the spiritual. The relationship
between the finite and metaphysical, a deeply literary and spiritual value
for both writers, shows up in their work in every poem. Bishop perfected
her own ways of paying reverent attention to location, and, as in the work
of the metaphysical poets, the literal and the symbolic were consciously, if
subtly, linked in her work. While both poets’ work is deeply rooted in the
physical. Bishop, in particular, seems to generate the metaphysical from
the concrete world, on which she exerts pressure with her patient and
penetrating gaze and ability to describe what she sees. The imagination
descends into the density of matter, and only rises to the symbol from the
richness of the atomic stuff of the visible world. There are some who
would argue that reading the world allegorically is itself a metaphysical
commitment and a deeply Christian practice (first developed in
relationship to exegetical approaches to the Christian scriptures—Andrew
Louth makes a good case for this in his book Discerning the Mystery).
Regardless, it is a visceral and long established practice of Bishop to
assume, almost to the point of not ever mentioning it discursively, the
inherence of physical and spiritual meanings. She esteemed this
commitment to the physical world in Herbert, whose work is firmly
located in this manner—the church porch, the windows, the pulley, the
flower—most of his titles demonstrate this attachment. Writing to Anne
Stevenson to explain her commitment to details that open into “meanings,”
Bishop describes concentration “on all the various particulars that
surround us and that are freighted with meanings so abundant that we may
find the consolations of systematic philosophy to be quite inessential.”8
Corelle qualifies the statement insisting that, for Bishop, this consolation
was not unnecessary, but rather unavailable. Clearly it is through the
physical—the materiality of the world and of language—Bishop found the
means by which to investigate and probe the unknowable.
No exception, “The End of March,” is tied to earth: a walking poem,
an ocean poem, and written by a sensibility attuned to bad weather.
We’ve all been on the beach on wretched days, when we feel ourselves
exposed to the elements, unprotected, and unloved by nature. That is the
case with our speaker who walks down the beach and back in the
Massachusetts early spring. Walking in such weather draws out the old
longings for a different life than the one she is living and she must reckon
with this. Cheryl Walker hears Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” as a
corollary to this poem with its opening spiritual desolation and the
exposure of the individual when the grand narratives have been removed
because God is dead.9 Unlike Arnold and true to her commitment to the
particular, Bishop starts small, carefully describing the ocean’s distance as
“indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken.”10 The ocean, by Walker’s
reading, suggests divine power and the presence of a mighty and
ubiquitous presence that has withdrawn from close contact. This idea
begins to seem more plausible later in the poem, as Bishop widens her
scope from stanza to stanza.
The second stanza of the beach-walk opens under the gaze of a
painterly eye which reports with exactitude telling us the “sky was darker
than the water / it was the color of mutton-fat jade.”11 How far do we
take analogy? J.D. McClatchy suggests that the “mutton” reference
invokes the paschal lamb.12 Notwithstanding, we see Bishop’s rigorous
attendance to the physical details, and understand that this absorbed
attention to the scene, and the language describes it, crosses into
metaphysical territory. Simone Weil designates this kind of attention as
the close companion to prayer—both in its discipline and in its capacity to
transform or penetrate. If the spiritual inheres the physical, attention to
one functions as a door or membrane to the other. (Incidentally, Bishop
was fascinated by Weil’s conversion which reputedly involved her
physical experience of Christ’s presence while reciting Herbert’s poem
“Love (3).”)13
Indeed, the solid physical presence of objects thickly clots this poem
and casually opens the vein to the metaphysical—the sand is wet, the
walkers wear rubber boots, they are following dog prints, they find
“lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string.”14 Another aspect of
Herbert’s poetic method is his naturalness of tone, concern for the
ordinary, as well as his use of the interior voice. Here, at the end of her
apprenticeship, we see how masterfully she had learned to do likewise. It
appears to be a catalogue of ordinary observations, but the voice speaking
begins to wander inward, to meditate on what it says; isn’t speaking just
for the listener any longer. The child-like repetition—“lengths and
lengths,” and later “over and over,” speaks of the trail of string. Like W.
C. Williams’ paper bag—this string takes on the proportions of a man,
then a snarl, a ghost, and the language follows the string and restates
itself—“awash, / rising on every wave, / a sodden ghost,/ falling back,
sodden, giving up the ghost…”15 Such a strange musical riff that enacts
the mind in thought; this is another Herbertian lesson—drawing attention
to the mind’s associative process as it thinks aloud. “The End of March”
speaker construes a kite, but finding none leaves the implicit question
trailing like the string. Notice the open profusion of “y” sounds to describe
the buffeting wind, followed by the “n” sounds for the withdrawn ocean,
and the long “o” sounds to add a tone to the wind at stanza’s end. In the
second stanza the rhythm that emerges from the repetition of words
produces a similar effect, in this case the motion being concentrated on the
strange string-man haunting the walker as if it were a dead body floating
in the surf.
This interrogative mode, introduced in an attempt to solve the mystery
of the string, is another that these poets share in the course of these two
poems, and throughout their work, their propensity to ask questions
contributes to our ability to travel the path of their minds. For Bishop, the
seemingly artless yet earnest question is a disposition toward the world.
Richard Wilbur, in an interview, describes an exchange with Bishop where
she became insistent with him about his Christian commitments
contending, “You can’t believe all those things.”16 He concludes the
anecdote with this summary, “It surprised me because of her bringing up,
(from which she) had many Christian associations, cared about many
Christian things, and had got (them) into her poems here and there. I think
that was what she was left with, the questions, if not the answers, of a
person with a religious temperament.”17 In “Five Flights Up,” the poem
that immediately follows “The End of March,” the speaker weighs human
shame and despair by contrasting it with that of animals—“Perhaps in his
sleep, too, the bird inquires / once or twice, quavering. / Questions—if that
is what they are— / answered directly, simply, / by day itself.”18 Such
questions were not answered simply for Bishop. Wilbur identifies the
relationship between the questions and her religious temperament, which
helps us to understand why Herbert would appeal to her at all and why his
was the sort of book she would turn to approach such matters.
Not surprisingly, the question that surfaces throughout her work
appears again in “The End of March” incising her longing for and inability
to reach home and the subsequent suffering for its absence. An earlier
poem, “Questions of Travel,” ends asking “should we have stayed at
home, / wherever that may be?”19 Like Herbert’s temple poems, these
poems are physically located, in Bishop’s case in maps, geography and
houses—concentric circles that extend around the core riddle which is
why can’t I find a home, what is a home? Unlike him, she seems to need
to locate herself in time and physical space to combat her existential lack
of tether. Throughout the body of her work, the geography of Brazil and
Nova Scotia figures heavily into the territory she maps for readers and for
herself—two, almost binary (hot/cold, south/north, carnival/restraint)
places where she found temporary homes. Her poems are juxtaposed to
her biography of an uprooted childhood and a wandering adulthood, which
lacked a permanent dwelling place and a permanent companion. Thus,
familiar readers, when they arrive at the house in “The End of March,” in
stanza three—“my proto (first)-dream-house, / my crypto (secret)-dreamhouse,” are aware that they have, seemingly carelessly, marched into the
force field of a charged object. The speaker admits that she “wanted to get
as far” as this curious house, which she describes as “that crooked box/ set
up on pilings, shingled green.”20 Here is another instance of imaginative,
wandering play at a serious moment—she wryly calls it “a sort of
artichoke of a house” and wonders aloud if it has been “boiled with
bicarbonate of soda.”21 She wonders what she is looking at—“are they
railroad ties?”22 She admits the place is “dubious.” But she also discloses
her desire to retire there to do mostly nothing except use binoculars, read
books, write notes, talk to herself, watch the rain, and drink, presumably
alcohol. Such an odd admission, why would anyone prefer this? In both
Bishop and Herbert irony and playfulness reside close to a deep sense of
being dust in every sense of the word, and a perception of uselessness.
Remarkably, our guide shows us, here at the end of a life-struggle, her
ideal retreat from the world; we begin to understand she is in the process
of reconciling herself to nature (the weather her life has offered), her own
nature (the fact that this was an ideal for her) and to the loss of a dream
(that it will never be). We know the daydream isn’t possible in the
physical world: the moment, the body, the temperature, even the
electricity, won’t allow this “perfect! But—impossible” dream.23 The
process through the external weather begins by admitting it is too cold to
make the journey. This admission precedes the homecoming to the
internal weather—a process of identifying her ramshackle daydreams.
(How could anyone who was a terribly self-destructive alcoholic admit
that this was part of her secret and earliest ideal?) One of the painful
aspects of this poem’s passage is the suffering that the speaker does for
who she is, for her own nature. This category of suffering would be easy
to pass over: the speaker desires this boiled artichoke house, work that
never yields, utter loneliness, and solo-drinking. The very naming of these
longings is a process of recognition—I am the sort of person who desires
this and it pains me to know that. Walker puts this contemplative
realization in the category of mystical knowledge saying “even if we
cannot bear the full weight of knowledge we can feel its edge as suffering
and assent to it.”24 In an earlier poem, “The Moose,” the speaker names it
this way: “‘Yes…’” that peculiar / affirmative. ‘Yes…’/ a sharp, indrawn
breath, / half groan, half acceptance, / that means ‘Life’s like that. / We
know it (also death).’”25 Bishop traces the course, not only of the mind in
process, of the heart in process. The speaker acknowledges the suffering
for the external nature of things, for her own nature and for the
relinquishment of the pseudo-ideal. The walk on the beach through bad
weather toward an odd dream house that cannot be reached, is a thumbnail
sketch of the process of coming home to oneself. The turning around to
struggle back down the cold beach, and away from that desired dwelling
place is an act of acknowledgement and renunciation. The habit of
attending closely to the particulars of the local scene yields the meanings
present there in progressive stages.
Certainly the work that brought her to this dark beach includes all sorts
of carefully revealed sufferings. In Slate Magazine, Meghan O’Rourke
demurs on the subject of Bishop’s famous reserve: “For all Bishop’s
modesty, her voice has an unmistakable moral clarity—paradoxically
derived from her ability to evoke uncertainty … she used reticence as a
tool to lay bare deep feelings.”26 O’Rourke points out that Bishop likely
knew that her gift was in description and found ways to invest her poems
with a sense of great pain and to take the reader to the most intimate places
by involving the reader in her own experience of coming to understand.
O’Rourke describes this process in contrast to the historical lyric poem
which “was traditionally thought of as a monument, a crystallization of a
moment in time, in Bishop’s hands it becomes a tidal inlet—contained but
always shifting.”27 “The End of March,” a tidal poem, demonstrates this
insightfully named tidal inlet of the mental process. The speaker takes us
through the desolate physical scene to the subject of inhabiting a home,
which, over a lifetime, had produced the most unhappiness in her poetry
and life.
The strong feelings that such a flood subject is likely to evoke are
regulated at every moment of the journey by precise description and
language, but there is also a strange solace that comes through the
admission. We understand some distance has been gained—the house has
been “boarded up.”28 In fact, the speaker is boarding up the “dream” house
before our eyes, putting it to rest as a possibility, by accepting its
impossibility. A further signal of long travail and a degree of arrival is the
sensibility narrating the exterior and interior doubling (signaled by being
“doubled in the window,”) has room to be playful with the story and to
linger over details.29 The excursion itself is a doubling because the walkers
turn back to retrace the steps they have just taken, just as the poet retraces
her life’s work and soul’s movement—telling us their “faces froze on the
other side”30—a joking comment, almost slapstick in its absurdity.
When it is least expected, on the heels of a surrendered, boarded-up
dream, the temperature warms a bit—the sun [comes] out “for just a
minute.”31 The momentary quality of this unveiling is repeated on the very
next line—“For just a minute” the random, most solid and unchanging
objects on the beach, the stones, turn “multi-colored.”32 This time, unlike
her early poem, “The Fish,” there is no fanfare of “rainbow, rainbow,
rainbow”33 at the moment of transformation, instead, like her poem titled
“Poem” the abidance is narrow—there are just some rocks glittering in the
sun. She gives up the dramatic epiphany but confesses an illumination
nonetheless. Corelle thinks the shadows thrown out by the stones that were
“high enough” are emblems that “represent her faith in the power of her
craft to commemorate and her hope to become one of those high enough to
throw out long shadows.”34 But the reconciliation here seems deeply
tangled with the most primary and abiding concerns of hers: loneliness,
home, and self-hood. It is also knotted to what comes next—the speaker
turns back to the lion, calling it “the lion sun,” which is positioned behind
the walkers, and describes it as a walker himself, who made “majestic”
paw-prints and enigmatically “perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to
play with.”35 We know that Bishop was reading Augustine’s City of God
around this time, which speaks of the footprints of God in Book XI,
Chapter 28.36 The lion is a Christian allegory—the lion of Judah, in
Christian interpretation, is Christ who was from the tribe of Judah and to
whom the text of Revelation gives this title. Incongruously, the lion is like
a great kitten frolicking on the beach with string, batting a kite down from
the sky. Our own imagination wanders, as she must have intended by her
own example: is the kite an emblem of her own soaring dreams brought
closer to the earth? Or is it the imagination, which needs to both fly and
descend into the lived world to leave the proto/crypto dream? An outcome
of Bishop’s habit of interrogation is its transference of agency to the
reader, Bishop and Herbert both cause readers to ask honest questions out
of our “poore silly soul(es).”37 Here the light meandering touch helps us to
see the process of reconciliation as not separate from play. The
illuminating figure—the lion—plays with the kite, which is itself
whimsical, “useless,” playful object.
What is Bishop’s intention in presenting these enigmatic and playful
images in such a serious poem? The foreground of this poem is all beach
and march, which function as a membrane of the speaker’s external
suffering and internal awareness of the inadequacy and weakness of her
nature and its dreams. While the reintroduction of the string contains an
aspect of return, now the lion plays with it and nothing in the earlier part
of the poem suggests the possibility of momentary magnificence that
emerges with the lion sun. The rising action of the poem is a walk to the
dream house and its boarding up appears to be the climax, but what should
be the dénouement becomes both climax and arrival. This is the only sort
of illumination a Bishop poem can bear—a reversal of expectations that
happens after relinquishing the ideal, which materializes on the way back
from the lost dream. In this end-of-life poem there is a developmental
relationship between the speaker’s acknowledgement of external nature
which is the external conditions of our lives, her own nature, and the
particular suffering that attends it, the relinquishing of her hopes, and the
emergent light. This is as close as we get to an answer to the question
“where is home” “why do I want this kind of home?” “why can’t I get it?”
Marianne Moore’s comment sheds light toward understanding “The
End of March” as a poem about suffering and the search for home as a
search for a location more significant than a house: “Miss Bishop’s
speculation also, concerning faith—religious faith—is a carefully plumbed
depth.”38 More specifically, Merrin describes Bishop’s attraction to
religious poetry, quoting from Bishop’s own early journals:
…It proceeds from the material, the material eaten out with acid, pulled
down from underneath, made to perform and always kept in order, in its
place. Sometimes it cannot be made to indicate its spiritual goal clearly
(some of Hopkins’ say, where the point seems to be missing) but even then
the spiritual must be felt…this is why genuine religious poetry seems to be
about as far as poetry can go—and as good as it can be.39
Bishop spells out the spiritual goal of material and her purpose to write
genuine religious poetry. At this moment in the poem, just after
renouncing the dream, the speaker is tentative and playful about the nature
of the illumination she experiences. The reader can follow closely enough
to understand there is a process of identification and acknowledgement,
relinquishing, and that light follows these steps. But Bishop will only hit
at the nature of the radiance. The rest is inferred from our knowledge of
her work and her life at large and in this penultimate moment in particular.
This parabola of experience, from suffering to reconciliation, is deeply
embedded in the work of George Herbert. One Herbert poem that clearly
establishes a similar trajectory is “The Flower,” in which the speaker
compares himself to a growing plant subject to the vagaries of the weather,
the root system, and the life cycle of the year in which vegetation
apparently dies and resurrects despite the tempests. The allegory draws on
and echoes back a number of biblical passages that realize the mutability
and evanescence of human life—whose days are but grass, and the
necessity for the seed to die in order to live (Psalm 103.15, Corinthians
15.38). The poem explores the discipline of suffering and its relationship
to peace. This last conclusion is not one that Bishop shared with Herbert
eschatologically; as her own admission establishes, she was a confirmed
agnostic who grew up having alienating experiences with Christians. The
body of her work demonstrates a range of response, from ambivalence to
irony, to the Christian tradition. However, “The End of March,” at the end
of her life, achieves a reconciliation that comes closest to peace and
resembles the parabola of Herbert’s flower.
During this period when Bishop was reading The City of God and
ailing, she called Peggy Ellsberg, who recounts their conversation in an
interview: “she (Bishop) said, I want to believe this. It is one of the most
exciting things I’ve ever read. I called you because I know you are a
Catholic and I want to hear what you have to say.”40 They spoke together
of life after death and of Bishop’s regrets that she did not have a child.
Ellsberg remembers answering Bishop “I have no child, but I have no
doubts about immortality…” and Bishop’s rejoinder, “That’s why I called
you.”41 This conversation suggests an unforeseen overlap of desire
between the poets and further supports the fact that Bishop was writing
religious poetry. The speaker of “The Flower” outlines a trajectory similar
to the “The End of March”—cold frosty spring to “recover’d greennesse”
(568:9) of a flower which has died with the life cycle of the earth. “The
Flower” speaks from the vantage of having recently recovered (thus
possessing a voice), but also represents the “grief” (567:5) and “cold
thing” (567:7) and “hell” (568:16) suffered in the cycle, which is likely to
be suffered again. The cosmic implications of “The Flower” reach beyond
the claims Bishop is comfortable making in her poems, but which she
probed in her fashion. Parallel to the winter-spring movement, “The
Flower” allegorizes the flower’s cycle as the arc of the outcast of Paradise
making his way through affliction to a garden “where to bide” (569:46).
Not only were the comforts of systematic philosophy unavailable to
Bishop but those of Christian theology, such as this one, were as well.
Nonetheless, the process of reconciliation is similar.
Herbert’s “The Flower” is only one among many that Bishop knew
well. As it opens, we are conscious of the suffering of winter, not simply
as a season of the earth but of the heart. In stanza one “Grief melts away /
Like snow in May, / As if there were no such cold thing” (567:5-7). Like
“The End of March,” this poem achieves a remarkable indwelling of the
physical and spiritual: snow-weather and heart-weather ring at once with
their doubly applicable coldness. This mirroring or inherence between
physical and spiritual realities continues in stanza two speaking of “my
shrivel’d heart” which “was gone / Quite under ground” (568:8-10). In
addition to drawing upon the Christian scriptures and allegorizing the soul,
Herbert contextualizes this poem in the experience of the Christian
passion. In The Temple, “The Flower” comes directly after the poems
“Grief” and “The Cross.” The reader walks the pilgrim road with the poet
through the grief that “excludes both … musick and a rhyme” (561:18-17)
and on to the cross whose “contrarieties crush me” (564:32), on her way to
the “The Flower” at the foot of the cross. Our flowering as individuals is
taking the pattern of the flower that presumably grew at the foot of the
cross after having witnessed its hell. We are led poem by poem, as if on
foot, to the place of grieving Christ’s passion, to the cross, and then
outward again to the foot of the cross where a flower grows,
demonstrating the power of resurrection even at place of desolation.
Hence the conjunction between the physical and spiritual realities extends
to the manuscript itself, which has located us on the road to Calvary.
Here the “mother-root” (568:11), the “hard weather” (568:13), the
“greennesse” (567:9)—all signify that the weather is both exterior and the
interior to the speaker. The ground/dust/earth becomes not only a source
of hardship, of paradise-leaving, of “dea(th) to the world” (568:14) but of
home and house. All of these dual realities held within the single
experience of flowering partake of the “contrarieties” Herbert attributes to
the cross which is itself death/life, suffering/consolation, innocent/victim,
desolation/hope. The earth-rooted human endures the death-coldness of
sin and sunlessness under the thrall of winter but returns as the earth
returns to spring (the natural symbol of resurrection). For Herbert the
external weather and internal weather are merged entirely, this is not
simply a literary value but a theological statement suggesting that our
nature is tied to the nature of what happened since humankind left
paradise, and hence it continues to happen to the earth. It was human
choice that caused the weather to change and subsequently we weather it
outside and within ourselves. Herbert’s scale is cosmic, he speaking about
all of us, about original sin, like Bishop, he goes beyond the bad weather.
We labor in the earth of our nature, which is mutable, we long “that I once
past changing were, / Fast in they Paradise” (568:22-23). Herbert’s
longing for home is total, his dream house is nothing short of Paradise;
this is the inconsolable longing that C.S. Lewis uses the German word to
name—sehnsucht. Conscious of our “groaning” our bent-ness despite the
fact that we grow upwards, of our penchant to reject the spring shower
offered to us, the speaker identifies the part of our affliction which relates
to our nature, which is also tied to the ideal we have embraced. In
Christian theology and in George Herbert’s theology, this pseudo-ideal is
carried over from our first parent’s (Adam and Eve) attempt to get food
and wisdom outside of communion with their Lord. Herbert’s claims are
vast in comparison to Bishop’s, and one might argue they are vastly
impersonal, a simple restating of Christian doctrine but the source, the
movement and point of arrival are quite similar. If the moment of this
poem is a return or recovery, as the speaker states, what is being
reconciled?
The speaker understands that he partakes of this ancient pattern, his
moment of greenness and quickening will again succumb to cold, frost and
tempests. Both of these masters fathom the mutable aspect of experience
and its inextricable relationship to the fact that all physical and spiritual
knowledge is tied to each other and subject to change. “The End of
March” accentuates the momentary, though greatly important, illuminating
physical presence of the sun, which is the agent in both poems. In stanza
five of “The Flower” Christ and light are implicitly tied together and the
speaker investigates what happens when “Thy anger comes, and I decline”
(568:31). It does not spell out the connection between light and Christ, the
poem assumes it; we know this because “Thy anger” is followed by a
series of weather implications—frost, burn—at the least “frown of thine”
(568:35). The suggestion is that Christ is light and the earth’s survival is
intricately tied together, light/Christ here cannot be extracted from each
other. Whereas with Bishop we have to follow the string-trail to see the
relation between the lion sun and Christ, in Herbert it is so closely allied
that it is metaphorically assumed and not explained. In Herbert’s third
stanza our brush with change, through the flesh of the flower, occupies
about the same amount of time and space as the momentary illumination
of the lion sun in “The End of March”—“bringing down to hell / and up to
heaven in an houre” (568:16-17). Both poets are conscious of the brevity
of moments of “quickening” (16). Herbert acknowledges the brevity also
of “killing” (16), or moments of affliction. Proportionally, “The End of
March” spends much more time on the affliction whereas “The Flower”
gives more time to the recovery, the return, but both acknowledge the
central role of the sun in the quickening moment, ultimately both also
acknowledge the link between Christ and the light.
It is no accident that hell, bell, all, and spell are the rhyme choices for
stanza three of “The Flower”. While scholars disagree about whether this
sentence refers to a letting go of self or the difference between man’s
mutability and God’s unchanging word, both interpretations identify a
submission, a relinquishing of the preeminence of self. The presence of
the light as a figure for Christ in relation to the flower’s inability to sustain
itself is a powerful comment on the fantasy of human independence. This
is the self which is hell to itself (Lowell’s “Skunk Hour”—“I myself am
hell”), the self which, if it could relinquish its nature, might convert a
tolling funeral bell into the chime of celebration.42 This is the self that
willfully leaves paradise “by their pride” (569:49) but it is also the voice
that exclaims “Oh that I once past changing were, / Fast in thy Paradise,
where no flower can wither!” (568:22-3). Helen Wilcox describes
Herbert’s “recoveries (down to hell up to heaven), which have their
circumscribing pattern in resurrection (introduction).” Just as Bishop’s
speaker proceeds from cold misery to identifying her nature in her
longings and ultimately renouncing the old ideal, so must Herbert’s
speaker.
The reconciliation that must happen in “The Flower” is the speaker’s
reference to his mutability—he is not past change, he is not in paradise, he
is subject to the same desperate attempts as the first inhabitants of paradise
“who would be more, / swelling through store” (569:47-8). Though for
the moment he speaks out of recovered greenness, the “hard weather” (13)
will drive the flower “quite underground” (10) again. The speaker is
conscious of being “Still upwards bent,” subject to the “frost” of God’s
anger and absence and to the contrarieties of being—both moving upward
and bent at once (29-31). As in “The End of March” this weather and
growth is a function of the nature of things as well as the speaker’s nature.
For Herbert it is also a function of “our” human nature in relationship to
the fall and original sin—he speaks with the comprehensive reach of the
catechizer, Bishop does not.
Herbert is more sure of how his tortured longing to be “past changing”
(22) might be reconciled, might find a garden “where to bide” (46)—a
permanent home. But none of the possibility of arrival curtails the
“growing and groning,” the “so many deaths I live and write” (25, 37).
This is the genuine devotional language and tone that Bishop could not
only stomach but dwell within. The resurrection inscribed here involves
elements similar to those in “The End of March:” age, the delight of
writing, contact with the elements, proximity to the sorrow of the tempests
that “fell all night” (42). Both poems end speaking of Lord—“teasing lion
sun”43 and “Lord of love” (569:43). Herbert describes the God-given sight
“To make us see we are but flowers that glide” (44), suggesting that
insight comes when we acknowledge and perhaps affirm that aspect of our
lives which has haunted, even tormented us. In this case, when the
speaker sees the transience, the mutability, the inconstancy of the creature
subject to the weather outside and within himself, the sight becomes an
agent that opens him to the Christ/sun and he exclaims, “Oh, my only
light” (39). This motion counterpoints the proud desire for more than the
given communion with God, which fallen nature requires in order to be
restored. Food, growth, home come only through death and resulting
sight. Notice the grammar of “we” “us” “our” in both our masters at this
precipice (poem’s end, book’s end, life’s end) which insists that arrival
comes in such paradoxical doubles—death/budding life, dark
tempests/light, artistic drought/relish versing, that self/this self. Affliction
and reconciliation live so close to each other in both of these poems, and
these writers, that painfully reckon with the nature and source of their
suffering, and in the process reconcile themselves to what is real, however
disappointing, making room for light. Perhaps this is the reason that
Elizabeth Bishop could bear the Christian catechizing of a priest, George
Herbert, her constant companion over fifty four years, two continents,
many loved houses, and lost beloveds.
1. Jeredith Merrin, An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop,
and The Uses of Tradition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 39.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 40.
4. Laurel Snow Corelle, Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity: A Poet’s High
Argument (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978), 49.
5. Ibid., 82.
6. Stanley Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), 11.
7. Cheryl Walker, God and Elizabeth Bishop: Meditations on Religion and
Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 19.
8. Corelle, Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity: A Poet’s High Argument, 82.
9. Ibid., 86.
10. Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 (New York: Ferrar,
Straus, 1983), 4.
11. Ibid., 11.
12. Walker, God and Elizabeth Bishop: Meditations on Religion and Poetry,
89.
13. Corelle, Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity: A Poet’s High Argument, 27.
14. Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, 17.
15. Ibid., 20-22.
16. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau, Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 348-349.
17. Ibid., 349.
18. Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, 5-9.
19. Ibid., 66-7.
20. Ibid., 24-5.
21. Ibid., 26-7.
22. Ibid., 31.
23. Ibid., 49.
24. Ibid., 88.
25. Ibid., 115-120.
26. Meghan O’Rourke, “Casual Perfection,” Slate Magazine, (13 June 2006):
2.
27. Ibid., 2.
28. Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, 52.
29. Ibid., 42.
30. Ibid., 53.
31. Ibid., 54.
32. Ibid., 57.
33. Ibid., 75.
34. Corelle, Elizabeth Bishop and Christianity: A Poet’s High Argument, 107.
35. Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, 63.
36. Walker, God and Elizabeth Bishop: Meditations on Religion and Poetry,
89.
37. Helen Wilcox, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007). All quotations of Herbert will be cited by line
number.
38. Lloyd Schwartz and Sybil P. Estess, Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 170.
39. Merrin, An Enabling Humility: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and
The Uses of Tradition, 57-8.
40. Fountain and Brazeau, Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography, 347-8.
41. Ibid., 348.
42. Wilcox, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert, 570.
43. Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927-1979, 59.