Davis McCombs on George Herbert

Davis McCombs's Poetry Month Pick, April 10, 2008, from Poetry Daily.

"Prayer (I)"
by George Herbert (1593-1633)

Prayer, the church’s banquet; angels’ age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth;
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage;
The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth;

Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner's tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six days’ world transposing in an hour;
A kind of tune which all things hear and fear:

Softness and peace and joy and love and bliss;
Exalted manna, gladness of the best;
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

* * *

Davis McCombs Comments:
I first read George Herbert’s “Prayer (I),” nearly twenty years ago this Fall in a year-long survey of English Literature course I was taking at Harvard: “It’s Tuesday, this must be Spenser,” I used to say.

When I look at my creased and slumping copy of the Norton Anthology from that time, I see that I’ve drawn stars around Herbert’s poem, as well as noting in the margin, NO VERBS! I still remember how thrilled I was by the idea of a perfect English sonnet with not one verb.

Helen Vendler, with whom I was studying at the time, has argued that the poem’s trajectory represents, as she puts it, a “spiritual evolution from dry recitation, through resentment, to spiritual refreshment.” I like that. I also like the idea that the poem has no trajectory; that prayer is all of these things and that it is all of them at once. Others have used the poem as a window into Herbert’s reading of the Bible or into his thinking about various questions of theology. Two decades later, the poem still seems fresh to me. Each phrase or “metaphorical appositive,” as one critic puts it, is like a little puzzle, demanding and rewarding attention, all culminating in the soothing, if still enigmatic, chords of that last phrase: “something understood.” And we haven’t even gotten to the question of why Herbert decided to forgo verbs in the first place: what effect is intended? what message is implied?

I loved all that about “Prayer (I)”; I still do, but I have to admit that the aspiring poet I was in the Fall of 1990, looking back across nearly four centuries to Herbert in his little parish church in Wiltshire England, was most excited by what I took to be the challenge thrown down by the poem. From that moment on, I wanted to write my own verbless poem, one that like Herbert’s wouldn’t be just a static or random grouping of words or phrases, but would have coherence, momentum. How does one get the boxcars of a poem rumbling down the tracks without the rods and pistons of verbs?

Over the years, I’ve collected other verb-free poems: Robert Francis’s “Silent Poem,” for instance. I’ve even made the assignment to write a verbless poem a regular feature of my poetry workshops. Banning verbs for an assignment or two, it seems to me, is a great way to get one’s creative writing students to enter and utilize language in new ways, to let go of narrative, to alter their thinking about poetry and to be altered.

About Davis McCombs:
Davis McCombs, a Yale Younger Poets Award winner selected by W.S. Merwin, directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas. He attended Harvard University, the University of Virginia (MFA) and Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ruth Lily Poetry Foundation, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 1996, The Missouri Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review. He is the author of Ultima Thule (Yale University Press), and Dismal Rock (Tupelo Press).

Tags: Davis McCombs, George Herbert, Prayer (I), poetry, National Poetry Month