Poem Of The Week: Prayer By George Herbert (1593-1633)

Seventeenth century poet and priest, George Herbert’s, devotional poem reaches forward into our own time, not so much in terms of religious observance – the articles of Christian faith and belief are in apparently irreversible decline – but rather in tone. A free-flow of metaphors for prayer, for approaches to prayer, and for objects of devotion, Herbert’s otherwise formal sonnet is studied yet impressionistic, an inventory of themes rendered associatively.

In this inventive tableau, the poet describes the circuitous means by which salvation may be determined: the journey through prayer to redemption is laced with symbols, images whose meaning may reside in exalted mood, in the music of the spheres, in natural bounty, or in the focused and sibilant intensity of the ‘Christ-side-piercing spear’.

Herbert’s joyous accumulation of attitudes, of the sense of a theocentric cosmos ‘builded’ by poetic pause and accretion towards perfection, finds resolution in his simple, and utterly compelling, final phrase – ‘something understood’; something of beauty that is unseen but recognised and shared.