Searching for God with George Herbert
A close reading of one of his (many) remarkable poems.
George Herbert (1593 -1633) was an English poet and priest for the Church of England. Today, he is one of those rare religious poets who manage to garner praise from even the most secular of audiences.
After revisiting a collection of his recently, I am not really surprised by this. Herbert’s poems are raw feelings refined by forms; prayers forged by prayer; wordplay and whimsey in dialogue with the divine. Collectively, his poems resemble the biblical psalter, in my view, spanning numerous genres, poetic forms, and human emotions, while insisting always on an intimate orientation to YHWH.
Much like the psalmist, this metaphysical poet occasionally struggled to sense the presence of his God, as in his poem “The Search.” The following article provides a close reading of this poem, noting both its resemblance to biblical lament and Herbert’s concern with the “modern” dilemma of the absence of God.
(Note: For copyright reasons, I am not able to include the entire poem in this post, but you can read it in full at this site.)
Formally, “The Search” consists of fifteen quatrains with a rhyme scheme of ABAB, CDCD, and so on. The first and third lines of each stanza are iambic tetrameter; the second and fourth are iambic dimeter. The poem’s subject seems to unfold two stanzas at a time, leaving stanza seven as the heart and central question of the work. It reads:
“Lord, dost thou some new fabric mould
Which favour wins,
And keeps thee present, leaving th’ old
Unto their sins?”
As its title suggests, “The Search” is a poem about searching for God. But because the speaker evidently once enjoyed God’s favor, it is equally a prayer of lament, of having lost touch. He fears that he can no longer relate to God, experience God’s presence, as he once did.
Hence “The Search” echoes the pathos of biblical lament psalms, the cries of God’s covenant people. Psalm 13, for example, famously begins: “How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?” Herbert’s opening stanza strikes a similar note: “Whither, O, whither art thou fled, / My Lord, my Love? / My searches are my daily bread; / Yet never prove.”
From here, the first half of the poem centers on the speaker’s search for God in nature and through prayer. Though the “herbs below” and the “stars above” seem to enjoy special access to the divine presence, both spheres “deny / That thou art there” for the bereft speaker. With the psalmist, he sends out prayers as “sighs” and “groans,” but these too prove fruitless. When we arrive at stanza seven, the speaker can’t help but wonder whether the means of obtaining God’s favor have been fundamentally altered.
The second half of the poem shifts from the speaker’s grief to the mysterious nature of God’s will, which becomes the new grounds for hope. Herbert writes, “To it [God’s will] all strength, all subtleties / Are things of nought.” Here the speaker admits outright what the first half of the poem only insinuated—that no man can secure God’s favor by his own strength; he must wait for God to “Turn, and restore me.” That God might indeed turn Herbert predicates again on God’s mysterious will, which “a strange distance is, / As that to it / East and West touch, and poles do kiss, And parallels meet.” Because the speaker supposes his grief “must be as large, / As is thy space,” he waits in hope.
Well. What is going on here? The logic of the final stanzas goes something like this:
God must choose to reveal himself to the speaker, who knows God’s will to be the sort of thing that overcomes great distances in order to unite disparate parties;
the speaker feels distant from God;
therefore, he anticipates God will turn toward him and bring reconciliation.
The closing stanza sums up the idea with an image of a bell: “For as thy absence doth excel / All distance known: / So doth thy nearness bear the bell, / Making two one.” A bell, of course, unites opposite polarities in its swing, and the farther the clapper travels, the louder the sound of its chime. The image of the bell may also allude to the union of a wedding ceremony, only here the re-union is between the speaker and his once-absent God, “My Lord, my Love.”
For Herbert, the “absence of God” is a question of distance, not existence. The modern poet may struggle to make sense of life in a godless universe; Herbert wrestled with the feeling of estrangement from the God he knows like a lover. In the end, his knowledge of God (shall we call it theology?) prevents the poem from concluding in despair. Because although Herbert’s searches “never prove,” God will go the distance.
Perhaps our so-called skeptical age could stand to hear from Herbert on this most startling of theological claims. You think you’re looking for God? God is looking for you.