I have not written about the poems of George Herbert in over a year, so I will have a go during this Advent, perhaps Herbert wrote once or twice, perhaps more. We shall see.

Herbert wrote no fewer than five poems with the title “Affliction”. I have already written about the first one in The Temple, known as “Affliction (1)”, and in this post I will look at “Affliction (2). Whereas the first “Affliction” may be Herbert’s most autobiographical, the second is much shorter and more focused on Jesus compared with generic human suffering. Behind that may be Herbert’s genuine suffering – his consumption and his failure to achieve a position at court, but in the poem itself there is little that might not apply to any other person’s suffering. Here is the poem:

Affliction (2)

Kill me not ev’ry day,
Thou Lord of life; since thy one death for me
Is more than all my deaths can be,
Though I in broken pay
Die over each hour of Methusalem’s stay.

If all men’s tears were let
Into one common sewer, sea, and brine;
What were they all, compar’d to thine?
Wherein if they were set,
They would discolour thy most bloody sweat.

Thou art my grief alone,
Thou Lord conceal it not: and as thou art
All my delight, so all my smart;
Thy cross took up in one,
By way of imprest, all my future moan.

So, let’s begin with the technical issues. The lines are not all the same length. Each verse has syllables in the the pattern of 6/10/7/6/10. The rhyme is ABBAA. As is usual, Herbert mostly uses short words of one or two syllables, with “Methusalem” standing out with its four syllables.

The true artistry, as Anne Pasternak Slater points out, is in his use of metric harmony and disharmony to mirror spiritual states. She writes,

The poem wobbles at the start with its reversed first foot (‘Kíll mē’) to settle into a regular iambic beat thereafter, only breaking down again after the warning ‘broken pay’ of the penultimate line. The natural stresses, prompted by the sense (and italicized below) fall quite differently from the expected iambic template (also marked below) – so that, in effect, the line can only be spoken (heavily) as prose.

Diē óvēr eách hoūr of Mēthúsalēm’s stáy.

George Herbert, The Complete English Works (Everyman Library 204), New York NY: Knopf/Random House, 1995, p. li.

The poem, then, wobbles, settles down, and then breaks down into what is effectively prose. This happens three times, once in each stanza.

The theme of the poem is to “compare Christ’s suffering with the vast inadequacy of the Christian’s reciprocal grief.” (Pasternak Slater, p. 419).

In the first stanza the poet begs Christ not to afflict him with death every day. Presumably “death” here is not actual death, but suffering, but even if it were death, Jesus’s one death is greater in value than if the poet were to die every hour for the length of Methuselah’s life. Now, Methuselah is described in Genesis 5:27: “all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty-nine years.” Twenty-four hours times nine-hundred and sixty-nine is 23,256, but the number is not so important as the disparity; some theologians would suggest that the death of the incarnate Word of God, fully human and fully divine, without sin, is infinite in its value. Whatever massive number the poet conceives, the value of Christ’s death, sufficing for all of humanity and the fallen cosmos, is greater.

In this Herbert demonstrates just how much of a Protestant he really is. While some commentators retroprojected onto him a High Church aspect, in valuing the death of Jesus as having a value greater than any one human death or many tens of thousands, he is referring to the penal substitution theory of atonement.

In the second stanza (I want to call it “the second verse”, but that’s more the sense of “verse” in hymnody than in poetry) the metaphor of suffering’s tears are used, and these are found to be less than that of Jesus’s bloody sweat. This is a reference to the the description in some ancient manuscripts of the Gospel according to Luke of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground” (Luke 22.44). Now, while modern scholarship since the middle of the 19th century notes that this verse is not in the best and oldest copies (notably Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus, as well as many 3rd century papyri), and so may not be original with the author of the gospel, Herbert would not have known this, having depended on the Textus Receptus, the Vulgate, and various early modern English translations that included it.

What I find strange is that humanity’s tears would discolour Jesus’s bloody sweat; I would have thought that if the disparity were infinite then there should have been no discolouration. Perhaps I am misreading it, and Herbert is suggesting that the bloody sweat would discolour humanity’s tears, but that’s not the obvious sense of the words.

The third stanza identifies the poet’s suffering with that of Jesus: “Thy cross took up in one . . . all my future moan.” Only in becoming identified with Jesus does the affliction become bearable, “as thou art/
All my delight, so all my smart.” One cannot have the delight without the affliction, because the goodness and glory of the divine leads to the cross, and the cross leads humanity back to the Good and the Glorious. “Imprest”, Pasternak Slater tells us, is the same as a deposit on a loan.The deposit, again, is of far greater value than all of the poet’s future suffering, or “moan”.

I personally have not encountered much suffering. I am, after all, a “white” male from the upper middle class, from a country where they speak English. I have experienced some depression, a few illnesses, one case of sexual assault when I was a minor, and some grief over the death of close ones, but that’s it. I have never experienced war, hunger, violence, repeated sexual abuse and exploitation, harassment, and the like of which is all too well known by persecuted minorities or innocents caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. This might explain why I never get too excited by the theology around “the blood of Christ”. I do not identify with a suffering Jesus, although I certainly see him as a persecuted First Century colonised subject of the Empire, abandoned by his disciples, denied by one and betrayed by another, and turned on by the collaborationist forces of Jerusalem and Judea. This simply encourages me to ensure that I am an ally on the side of those who are suffering.

The penal substitution theory of atonement does not appeal to me, either. I can give notional assent to it as being meaningful for others, but for me it is but one metaphor among meany that describe the ultimate meaning of the death of Jesus.

Thus, while I can admire the artistry of this poem, it is not one that really speaks for me. Perhaps Affliction (3) might be different?