Discipline

I’m taking here a break from our Word of the Week, blackbird, because, after all, it’s Ash Wednesday, so our Poem of the Week is fit for the time. It’s a striking poem of short lines and clipped speech, by the master of English lyric poetry, George Herbert, whom we’ve featured here several times. But first a bit of reminiscence. When I was a boy in my Catholic grade school in Pennsylvania, we were sometimes taken out of the building and on to the church across the street, for certain devotions. Every first Friday of the month, we went to the church in the afternoon for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, which I remember very fondly, followed by confession. How on earth three priests heard the confessions of a couple hundred kids in a pretty short time, I don’t know, but they did. On Ash Wednesday, we didn’t begin the school day until after everybody received the imposition of ashes, with the words, “Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return.” On that day, and every day till Easter, all the statues in the church would be covered with purple cloth, for the penitential season. In Lent, though, each Friday would be devoted to the Stations of the Cross, and in our church the stations were quite prominent and very well done sculptures in high relief, with full captions below.

Lent was supposed to be a season of discipline, the title of our poem this week. I can’t say that I’ve been very good at that. By the time I was a teenager, and even before, the Church had gotten rid of a lot of the things we were supposed to do in Lent to discipline ourselves and our appetites. I have a memory of the calendar my grandmother used to get from De Rosa’s grocery store, with symbols of fish to mark every day when Catholics were to abstain from eating meat. There were a lot of those fish in Lent! But that was then. It was a very long time before I learned that for us human beings such as we are, the “fast” is a real prerequisite for the feast — and in fact, the two nouns were once one.

In our poem, the speaker — I’ll just call him Herbert, assuming for simplicity’s sake that the poet is speaking in his own right — begs God to change the manner of his discipline. There’s the rod, the affliction, the deprivations, grace-instilled sorrow; and nowhere does Herbert say that those things are bad. Discipline, after all, teaches: that’s what the word means. But he asks God to choose instead a more stalwart soldier than even those are — the “man of war” with the name of Love. “I’m ready for that soldier and his arrows,” the poet seems to say. “I fail, but when I fail, I weep for it. I want nothing more than to enjoy your favor. Please, then, take the gentle path.”

In sound and structure, the poem is quite unusual. All the lines are short, like those of a haiku — though of course Herbert, an Englishman of the 17th century, knew nothing of that Japanese form. But he did know the principle behind it. We tend to read a line in a certain length of time, regardless of how long the line is, so that, paradoxically, the shorter the line, the slower the words seem to linger. Think of the difference between a few whole notes and a flurry of a heck of a lot more quarter notes and eighth notes. In our poem today, in each stanza of four lines, the first, second, and fourth lines have but five syllables; the third line has only three. The rhythm of the lines is clipped at the front: DUM-da-DUM-da-DUM, as if some first syllable, unstressed, had been lopped off. The final stanza rounds us back to the first stanza, repeating the opening two lines, but placing them in a fuller context, and ending the whole poem on the second line, “Throw away thy wrath.” I do not know of any English poem that is as powerfully laconic as this one.

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Throw away thy rod,
Throw away thy wrath;
          O my God,
Take the gentle path.

For my heart's desire
Unto thine is bent:
          I aspire
To a full consent.

Not a word or look
I affect to own,
          But by book,
And thy book alone.

Though I fail, I weep;
Though I halt in place,
          Yet I creep
To the throne of grace.

Then let wrath remove;
Love will do the deed,
          For with love
Stony hearts will bleed.

Love is swift of foot,
Love's a man of war,
          And can shoot
And can hit from far.

Who can scape his bow?
That which wrought on thee,
          Brought thee low,
Needs must work on me.

Throw away thy rod;
Though man frailties hath,
          Thou art God:
Throw away thy wrath.

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