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National Poetry Day 2020 - Hope by George Herbert
National Poetry Day is celebrated every year on the first Thursday of October, and encourages everyone to enjoy, discover and share poetry. With this in mind, we are sharing a poem by George Herbert called Hope, with a commentary from Mark Oakley. This is an extract from Mark Oakley's volume My Sour-Sweet Days: George Herbert and the Journey of the Soul.
Hope
I gave to Hope a watch of mine: but he
An anchor gave to me. Then an old prayer-book I did present:
And he an optick sent.
With that I gave a viall full of tears:
But he a few green eares:
Ah Loyterer! I’le no more, no more I’le bring:
I did expect a ring.
When Herbert’s contemporary John Donne was ordained, he adopted a seal with a particular design on it: Christ crucified on an anchor. Not long before he died, Donne is said to have had copies of the seal made to be sent to the friends he valued most. These included Herbert who, in gratitude, wrote a poem in Latin to Donne exploring the image.
‘Hope’ is another poem by Herbert that includes reference to an anchor. He uses it as the first gift that Hope, who is a personification of Christ here, gives to him. With its cruciform shape, and with words from the letter to the Hebrews in mind, that ‘the hope set before us’ is ‘an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast’ (6.18–19), it is an emblem for one of the three Christian virtues that sometimes gets overlooked. It is given to Herbert in response to his gift of a watch. Is this Herbert mistakenly thinking that hope is time-bound? Is it a present that is stuck in the present while hope looks patiently ahead?
Or maybe the watch, a human mechanism with hands that seek to contain each moment, falsely embodies the idea that hope is human in origin and not of God, eternal in source and scope?
Herbert then gives another gift – an old prayer-book. This is a symbol of his devotion through life, in all its turbulence and peacefulness. In return, Hope gives him a telescope, an optick, through which great things can be seen from a distance. Hope has a heavenly origin and can be made effective not simply by reciting prayers but by dedicated attention to the long view and a willingness to work and act in such a way that it is brought nearer to this world in the same way that a telescope brings distant realities into our living rooms.
Like the psalmist who stored up his tears in a bottle (Psalm 56.8), Herbert then hands over the tears he has shed in this frustrating give and take with Hope. Are they tears of penitence? Of anger, at himself or at God? Maybe tears of loneliness and hopelessness? Tears resist abstract intellectual reasoning: they come from a deep, dark, often unexplored place. Some Christian writers have spoken of the ‘gift of tears’ as not only an honest offering to God but a gift to the self as they cleanse the soul into a more immediate and transparent expression of itself. Hope seems to recognize the potential of this gift and in return offers a few green eares, promising a harvest.
Herbert now loses it and barks out his irritation. He calls Hope a Loyterer, someone who delays giving, because he has offered his time, reverence and penitence and still hasn’t had what he expected in return for them – a ring. He has wanted full union, a covenant, a ring that speaks of for ever, and all that came his way was a seeming postponement. Why has Hope never proposed? The courtship nature of this lyric becomes especially noticeable. Hope, it seems, never domesticates and settles down. The complete spiritual union between Christ and the person of faith is necessarily a restless longing and the pulse of faith.
St Augustine famously said that Hope has two beautiful daughters: Anger (at the ways things are) and Courage (to put them right). Both of them are brought into this world by the confidence but not the certainty of Hope. Martin Luther King Jr never said, ‘I have a nightmare,’ even though he had many in his time. He said that he had a dream and it was being motivated only by this hope that enabled him to help people reimagine the world and to pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. Hope is a soul’s strong but deep down, unseen, anchor.
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