‘I once more smell the dew and rain.’
This is a truly rejuvenating poem, acknowledging human error and frailty, yet also celebrating the power of spiritual connection; the healing of perception through humility and the imagination untrammelled by pride and worldy ego. No matter how bleak the time or the experience, simple pleasures in being can rescue us from the dark places of life.
Contemplation revives us and rescues us from despair and doubt. ‘Tempests’ fall away and the speaker looks on his old self as another spirit as he is but one of the ‘flowers that glide’ -serene, accepting and non judgemental of self and other.
Reading this poem is a like a gift of light. George Herbert’s struggles with faith and worldy challenges seem our own. On a rainy day in December he offers something monumental to believe in and know. A truly good human being.
Janet Lewison
The Flower
How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.
Who would have thought my shrivel’d heart
Could have recover’d greennesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.
These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickning, bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an houre;
Making a chiming of a passing-bell,
We say amisse,
This or that is:
Thy word is all, if we could spell.
O that I once past changing were;
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!
Many a spring I shoot up fair,
Offring at heav’n, growing and groaning thither:
Nor doth my flower
Want a spring-showre,
My sinnes and I joining together;
But while I grow to a straight line;
Still upwards bent, as if heav’n were mine own,
Thy anger comes, and I decline:
What frost to that? what pole is not the zone,
Where all things burn,
When thou dost turn,
And the least frown of thine is shown?
And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.
These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flowers that glide:
Which when we once can finde and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us, where to bide.
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.