I’ve been reading George Herbert’s poem, ‘Affliction III’, and I’ve been reading it very slowly. No apology for that – why need we rush? One line of meditative meaning is as good as twenty skim-overs. Here’s the poem again. Read it aloud to get back in:
MY heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God !”
By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a sceptre of the rod :
Hadst Thou not had Thy part, 5
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape, 10
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
Thy life on earth was grief, and Thou art still
Constant unto it, making it to be
A point of honour, now to grieve in me, 15
And in Thy members suffer ill.
They who lament one cross,
Thou dying daily, praise Thee to Thy loss.
I’m going to pick up at line 7 and go on a little way from there:
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape, 10
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
Herbert is in a grim state of (what we would now call) depression. It’s not hyperbole in line six, when he says he thinks the ‘sigh’ might have broken his heart. It’s good that although it feels killingly bad to him at the moment, the sighed words ‘Oh God’ have changed what might otherwise have been the tenor of his mind. In the opening lines he’s concentrating on what good he can sense in his situation, not the utter misery he feels. I’m trying now to understand these lines:
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
I feel stuck, as if I can’t understand this, so I try a paraphrase to get my head round as much of it as I can.
‘But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape’ = God your spirit gave me both spirit and form. (Therefore) ‘Thou know’st my tallies’ = you know what I’m made up of, or owe you, or you know what is the relationship between us. Perhaps also something about cost? A tally is the stick notched to mark what’s owed. So perhaps I can read that line as – ‘you know what I owe you’.
The owing here seems connected to the very creation, and shape and being of the man; God knows what’s owed because ‘Thy breath gave me both life and shape’. This is one of those places where a contemporary non-believer like me gets stuck. I don’t like the idea of owing anybody anything. I didn’t ask to be born! If something (apart from biological parents) birthed me – not just my body, my form, but also my life, my spirit – what would that be? What’s the translation here for a non-believer? I’ll try letting x mark the spot as a holding ground for now.
But since X gave me both life and shape,
X know’st my tallies ;
I owe something by being here – whether I asked to be born or not. For a moment I’m going to assume there is (to use the AA phrase) a power greater than myself at work in the universe; that somehow ‘I’ come out of that, am created by it, and owe it. And when I think of all the possible non-existence (most of the universe is nothing! there’s vastly more nothing than anything else…) then it does some an extraordinary – could I say – miracle – that I, or yesterday’s blackbird, or even couchgrasss have come to be at all.
Need to reread the whole poem now, to get back into its mind, as I’ve been going off on one in my attempt to understand. I reread it and concentrate again on the next bit of this thought:
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
I start at the end here – wonder what he means by ‘behind’. Think it has a specific kind of meaning, which I’ve read before in other poems by George Herbert, though I can’t quite remember it. Does it mean – what is left? To paraphrase – you created me, you know what I owe, and when so much breath is assigned to a sigh, whats going to be left?
The paraphrase makes me concentrate on ‘assigned’ and on the difference between ‘breath’ and ‘sigh’. The word ‘assign somehow connects to ‘tallies’. It’s an old, legal word. I look it up. The ‘sigh’ is an expression of sadness, misery, even despair but it is full of ‘breath’ – life. If we put the gift we’ve been given (thing owed, the thing signified by the tally) into ‘a sigh’, what is going to happen? Not quite sure about this as I read and think – maybe I haven’t understood it well. But I do think I’ve made some headway. I leave this bit for now and move on in case what is coming next will cast a light back for me.
The next bit does seem to develop that thought. Let’s read it all through to that point:
MY heart did heave, and there came forth, “O God !”
By that I knew that Thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief,
Making a sceptre of the rod :
Hadst Thou not had Thy part, 5
Sure the unruly sigh had broke my heart.
But since Thy breath gave me both life and shape,
Thou know’st my tallies ; and when there’s assigned
So much breath to a sigh, what’s then behind?
Or if some years with it escape, 10
The sigh then only is
A gale to bring me sooner to my bliss.
I’m not sure of the function and tenor of ‘Or if’ I don’t think line ten on is an alternative to what came before. Perhaps more a development of the logic. These sighs cost actual life. This wind blows me towards death (‘my bliss’) Herbert is a Christian and believes in life with God after death.
But I don’t. I’m not coming with you in this thought, George.
Time is up for today. And me with my heels dug in.
readerjanedavis 