'I Will Complain, Yet Praise'

Seven years ago, the late Helen Pinkerton gave me her copy of The Poetical Works of George Herbert. The volume is heavier than it appears, bound in brown leather, scuffed but still sturdy. It has marbled endpapers, fore-edge, top and foot, and its cover and spine are stamped with gold. No foxing is apparent. It was published by D. Appleton & Co., New York, in 1854. Helen signed her name and the date: “Helen A. Pinkerton 12-1945.” In her note to me she wrote: 

“Going through my books of poetry, I came upon an old favorite, one of the earliest books I acquired when I began at Stanford in 1944-45. . . . I bought it just at the end of my second year at Stanford, probably at a bookstore in Palo Alto. There were quite a few excellent stores at that time. That I spent my hard-earned money on Herbert tells me that I must have already had contact with [Yvor] Winters and was exploring his favorite poets.”

 

I have more modern editions of Herbert, including a handy pocket-sized hardcover from Oxford University Press, but for reasons historical and sentimental I rely on Helen’s student text. There are no underlinings or marginalia, though she has checked in pencil certain poems in the table of contents, including “Church Monuments.” Winters ranked it among the finest in the language. In a letter written April 19, 1958, to Allen Tate (ed. R.L. Barth, The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters, 2000), he says: “This is the only great poem that Herbert wrote. In his other poems there is a kind of childish pietism which is very hard to take. This poem is absolutely serious; it would appear to come from another hand.” A poem not checked by Helen or singled out for comment by Winters, “Bitter-sweet,” drew my attention this time:

 

“Ah my deare angrie Lord,

Since thou dost love, yet strike;

Cast down, yet help afford;

Sure I will do the like.

 

“I will complain, yet praise;

I will bewail, approve:

And all my sowre-sweet dayes

I will lament, and love.”

 

God loves, yet punishes – in a seemingly oxymoronic coupling of words, “deare angrie.” Divine attributes mirrored in humans, with a twist: “I will complain, yet praise.” That line grabbed me. It’s easy and even fashionable to complain: just listen. The gift is to recognize human failure, even evil, while remaining grateful and giving thanks. “Bitter-sweet” and other poems by Herbert reminded me of one by the late Richard Wilbur, “Praise in Summer,” from his first collection, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947):

 

“Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,

As sometimes summer calls us all, I said

The hills are heavens full of branching ways

Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;

I said the trees are mines in air, I said

See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!

And then I wondered why this mad instead

Perverts our praise to uncreation, why

Such savor’s in this wrenching things awry.

Does sense so stale that it must needs derange

The world to know it? To a praiseful eye

Should it not be enough of fresh and strange

That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,

And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?”