'Verses, Ye Are Too Fine a Thing'

Words are paltry things, but what’s the alternative? While writing that sentence I was ambushed by an echo of Yeats, though I had another poet in mind when I started. “Grief” is a late poem by George Herbert. Its first two-thirds are uncharacteristically hackneyed. He calls on clouds and rain to help him shed tears – an embarrassingly bad conceit. But Herbert recovers beautifully in the final third: 

“Verses, ye are too fine a thing, too wise

For my rough sorrows: cease, be dumbe and mute,

Give up your feet and running to mine eyes,

And keep your measures for some lovers lute,

Whose grief allows him musick and a ryme:

For mine excludes both measure, tune, and time.

                                             Alas, my God!”

 

Words, and by implication all poetry and art, are at best second-best. As humans we are not equipped to deal with the memory of what happened twenty-one years ago. What remains are “rough sorrows” --  loss, bereavement, anger, grief. In Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (University of Chicago Press, 2014), John Drury writes:

 

“There is nothing like one’s own, real pain. It wrings from him that last line, its brevity bringing the poem to a shuddering halt.”