'A Sug'red Strange Delight'

Joan la Pucelle merits a choice phrase in Henry VI, Part 1: “By fair persuasions mixed with sugared words . . .” We might say “sweet talk,” candy-coating lies to seduce the credulous. The alternative is making lies sour and unpleasant, and that sometimes works too. Sweetness is probably preferable. Children have a sweet tooth.

The adjective sugared (usually spelled sug’red) was a favorite of George Herbert, that wittiest of poets. In “Dullness” he pleads with God to “give me quickness, that I may with mirth / Praise thee brim-full!” But the poet is dull: “Where are my lines? my approaches? my views?” He is weak: “But I am lost in flesh, whose sug’red lies / Still mock me and grow bold.” Like Philip Larkin, Herbert is a master of unexpected yet memorably appropriate words, adjectives in particular. Here he is in the opening stanza of “The Rose”:

 

“Press me not to take more pleasure

                 In this world of sug’red lies,

And to use a larger measure

                 Then my strict, yet welcome size.”

 

Sugared here suggests not only fraudulent but full of temptation, an inducement to sin. In “The Glance” it takes on a more positive sense. When God first noticed the poet in his youth, “I felt a sug’red strange delight, / Passing all cordials made by any art, / Bedew, embalme, and overrunne my heart, / And take it in.” That’s Herbert’s use of sugared that gives this reader the most pleasure: “a sug’red strange delight.”

 

Herbert was born on this date, April 3, in 1593.