I’m reading George Herbert this week. Now, as I began this year of reading poetry for my morning devotional time in lieu of the Bible, I determined that this did not mean I was going to read “devotional poetry,” i.e. poetry with religiously uplifting content. I was simply going to read good poetry, regardless of its subject matter, and see where that led. But of course, some good poetry is devotional in its matter. For instance, everything that Herbert ever wrote.
And I’ve always liked Herbert. I like his simplicity and his care to make his rhythms match the content of his poems (ragged, halting lines in moments of stress and flowing lines for his peaceful resolutions). He has some breathtaking individual lines and several perfect little poems, such as “Prayer” (I) and “Love” (III). But perhaps the main reason I’ve always liked him in the past was that he is, in fact, a devotional poet, and unlike so many in the genre, he’s good. He’s skilled enough to be read and studied in secular literature classes, but he is completely devout. Herbert wrote as a private devotional discipline. His major work wasn’t published until after his death.
This, it seemed to me in my twenties, might be the way to reconcile my love of poetry with my faith and calling to ministry. Here was a Country Parson writing enduring verse about and to his God as a spiritual exercise. Along with the American poet/Puritan minister Edward Taylor, who did much the same thing, Herbert seemed to offer a synthesis of my two loves. In seminary, when I had a weekend pastorate three and half hours away from school, I followed Taylor’s example and wrote a poetic Communion meditations on Saturday nights before serving the Lord’s Supper the next day. My poems were not as good as Herbert’s (or even Taylor’s), but they were definitely devotional.
This time, though, something is bothering me about Herbert’s devotional poetry. As I read through his poems, it disturbs me to note how many of them end tidily, with a neat and generally conventional thought tying everything up at the end. Even where Herbert begins a poem with angry and honest questioning, he can’t bear to simply the leave the questions out there. He always has to resolve his questions with an orderly, smooth couplet. And at that point his poems feel somehow less poetic, or even less true.
I just can’t help feeling that the role of poetry is not to solve problems but simply to lay them bare. Essays and scientific treatises and how-to books set out to present solutions, but my own conviction is that the most that poetry should do along those lines is look at problems with new eyes. Even the psalms don’t generally try to resolve questions. Sure, there are some that end tidily (e.g. 13, 23, 121) and others that trace the psalmist’s journey from doubt to faith (73), but there are just as many that end with anguished prayers unanswered (39, 89) and still others that appear about to close neatly only to end on a jarring note (51, 137, 139). And even if the psalms were more superficially reassuring than they are, they would at least have the excuse that they were composed for corporate worship. The fact that Herbert’s poems, composed in private dialogue with God, wrap up with a more determined return to orthodoxy than do the psalms, composed for public worship, seems very wrong to me.
Fortunately, I’m mixing up my Herbert with some Denise Levertov. She’s as limpidly clear as Herbert in style and, like Herbert, more complex beneath the surface. Unlike Herbert, though, she is comfortable with ambiguity in both her verse and her faith. A comparison might be helpful. One of Herbert’s most anthologized poems is “The Collar,” in which he grumbles about the chafing yoke of God’s calling – which in his case is understood in terms of his ministerial role. As usual, though, his doubts are resolved, or at any rate suppressed, at the end:
I struck the board, and cried, "No more;                          I will abroad! What? shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free, free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store.           Shall I be still in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me blood, and not restore What I have lost with cordial fruit?           Sure there was wine Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn     Before my tears did drown it.       Is the year only lost to me?           Have I no bays to crown it, No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?                   All wasted? Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,             And thou hast hands. Recover all thy sigh-blown age On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,              Thy rope of sands, Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee Good cable, to enforce and draw,           And be thy law, While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.           Away! take heed;           I will abroad. Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears;           He that forbears          To suit and serve his need           Deserves his load." But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild           At every word, Methought I heard one calling, Child!           And I replied My Lord. 
In sharp contrast, though, is Levertov’s little poem “The Thread.” In many ways, this shares a world with “The Collar.” Here, too, the poet senses an external calling of sorts – even describes it in terms of a tugging around the neck – but exactly what this calling is, or from whom, is left unspoken, and no need is expressed either to resist or to surrender to its pressure.
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me - a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven't tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone. 
Or maybe it’s just that Levertov’s experience of pulling, stirring, calling is more familiar to me than Herbert’s rant against grim duty. Either way, “The Thread” – whatever it’s about – was, to me, devotional.