On the 13 th day of the Blog chatter’s
#WRITEAPAGEADAY, Here is a poem with love as the major theme.
Poet: George Herbert
Poem: Love
Love
bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance
in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I
lacked any thing.
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be
he.
I I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
T Truth Lord, but I have marred them:
let my shame
Go where it doth
deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
George
Herbert was educated at west minster school and Trinity college, Cambridge,
where he was a
public
orator from 1619-27. Herbert’s chief claim upon us lies in his volume “The
Temple”, which has
always
held the popular imagination. O all the school of Donne he is the most widely
read, by reason
of his
clearness of presentment and his happy knack for using conceits sufficiently
obvious to most
people.
His treatment of religious themes has the simple, unstudied earnestness of
Longfellow.
Along
with his delicate didactic vein, he shows a quaintness and daintiness
characteristic of the time.
The
discerning reader will note also a welcome salt of humour in his work that
preserved him from
the
extravagance into which so many of his contemporaries fell. His earlier work
was bright and
witty.
Later on, his art served as handmaid to
his piety. He is
remembered as a pivotal figure:
enormously popular, deeply and broadly influential, and
arguably the most skillful and important
British devotional lyricist of his or any other time.
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