In 2018, Leland Ryken released a book entitled The Soul in Paraphrase: A Treasury of Classic Devotional Poems. This book sits in my home study never out of reach. In this collection is a poem by George Herbert entitled “Prayer” first published in 1633. This is one of my favorite poems and one I come back to often to help me think about the delight and duty of prayer.
As we think about what it means to be a church devoted to prayer, we must understand the great privilege it is to pray. As you read through the poem and Dr. Ryken’s explication of it, I hope that you will want to move from reading about prayer to the joy of prayer itself.
Prayer
Prayer, the church's banquet, angel's age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth;
Engine against the Almighty, sinner's tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days' world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
George Herbert, The Temple, Cambridge: Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel, 1633.
Leyland Ryken’s explication of the poem:
Notes on selected words. Angels’ age: just as we speak of “the age of Shakespeare” or “the age of Milton,” meaning the entire way of life that prevailed back then, the phrase “angels’ age” means that prayer enables us to live—in God’s presence, in heaven, in eternity, in praise, and so forth. In paraphrase: put into our own words. Plummet: a line with a weight on one end dropped over an edge to determine depth. Engine: weapon. The six-days’ world: the ordinary week apart from Sunday, and/or the world that God created in six days—the entire world; everything. Transposing: musical term meaning to put into a different key. In ordinary: in everyday clothing. Bird of Paradise: in this context, a mythical bird that is always in flight and never lands on earth; by extension, therefore, an image of the heavenly. Land of spices: paradise; in this context, the celestial paradise.
Commentary. This sonnet is a prolonged meditation on the nature and effects of prayer. More specifically, the poem is an “encomium” — a poem written in praise of a general quality or category. The poem is unique in being without a single main verb (with hear and fear in line 9 being part of a subordinate clause). Instead of sentences with a subject and verb, Herbert strings together a list of titles or epithets that describe prayer. Most of these epithets are metaphors in which prayer is compared to something else. We can also think of these titles and metaphors as individual definitions of prayer.
The main organizational principal is the list or catalog. To assimilate the meanings of the poem, we need to unpack each epithet and metaphor by itself. At the same time, however, we can discern clusters of imagery and epithets that lend broader units than the individual epithets. The following arrangement emerges: imagery of return, connection, and joining (lines 1-4); military imagery (lines 5-6); musical imagery (lines 7-8); conceptual imagery (words naming abstract qualities; lines 9-10); imagery of transcendence or the heavenly (lines 11-14).
If we read this poem slowly and meditatively, allowing the individual epithets and metaphors to sink in, the effect is like turning a prism in the light. Various dimensions of prayer reveal themselves as the catalog unfolds. The final effect is that of a preparative tot prayer, as the poem instills in us a desire to pray.