George Herbert: "Jesu"

Guest Post by Elizabeth T. Parker

[Portrait of George Herbert (Montgomery, 1593-1633). Oil on canvas by William Dyce (1806-1864) London, Guildhall Art Gallery Corporation Of London (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)]

Readers, I’m delighted to bring a guest writer to you this week to discuss Herbert’s lovely and powerful poem, “Jesu.” Elizabeth T. Parker received her PhD from Baylor University, and is currently Assistant Professor of English and Assistant Director of Honors at Taylor University. I got to meet her earlier this year while I was speaking at nearby Indiana Wesleyan University. She is truly delightful. Elizabeth and her family live in rural Indiana where they follow Wendell Berry's injunction to "practice resurrection" by praying, gardening, walking, and reading together.

Here is Dr. Parker’s reflection on “Jesu”:

Deep in my email archives from 20 years ago, I have a note from my father quoting George Herbert’s “Jesu” in full. I was weeks into a depression, and I was trying to hold it together enough to keep my teaching job. My depression felt like a five-alarm fire to me, and precious little eased my agony.

George Herbert’s “Jesu” did.

Short and seemingly simple, “Jesu” pierces the gloom by inviting readers into a process of discovery. Presented with a dilemma and a puzzle, we are skillfully drawn away from self-reflection and into contemplation of Christ’s name and nature.

Jesu is in my heart, his sacred name 
Is deeply carved there: but th’ other week
A great affliction broke the little frame,
Ev’n all to pieces, which I went to seek:
And first I found the corner, where was J,
After, where E S, and next where U was graved.
When I had got these parcels, instantly
I sat me down to spell them, and perceived
That to my broken heart he was I ease you,
			And to my whole is J E S U.

Before reading further here, take a moment to reread the poem and notice its details. Then, listen to the voice of the speaker in the first-person (“I”) as he recounts his story.

What do you notice? What does the speaker sound like to you?

Listen, also, for the voice of Christ in the penultimate line of the poem.

How does that one statement of Christ’s, “I ease you,” transform the rest of the poem and, thus, the speaker?

“Jesu” possesses George Herbert’s characteristic sweetness – a sweetness that we often hear through the voice of Christ in his poetry, as in the well-known “Love (III)” where “quick-eyed” love comes “sweetly questioning.” In “Jesu,” that sweetness comes not from the voice of Christ addressing the poem’s speaker throughout, as in “Love (III),” but from the speaker’s troubled earnestness. His voice is wholly recognizable as that of the Christian surprised by suffering and seeking solace.

“Jesu” is one of Herbert’s emblem-poems. Emblem-poems typically describe some kind of object or thing, and then offer an explanation. The term can also refer to concrete, or pattern, poems that take the shape of their subject, like Herbert’s “Easter Wings” and “The Altar.”[1] In “Jesu,” as well as in its companion poem, “Love-Joy,” the emblem is a verbal riddle or puzzle where one word means two things.[2] Here, the word-play is on the name, “Jesu,” and it requires a bit of explanation to understand what Herbert is doing.

The name “Jesu” is a term of endearment. It comes to Middle English from Latin, where it is spelled with an “I”, as in “Iesu.”[3] It is in the vocative case, which is used as a call or a direct address (think “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”). The transition from the Latin “I” to the modern English “J” begins during the 16th century, and the “J” does not become the dominant spelling until later in the 17th century. During Herbert’s career in the early 17th century, both the “I” and the “J” were used interchangeably, and this fact is the key to the puzzle that the poem poses for its readers.[4]

Today, we might be tempted to read the alternate spellings of Jesu/Iesu as a source of uncertainty for the speaker. Instead, the speaker finds the complication of the two spellings to hold a revelation about Christ, as we will see. The instability in the poem, rather, comes from the speaker’s own changing circumstances throughout. The poem moves from a present-tense statement of confidence that “JESU is in my heart” and “his sacred name/ Is deeply carved there,” through the telling of a past trial which “broke” the speaker’s heart, to a quest for its pieces, and, finally to a return of the present-tense in the final line: “to my whole is J E S U.” The journey from certainty, through uncertainty, and the return to certainty is, in microcosm, the journey of the Christian life.

The poem is structured around these shifting circumstances. In the first line, the speaker, in the present-tense, declares Jesu to be so resolutely embedded in his being that it is as though his name is “carved” or “graved” on his heart.[5] In line 3, we discover that this knowledge was hard won when the speaker’s “little” heart was shattered into pieces because of “great” suffering. The contrast between “little” and “great” is instructive – the speaker sees his frame as feeble, fragile and the trial as overwhelming, even unendurable. Yet, this fiery past trial is narrated in less than three lines, and the whole stage is set in only four – less than half the poem.

A turn in the poem comes between lines 4 and 5, as the unexpected affliction sends the speaker on a quest to find the pieces of his broken heart and put them together again. The pieces of his heart are scattered across lines 5 and 6, and lines 7-9 recount the speaker’s eager attempt to spell the whole name from the pieces he has found. As he spells, he realizes that the broken form of Jesu/Iesu contains the words “I ease you.”

In the final line of the poem, the fragments are at last gathered together and made whole again. The speaker and reader both experience a revelation: Jesu/Iesu is our comfort. The instability of the speaker’s circumstances is resolved by arriving back where he started – with Jesu – but with his understanding of Christ’s nature transformed. This journey of reconstruction and revelation takes place over six lines (five full lines and one half line), putting everything into right proportion: the speaker’s trial is fierce but brief compared to Christ’s restoration and comfort.

Just how profound is this revelation? Having arrived at the end of the poem, we return to the beginning and reread it, discovering that “Jesu” has even more to tell us about Christ.

Suffusing this poem is the presence of Christ the crucified who knows our sufferings because he himself has suffered. The crucified Christ appears in the breaking of the name, Jesu, into pieces, reminding us that although Jesus’s bones were not broken in the crucifixion, his heart breaks in the Garden of Gethsemane as he pleads for the cup of suffering to pass from him. Christ’s “little frame,” too, is stricken in the crucifixion, identifying the speaker’s broken heart with Christ’s bodily agony. Later, the speaker finds the corner where “U was graved,” or graven. In a poem built on word-play, we don’t have to reach far to identify a play on the word “grave.” Christ was “graved” on the speaker’s heart, yes, and this is because his unbroken body was once “graved” after crucifixion. Thus, Christ stricken and smitten is our comforter (“I ease you”) and Christ whole (Jesu) is our Savior. Following the logic of the poem’s revelation, Christ, as crucified and risen Savior, is our comfort.

So, what can depressed Christians read for solace, especially when scripture, sermons, and other ordinary means of grace seem to fail?[6] Consider devotional poetry. Over many hundreds of years, poets like George Herbert have kept records of the soul’s dark night. Think of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets,” written during a period of anxiety and illness, William Cowper’s hymns and poems, written over a lifetime of depressive episodes, and, more recently, Christian Wiman’s volume, Every Riven Thing, written while he was suffering from cancer.

Poets like these inscribe their pain in such a way that we learn with them, not just from them, as we wrestle with their poetry. These “sermons in stones,” as Helen Vendler calls the pieces of Jesus’s name in Herbert’s poem, are catechistical and liturgical. We are invited to speak with the speaker’s voice (“Jesu is in MY heart”) and to search for the pieces of our own hearts as the speaker seeks for his. As he spells, we spell. As he finds, we find. Such identification draws us in to hear the voice of Christ sweetly saying “I ease you” to our own vexed souls.

One last word. Poetry can be opaque (like parables!), especially when a seemingly simple poem like this one starts to unwrap its layers. We should resist the urge to stop reading poetry for fear it may be too difficult! For example, we can understand the emotional sense of “Jesu” long before we know anything about the Latin alphabet and emblem-poems, and the emotional sense that comes through identification with the poet and Christ’s comforting voice is sufficient to touch the heart. Once the heart is touched, a poem like this becomes a friend. Once a friend, it will further reveal itself over time with study and contemplation, just like Christ our comforter.

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Next week, I’ll be back to discuss “Easter Wings.”

Then we will spend some time with John Milton. Milton is foremost among all English writers. I certainly can’t do any of his works justice here in this little newsletter! And there is so much to his body of works. We will only be able to dip in. I’m going to take some cues from you, readers, about how deeply you want to cover Milton. A short poem a week is one thing to ask you to read. It is another altogether to tackle something like Paradise Lost, even in small bites. I’m up for doing so, if you like. We can (and will) cover some of his shorter poems. But I plan to start with his prose treatise, Areopagitica. You can read it online here. You can also find inexpensive print editions. Just be sure it’s not a print-on-demand version because you never know what you get with those. Dover is always cheap and reliable.

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”¹

BOOK NOTE:

I finally have my hands on Marilynne Robinson’s latest, Reading Genesis. Robinson can be hit or miss for me, but there is no doubt that she is one our age’s most significant Christian writers. I will be reading this later this fall to write a review for early next year. Have any of you read it yet?

My favorite work of Robinson’s is Housekeeping. It is stunning. Here’s a review a wrote on it a few years ago.

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[1] Baldick, Chris. “emblem.” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms: Oxford University Press, 2008. Oxford Reference.

[2] Anyone interested in a more thorough explanation of “Jesu” as an emblem-poem should look for Helen Vendler’s study, The Poetry of George Herbert (Harvard UP, 1975).

[3] Two groups of people will know this immediately: Latin students and fans of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The intersection of these two groups on the Venn diagram is very large.

[4] For modern readers, it might be frustrating that so simple a poem requires such a technical explanation in order to “get” it. This is not Herbert’s fault! What requires a linguistic history lesson for us now would have been a present reality for Herbert.

[5] See II Cor. 3:2-5.

[6] Think of Psalm 77, where the psalmist, Asaph, declares, “I remembered God, and was troubled” (Ps. 77.3).

1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.