‘Love’ by George Herbert (1593-1633)

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 lack’d anything.        6

‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’
            Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘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?’  12

‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d 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.’ 16
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
            So I did sit and eat.

Considering the Poem

As had John Milton in ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Paradise Regained’, George Herbert, here, though much more quickly than Milton, covers the whole of Christian spiritual history and theology with clarity of purpose and poetic skill.

Perhaps the most important of the text’s virtues is an image, though not one that is used at a single point in the verse to convey some visual detail but one that runs through the poem from start to finish and acts like a framework for everything that happens on the surface of the verse – something we could call a structural image, perhaps. This is the image of a house that we learn by inference is God’s house. At the start of the poem, the speaker, as an invited visitor, is at the threshold of the house; at the end of the poem, he has been persuaded to enter the private part of the house to ‘sit down’ (18) at the host’s table and eat.

So, something completely familiar – a house and the process of visiting it – is used to present the Christian story of creation, the fall, guilt, repentance, atonement, forgiveness and, in the end, a convivial reconciliation between the visiting man and the God of Love, the householder. How is this done?

Each verse comprises a single exchange between the two participants in the dialogue. There is not the tiniest bit of irrelevance at any point and not a wasted word.

The first line, because of the odd reaction of the guest, must surely be one of the most puzzling and arresting lines in English poetry? The rest of the poem explains why a guest, invited by Love itself, would recoil.

He knows he is ‘Guiltie of dust and sinne’ (2), of the dirt and imperfection he has picked up on the road of life. He is confessing his part in the sin that had its original source in the pride and disobedience of Adam and Eve. We then notice that the self-doubting visitor has been coaxed beyond the threshold and into the hall, still a relatively public part of a house, but has stalled (3-4) in his progress. He needs further encouragement so, as in each of the host’s replies to the visitor’s doubt (8, 10-11, 14-18), he is spoken to in a tone of gentle kindness and asked what is wrong, whether he lacks anything (8).

Carrying us into the exchange in the second verse, the visitor answers that what he lacks is inside himself: he is not ‘worthy’ and shouldn’t even have got this far past the threshold. He has made an acknowledgement of his inner failure.. This is exactly the kind of shortcoming that the divine host can rectify through forgiveness. He will mercifully transform the ‘unkinde, ungratefull’ (9) visitor into a worthy guest (8): firstly, he will do it because the guest’s confession has been made, showing that he is ready to repent; secondly, because the God of Love is the creator and made the guest’s now ‘marr’d’, distorting eyes in the first place, he is able to purify them and restore the guest’s clarity of understanding and vision.

Still, in his humility and shame, the guest is holding back, thinking that to bring him further into the house would be unjust to those who are more deserving. But he has forgotten something: the host asks him (such a simple question!) whether he remembers ‘who bore the blame’ (15) for the sins and wickedness of mankind. The question doesn’t need answering. The guest’s problem was solved a long time before. He is told that, now, he ‘must sit down’ (17) at the table and share in the meat’ (here, the word has its old meaning, referring to all food, not just flesh) in the reconciling communion service that Christians celebrate continually.

The poem has done something almost impossible, then, by taking us through the historic relationship between mankind and God in eighteen short and plainly-worded lines of verse, using an everyday structural image and three rounds of dialogue. Herbert was a parish priest. His vocational knowledge, not just of abstract theology but of the liturgy and the order of service for holy communion, must have had a formative influence on this extraordinary poem. How many times, after all, must he have administered the sacraments of bread and wine to those who, perhaps sometimes after a spiritual struggle, quietly ‘did sit and eat’ (18)?