Myth, Microcosm, and Method in George Herbert's "Prayer" (I)

Myth, Microcosm, and Method in George Herbert's uPrayer" (I) by Joan Klingel Ray Barbara Lewalski's observation that George Herbert "all unobtrusively loads every rift with ore"1 applies especially well to "Prayer" (I), in which the poet offers twenty-six highly suggestive — if sometimes puzzling — metaphors to explore the meaning of prayer. The images of which this sonnet is comprised have been well mined.2 Yet delving a bit more deeply into lines six and seven, with their respective descriptions of prayer as "Reversed thunder" and "The six-daies world transposing in an houre," as well as into the overall organization or method of the poem, especially a suggested turn at line four, yields even greater riches in "Prayer" (I) than have been hitherto recognized. Explicating line six's image of "Reversed thunder," critics point to the thunder frequently associated in the Bible with God's presence and to the thunderbolts that pagan lore says were hurled by Jupiter. But how might thunder be "Reversed"? Di Cesare answers that the image "suggests bold, aggressive prayer" and as such is a witty description of how "the thunderbolt of the divine anger against sinful man is absorbed by the lightning rod of the Cross. . . ."3 On the same image, Rickey and Bloch observe that "Reversed thunder" reminds us that God allows his creatures to assume the divine prerogative and use prayer against him — to "storm" in Rickey's words, "the very throne of Grace"; this is implicitly contrasted with the "merely" authoritative and unapproachable throne of Jupiter.4 While cautioning against the "attempt to 'visualise' the metaphor too closely," Greenwood acknowledges Herbert's "allusion to 'profane' literature" and regards the association of Jupiter's thunderbolts with Judeo-Christian prayer as oxymoronic and suggestive of prayer's " 'two-way' direction."5 But even as readers of line six note the biblical and mythological sources for "Reversed thunder," little has been done to specify a relationship between the two traditions beyond Rickey's 38Joan Klingel Ray contrasting God's approachability with Jupiter's inapproachability . Yet Herbert, an Anglican divine and a classicist, would have surely considered a metaphysically witty fusion of the biblical and mythological allusions. That is, the wounded Christian pray-er who would "storm" God's throne with bitter recriminations — with "Reversed thunder" — is reminiscent of the raving, unruly "Child" in Herbert's "The Collar." In mythology, Phaethon was the unruly child who became a victim of Jupiter's thunderbolts. Despite his father's (Phoebus') warnings, Phaethon insisted on driving the huge, fiery chariot of the sun. The chariot so overpowered the boy that he was unable even to heed his father's instructions for directing it. Consequently, it raced chaotically, burning everything in its path until Jupiter, at the behest of Mother Earth, struck and killed the young charioteer with a thunderbolt . This is a "tale of indulgent parenthood," observes Joseph Campbell.6 It is also the tale of the unruly child who proudly assumes the prerogatives of his father, until (in Campbell's words) "chaos supervenes." Similarly, the pray-er who figuratively hurls "thunder" at God — albeit that God, in His loving generosity, gives His creature the freedom to do so — is an unruly child whose spiritually adolescent rebellion will potentially plunge him into chaos. Indeed, this is precisely what happens to the speaker of "The Collar," who "rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde / At every word . . ."(II. 33-34). But whereas Jupiter hurls punitive thunderbolts at a rebellious child, the Christian God lovingly calls the "Child" back to order.7 This occurs not only in "The Collar," but also in "Prayer" (I). To understand this return to order in "Prayer" (I), we turn to the second image of line six, "Christ-side-piercing spear," insofar as it relates to line 7, "The six-daies world transposing in an houre." In the fullest and most cogent interpretation of line 7 that I have encountered, Di Cesare suggests that its final word, "houre," refers not only to the hour of prayer, but also (and more profoundly) to the hour of Christ's death. Thus, he reasons, the "houre" of the Crucifixion, which is also represented by the...