"No room for me": George Herbert and Our Contemporaries

Herbert and Our Contemporaries Peter Sacks "No room for me": George Herbert and Our Contemporaries It is dawn above the trenches of the First World War. There are bodies hanging in the wire. Crouching below ground, Christopher Tietjens, the protagonist of Ford Madox Ford's tetralogy Parade's End, falls into a reverie while awaiting another enemy onslaught. He has already lost part of his memory under the shock of bombardment ; and among the ruins of an inner waste land dike Eliot's poem, these novels were published in the twenties), he struggles to evoke a state of England and a state of being that the war has shattered. "What had become of the Seventeenth Century?" he asks, and a line of eight monosyllabic words floats into his mind: "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright. . . .'n Out of the words and images of all preceding centuries, this single line of poetry, with its lucidity and its serenely equilibrated symmetry and pace, becomes both the near-talismanic touchstone of an ideal, and a source from which to measure violent degradation. While readying the defenses of his soldiers, Tietjens probes his damaged memory for the name of the author's parish: "What was it called? . . . What the devil was its name? Oh, hell! . . . Between Salisbury and Wilton . . . The tiny church . . . until he could remember the name he would consider nothing."2 The elusive name becomes a lock or key to consideration itself, depending on the integration of mind that it represents and requires. Interestingly — and this will be crucial to one strand of my argument — Tietjens cannot deliberately recall the name: it will come not only involuntarily, but out of an intolerable pressure: "They're due to begin their barrage in fourteen minutes, but they won't really come over without 32Peter Sacks a hell of a lot of preparation ... I don't know how brigade knows all this!" The name "Bemerton" suddenly came on to his tongue. Yes, Bemerton, Bemerton, Bemerton was George Herbert's parsonage . . . He imagined himself standing up on a little hill, a lean contemplative parson, looking at the land sloping down to Salisbury spire. . . . Imagine standing up on a hill! It was the unthinkable thing there!3 From this moment, Bemerton becomes a positive watchword, even as it defines the one "unthinkable thing," the least available stance. The German shelling begins, and amidst the screamed obscenities around him, Tietjens hears an additional line of "Vertue": "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, / The bridall of the earth and skie." Ironically, the literal havoc between sky and earth may have prompted this further line, but in the following moments the image of Bemerton becomes a kind of foxhole associated with the lost Jerusalem of an exile's pledge: "When I forget thee, oh, my Bemerton . . . may my right hand forget its cunning!"4 During a brief lull, Tietjens wonders, Don't we say prayers before battle? . . . He could not imagine himself doing it . . . He just hoped that nothing would happen that would make him lose control of his mind. . . . Otherwise he found that he was meditating on how to get the paper affairs of the unit into a better state. . . . "Who sweeps a room as for Thy cause . . ."It was the equivalent of prayer, probably.5 The misquotation from "The Elixir" may signal the impossibility of realigning oneself perfectly with Herbert, even while one is summoned by his example. And the larger inability to pray while nonetheless searching, via the prompting of Herbert's language, for some probable "equivalent of prayer": this predicament will challenge other twentieth-century writers and thinkers in distress, as we shall see. While Ford's novel inaugurates the last eight decades of our century, Tietjens' relation to Herbert, its blend of compelled yet compromised recollection, of historical anguish and attempted Herbert and Our Contemporaries33 metaphysical reorientation, is no less inaugural and paradigmatic for later writers. Before leaving Ford, two brief points should be added. It would be foolish to suppose that Herbert represents untroubled tranquillity. Certainly there is a mantra-like solace in repeating "Sweet day, so cool ..." (and perhaps for a few moments it was a beautiful dawn that...