Pain and Sweetness

Eleanor Peers

The Flower by George Herbert

How fresh, oh Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! even as the flowers in spring;

         To which, besides their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

                      Grief melts away

                      Like snow in May,

         As if there were no such cold thing.

         Who would have thought my shriveled heart

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone

         Quite underground; as flowers depart

To see their mother-root, when they have blown,

                      Where they together

                      All the hard weather,

         Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

         These are thy wonders, Lord of power,

Killing and quickening, bringing down to hell

         And up to heaven in an hour;

Making a chiming of a passing-bell.

                      We say amiss

                      This or that is:

         Thy word is all, if we could spell.

         Oh that I once past changing were,

Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can wither!

         Many a spring I shoot up fair,

Offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither;

                      Nor doth my flower

                      Want a spring shower,

         My sins and I joining together.

         But while I grow in a straight line,

Still upwards bent, as if heaven were mine own,

         Thy anger comes, and I decline:

What frost to that? what pole is not the zone

                      Where all things burn,

                      When thou dost turn,

         And the least frown of thine is shown?

         And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

         I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing. Oh, my only light,

                      It cannot be

                      That I am he

         On whom thy tempests fell all night.

         These are thy wonders, Lord of love,

To make us see we are but flowers that glide;

         Which when we once can find and prove,

Thou hast a garden for us where to bide;

                      Who would be more,

                      Swelling through store,

         Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

This poem for me catches the pain and the sweetness of Lent – a pain and sweetness you feel as much in the halting onset of spring as in the Lenten liturgy and fast. The final verse takes us to the fulfilling of that sweetness – a fulfilment that takes us beyond any oscillation between growth and decay, pleasure and pain, or life and death. We start to perceive the divine love that lay behind even the phases of suffering and futility. This love is both fierce and wise, beyond anything we can imagine or express. In fact, this love is so vast as to be everything that is. God nurtures us into understanding – despite ourselves – that we are as fragile and helpless as tiny flowers, gliding on his love. And so this poem accompanies us through the painful confrontations of Lent and the violence of Holy Week, to bring us to the Easter Resurrection: Christ has lovingly prepared a garden for us, through his own flesh and blood.

Alec Roth recently set four verses to music. Here is a recording by the choir of Salisbury Cathedral: