The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
– Description of prayer from George Herbert’s poem Prayer (I)
Reflection
I certainly didn’t expect it. If someone had told me that a seventeenth-century poem called Prayer would capture the imaginations of my undergraduate British literature class, I’d have chuckled gently. My students that semester were thoughtful and full of goodwill, but they didn’t seem extraordinarily interested in seventeenth-century Anglican theology.
In fact, I taught George Herbert’s Prayer (I) mainly because I was also struggling to write my dissertation on Herbert and Donne at the time. I couldn’t resist sneaking a day for each of them into my syllabus, and I hoped that my research and teaching could dovetail at least for those two class periods.
But to my surprise, our classroom conversation about Prayer (I) was one of the most successful discussions all semester. As I read out quotations from the poem and asked what each image meant, thirty students tossed out insights with a fascination that surprised me. [Read more…] about Learning Prayer from George Herbert