"SOMETHING LIKE THAT": A PRONOUN'S LIFE IN POETRY

Consider next the use of the word "something" in George Herbert's sonnet "Prayer (I)": Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth; Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r, Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss, Exalted manna, gladness of the best, Heaven in ordinary, man well drest, The milky way, the bird of Paradise, Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood, The land of spices; something understood. First he makes a reasonable appeal. The image of the beam from the lighthouse as a form of speech is brilliant, and the word "something," as if it were a bracing and oracular passage of scripture-John 1:5 comes to mind, "And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not," and also Psalm 36:9, "in thy light shall we see light"-is fairly blinding in its implication. Something like that I don't know enough about the kind of Gnosticism behind this poem-much of the book in which it is included, Bright Existence, investigates the journey of the individual soul into this world-but I do know a particular mysticism is suggested, one in which, as this poem shows, birth itself becomes a kind of wedding, even if a reluctant one, between the mind of God and the physical world.