Yet though my flowers be lost, they say A heart can never come too late Teach it to sing Thy praise this day, And then this day my life shall date. The last line, however, is perhaps Herbert’s most brilliant of the poem: the final expansiveness, the structural resting place of fullness in the poem, is the place of our fall from moments of proximity to God into further sin, powerlessness, honesty, limitation, and dependence upon God which, in time, will ultimately “further the flight in me. I GOT me flowers to straw Thy way, I got me boughs off many a tree But Thou wast up by break of day, And broughtst Thy sweets along with Thee. With God’s newly realized presence we rise again like birds, ascending emotionally and spiritually to praise – and yet, like Babel or Icarus or Saul or any other ascent of man, we must fall back down into our natural sinfulness. The spacially expansive first lines recalls humanity’s original glory, which narrows in the Fall (line 2), which continues to constrict into the emotionally bound and powerless place of utter poverty and abjectness – “most poor.” And yet it is here, in death to self that mimics Christ’s crucifixion, that the presence of God comes (“With thee”). In this stunning poem, Herbert approaches the beauty of cyclical ‘spiritual progress’ – the cycles of consolation and desolation by which the Spirit moves in us. Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store Though foolishly he lost the same, Decaying more and more, Till he became Most poor: With thee O let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
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