by Doug Talley

What is the “perfect” work of art?  Are mortal man and woman, in their fallen condition, even capable of perfect art, if only for a moment?  Can we even conceive perfection, let alone attain it?  In His timeless sermon, Jesus Christ, the Exemplar of a perfect life, instructed his disciples, Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.  Volumes have been written and spoken about this simple injunction. How do we apply the scripture to ourselves, and how can art lead us into an understanding of this commandment?

The word translated from the original Greek verse as “perfect” is an adjective, teleios, pronounced “teleios”.  It means “having reached its end”, “finished”, “complete”.  Applied to sacrificial victims, the word meant “without spot or blemish”.  When Christ uttered his final words from the cross, and said, It is finished, the original Greek text reads Tetelestai, pronounced “Tetelestai”.  This is the verb form of the same concept, that a thing has reached “completion”, “fulfillment”, and thus “perfection”.  In those last words on the cross, Atonement was finished, complete, perfected.  When Christ, therefore, instructed us to be perfect, among the many shades of meaning in the word are the concepts to bring our own lives to “fulfillment”, to become in Him “without spot or blemish”, to “reach an end” of “perfection”. 

Mired as we are in the imperfections and incompleteness of our daily lives, this concept can be elusive.  Works of art, in themselves “virtuous and lovely and of good report”, can help us grasp this concept of perfection in real and tangible ways.  Works of art can achieve, in their sphere, perfection.  In support of this thesis one could cite a single poem, “Gratefulness” by George Herbert.

George Herbert was born in 1593, the same year approximately when Shakespeare is believed to have written Richard the Third.  He was the seventh of ten children of Richard and Magdalene Herbert and was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College.  He developed into a well-regarded Greek and Latin scholar, and was fluent in Italian, Spanish and French.  His eldest brother, Edward was appointed Ambassador to France in 1619, and George himself appeared destined to a distinguished public career, when in 1626 he resigned his seat in Parliament and abandoned all political ambition.  Instead he took holy orders to become eventually the Rector of Bemerton, a small rural parish on Salisbury Plain.  He married Jane Danvers in 1629 and four years later died of consumption at the age of forty.  Almost all of his extant poems in English are collected in a single masterpiece, The Temple, which before his death he instructed a friend to burn or to print, as deemed best.  Fortunately, the manuscript was preserved, and the poems were printed in what the printer himself termed their “naked simplicity”. 

This naked simplicity derives almost entirely from Herbert’s labor as a country parson.  Seemingly modest work made a modest man and informed a seemingly modest style.  His images were drawn from the cultivated fields of the English countryside – flowers and honeybees and melting snows – and the cups, tableware, and other household items of a simple domestic life.  His content was drawn from the scriptures, the seasonal cycles of the Christian calendar, and his own profound religious experience.  His syntax is free of the Latinate complexities of other English poets, such as John Milton.  Instead, he wrote in a straightforward Anglo-Saxon style, in that forceful pattern of subject-verb-object learned in grade school, which is today still at the heart of modern American and English poetry. 

There is much in the whole volume of The Temple to admire.  Consider the following: 

What is perfect about this poem?  Virtually everything.  In these few lines all the skills of a master poet find their place – a perfect confluence of many elements found in fine poetry – profound feeling, unusual insights one upon another, delightful irony from the first lines of the poem to the last, incisive statement, daylight clarity of logic, seamless development and progression of theme, rich sound, captivating metaphor, brevity, elevated diction, and in the final word of the poem a perfect conclusion, both surprising and utterly inevitable.  

The poem itself is a simple prayer, instilling a humble, holy sense of worship.  But it is a prayer perfect as well in the irony of its request, a request not to meet yet another physical need, like one’s daily bread, but to meet a spiritual need, to gain a heart capable of appreciating the bounty already provided by a merciful God.  Is not this itself a perfect sentiment for a child of God?

This perfect sentiment is reinforced perfectly by its form, which was and still is innovative, a departure from the regular English quatrain of four full lines of verse.  Instead, the last line of the quatrain consists of a single metric foot embodied in two monosyllabic words.  And yet the rhyme scheme is maintained masterfully throughout the poem for eight stanzas.  The effect is jarring, but not awkward, or unsettling.  In almost every quatrain the last two words cap the stanza with surprise. 

The rhythm of the poem is basically an iambic tetrameter:  ta-thump, ta-thump, ta-thump, ta-thump.  But instead of locking into dull rigidity – monotonous to the ear like the lines “I think that I shall never see / a poem as lovely as a tree” – Herbert varies the pacing of the line, replacing the iamb occasionally with a trochee for the rhythmic effect, thump-ta ta-thump, as in the lines:

To the ear, the repetition of this metrical pattern in the same line suggests wave after wave after wave of gift.  To the heart, the rhythm suggests an infinite need on the part of the author and an infinite generosity on the part of God, who answers need after need, time after time – much would have more, and much . . . comes.

Herbert’s handling of a difficult and fascinating form appears effortless and masterful.  There are no forced rhymes.  The few occasions of inverted syntax do not cause even a modern reader to stumble.  We can comprehend the line, Thy word our hearts and hands did crave, just as readily as if it had been written, Our hearts and hands did crave Thy word.  The form does not hinder the content of the poem, but promotes it, moving the reader to one spiritual insight after another until it culminates into an unbelievably profound and elegant request in the final lines of the poem.

Consider the perfection of those last few words – “whose pulse may be / Thy praise”.  The poem ends on a powerful metaphor, the idea that the very pulse of our veins might some day prove to be a song to God (as in the scripture, For my soul delighteth in the song of the heart).  Place your fingers on your wrist, and read the final six words slowly, over and over, at the same pace suggested by the pulse of your wrist.  The rhythm of the words is cased in perfect iambs, like a heartbeat, ta-thump, ta-thump, ta-thump.  The alliteration created by the letter “p” in “pulse” and “praise” and the letter “b” in the word “be”, reinforces this heartbeat by falling on the final accented syllables of the poem.  The sound of the line suggests the very pulse of praise the author seeks.  Heard in the silence that follows is the reader’s own heart, as it were, striving for that same rhythm of praise.

This poem may be read over and over and over, each time to new profit.  In this instance, over-familiarity does not dull appreciation, but sharpens it.  The poem suggests perfection; it helps point to perfection, because it is in its own sphere a kind of perfection.  Great art has that quality.  Perhaps, George Herbert himself made the case best in another poem:

Hopefully, these poems of George Herbert have given pause to consider our own labors and aspirations for perfection.  Feel free to write Meridian Magazine with your own nomination for the “perfect poem”. And as always, readers’ submissions are welcome.