like a flaring thing

Sometimes I have this problem with National Poetry Month. The problem goes like this: I know today is a Herbert day -- for about ten different reasons, starting with drinking champagne and reading Erasmus on the lawn in the sunshine instead of eating lunch, and ending with my friend who just passed her oral exams drunkenly folding $20 bills into frogs -- but then after a very long day of excellent classes and glorious weather and good friends, I get lost rereading The Temple; and then it is half past 11, and somewhere in this book is the right poem for the day, but the thing is that once you cross that threshold, The Temple is a whole lot bigger on the inside, and choosing the right poem becomes weighted, complicated, more than just a choice. A heart in a building in a heart that is a building. The TARDIS effect of Metaphysical Poetry. Your relationship with God.

Herbert is not always wonderful, and in any case I think he may be an acquired taste, but I love him. Feel free to speculate about what my selection of this poem says about me. Alternatively, go read the rest of The Temple. You might hate it, especially if you're not into devotional poetry; on the other hand, you'll get to enjoy the dubious pleasure of the Anamarygram.

Lord, how can man preach thy eternall word?
   He is a brittle crazie glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
   This glorious and transcendent place,
   To be a window, through thy grace.

But when thou dost anneal in glasse thy story,
   Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glorie
   More rev'rend grows, & more doth win;
   Which else shows watrish, bleak, & thin.

Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one
   When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
   Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
   And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

—George Herbert (1593-1633), "The Windows" from The Temple, 1633.