This is a remarkable book. It is the best example I have encountered of what it means really to live with a great poem. Aaron Kunin not only reads the poem in a serious way but allows the poem to read him. He sees George Herbert’s great lyric “Love” (always known, through editorial convention, as “Love” [3], the final lyric in The Temple) as having the kind of life-revealing power that Herbert saw as special to the words of the Bible. Of the ways that scattered verses in the Bible could, unexpectedly, combine into “constellations,” which work astrologically rather than astronomically to “make up some Christian’s destinie,” Herbert asserted:
Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good,
And comments on thee: for in ev’ry thing
Thy words do finde me out, & parallels bring,
And in another make me understood.1
Herbert, of course, saw “The H. Scriptures”...
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