Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Herbert Discussing the Word 150
away from God and Christianity entirely. The ‘Ah my deare God!’ in the final line of
‘Affliction (I)’ is a long way from the cheeky ‘Ah my deare angrie Lord’ that begins
‘Bitter-sweet’. This is not a cry of affection. As God had turned the joy that Herbert first
found in salvation to a life of affliction, so too Herbert has now turned the love of
irresistible grace back on God and made it seem like he only loves God because God
compels him. When he declares ‘Let me not love thee, if I love thee not’, the difficulty of
the idea of a God as afflicter of torments, becomes more complicated and disturbing when
Herbert states that there is the possibility that he only loves God because he has no choice,
and if this is the case, he is confined to his love, and must ask for a way out. He does not
want to love God against his will, and it is a terrifying prospect that this may very well be
the curse of his life in Christ. Michael Schoenfeldt rightly states, ‘Suspended
uncomfortably between rebellion and submission, autobiography and art, politics and
prayer, the poem confronts the chilling possibility of a malevolent divinity’. 47
He could be
joined in Christ to God, and from this point of irresistible grace, unable to leave what he
has found to be a toxic and poisonous relationship. The refrain from Jesus of ‘Was ever
grief like mine’ is now a taunting call for a believer, complicit in the torturing and killing
of his God, stuck in a bond that causes regret for the way he has made Jesus suffer, but
also containing a greater regret for being tied to a God who causes nothing but pain and
suffering to those faithful to him.
However, the reader is not left with ‘Affliction (I)’. Instead, as one reads on, there
is comfort found in the next poem, ‘Repentance’. With ‘Repentance’, Herbert begins with
the statement ‘Lord, I confesse my sinne is great; | Great is my sinne’, (1-2) a statement
that is especially powerful when following right after ‘Let me not love thee, if I love thee
not’. Herbert here uses a brilliant piece of repetition to end one poem and begin the next.
47 Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power (London, 1991), p. 78.