Mend My Rhyme, Ten Years Later

It’s surreal to think that it has already been ten years since I released Mend My Rhyme: The George Herbert Project, on April 4, 2015. In this short, seven-track album, I took eight poems by the Anglican devotional poet George Herbert (1593-1633) and set them to music, singing five of them, reading two of them, and—yes—making an attempt at rapping one them. I listened to the album again this week and was pleased to find I’m still happy with it.

The Inspiration for the Album

I had been introduced to George Herbert’s poetry in my British Literature class during my senior year of high school. Three years later, during my sophomore year of college, three things converged in Spring 2014 to give me the idea for making a tribute album. First, I had been listening to Heath McNease’s album The Weight of Glory (2012) and its “hip hop remix” The Weight of Glory: Second Edition (2013); in both versions of the album, each song is inspired by a different work by C. S. Lewis. Second, I was memorizing Herbert’s “The Pulley” to recite it, and writing an essay to analyze it, for an English composition class. Third, I had been working on an instrumental track in Apple GarageBand, just for fun. When it somehow occurred to me to wonder if “The Pulley” could be read over that instrumental, and it worked, I realized I could do a project in the style of McNease’s Lewis tribute, only this time almost all the words (I invented a chorus for “Paradise”) would be the author’s own.

Incidentally, the initial reason I became interested in Herbert’s poetry in high school was because of what Lewis had said about him. In the memoir Surprised by Joy, Lewis writes that, while he was still an unbeliever, he found that Herbert “seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment; but the wretched fellow, instead of doing it all directly, insisted on mediating it through what I would still have called ‘the Christian mythology’. … The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed [as] … Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores” (HarperOne, 2017, pp. 261–262).

The Structure of the Album

I realized that the poems I had selected from Herbert’s book The Temple generally fell into two broad thematic categories: poems about restlessness apart from God, and poems about finding rest in God. This “rest”/“restlessness” contrast is explicit in the first track, “The Pulley.” From there I discovered I could order the tracks in a fittingly poetic fashion. I hadn’t yet discovered and become obsessed with chiastic structure—but of course the structure would turn out to be very close to chiastic.

• Track 1, “The Pulley,” is about restlessness, and the poem is read (A1).

• Track 2, “Paradise,” is about rest, and the poem is sung (B).

• Track 3, “Vanity II,” is about restlessness, and the poem is sung (C).

• In track 4, “Love I and II,” “Love I” is about restlessness, and is rapped, whereas “Love II” is about rest, and is sung (D).

• Track 5, “Denial,” is about restlessness, and the poem is sung (C).

• Track 6, “Love III,” is about rest, and the poem is sung (B).

• Track 7, “The Dedication,” is about rest, and the poem is read (A2).   

The Artwork of the Album

I had a lot of fun working with my friend David Rhee to create the cover and liner notes booklet for the album. Because I took centuries-old poems, which Herbert would have written by hand, and turned them into very modern songs, which I produced using only digital instruments, we wanted the artwork to reflect that convergence of old and new, organic and artificial. David also wanted me to have a hand—literally—in the production of the artwork. For the cover, David put a parchment-like texture, covered with the words of the poem “Denial,” in the background, and put my handmade trace of Herbert’s portrait, enmeshed with two intersecting red bars (suggesting a cross and modern art), in the foreground. Inside the booklet, each track was given its own page. For tracks 2 through 6, we found stock images online that fit with the themes or imagery of each poem, and I traced them by hand just as I did the Herbert portrait. For track 1, “The Pulley,” we couldn’t find a good image of a pulley lowering a bucket, so I drew that from scratch. For track 7, “The Dedication,” David took a photo of my own outstretched hands for me to trace.

What I Would Do Differently

Herbert scholars and lovers of classic poetry generally may be horrified by what I’ve done with these poems, but I was relieved, on revisiting the album this week, that at least I didn’t do as much violence to the construction of the poems as I might have. My one regret in terms of respecting the source material is that the way I interpreted “Love I” and “Love II” ignores Herbert’s punctuation and line breaks. I had an underdeveloped understanding of the craft of poetry at the time of composing the tracks, but the semester I was finishing up the album I wrote another essay on Herbert, this time on “Easter Wings,” which helped me appreciate how Herbert uses line lengths and enjambment. If I had composed “Love I and II” even a few months later, I might have tried to pause a musical phrase only where there was a comma, period, or line break in the poem, so that the shape of the songs would always match the shape of the poems.   

The other things I would differently would be to not experiment so much with the stereo mix, and to not record the vocals for all the songs in a single half-day session. Granted, I was renting a recording booth and I had one chance to get it all right, but that wasn’t a good choice for my voice.

Men with Chests

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis famously coined the phrase “men without chests” (p. 26 in the 2000 HarperOne edition). But what does it mean to be a man with a chest? What is the Chest?

Lewis is adapting Plato’s idea of the tripartite soul. In his Republic, Plato says the human soul has: [1] a rational, philosophic part (literally, the wisdom-loving part); [2] an appetitive part (the pleasure-loving part, though more specifically the money-loving part because money helps satisfy all the other appetites); and [3] a spirited part, which loves honor and victory (p. 251 in the 1992 Hackett edition). According to the Republic, the spirited part should submit to the rational part, and together the rational and spirited parts should rule over the appetitive part (117). And Lewis agrees with all this: “Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’” (24). Yet Lewis makes two significant changes. 

First, Lewis brings in an analogy between the soul and the body that Plato does not use: “The [rational] head rules the [appetitive] belly through the [spirited] chest” (24). More on that in moment. And second, he expands the range of functions encompassed by the concept of the spirited element. 

The index of my copy of Republic tells me the Greek word used for ‘spirit’—thumos—also means ‘anger’ (299). And in fact, Plato puts a lot of emphasis on how it is “the spirited part by which we get angry” (115; cf. 251). Those who live for honor or take honor the most seriously are proud, and the proud can be quite, well, touchy. Plato acknowledges that, at worst, the spirited part can be “hard and harsh” and marked by “savageness.” But, at best, if the spirited part is rightly channeled, the anger and pride that are aroused whenever honor is at stake can produce courage, one of Plato’s four cardinal virtues (87). 

Lewis also associates the spirited element or Chest with courage, using the example of a soldier in battle to show how, without having a courageous Chest, the soldier will not be able to fulfill his duty while under fire (24). But Lewis, being a Christian who knows Christ’s command to turn the other cheek and who has read Paul’s celebration of humility—and above all, has been soul-transformed by the gospel of grace—cannot give anger and pride the controlling interest in the Chest. Instead of associating the spirited element with anger, pride, and honor, Lewis associates it with the terms “trained emotions,” “Magnanimity,” and “Sentiment” (24-25). He says the Chest is “the seat … of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments” (24-25). In most people, anger is volatile, not stable. I think we can infer from Lewis that the person who follows his anger all the time is controlled by his appetitive part, not by his spirited part as Plato supposed. But if anger were reined in by reason and habit and if it was only heeded and acted on when the emotion corresponded with reality—if someone could be angry only about those things that rightly merit anger, and in the right degrees—then anger would be at home in the Chest. But it wouldn’t be the only emotion at home there. So what else is included in Lewis’s conception of the Chest?

To approach a clearer, fuller answer to that question, I’ve found it helpful to ask, first, Why does he use the word “Chest” and not “Heart”? Actually, he does use “heart” at least once in the text. He says: “The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it” (19). But within a few pages he has swapped out “Heart” for “Chest,” and he clearly prefers the latter term. Why? Is it just that for modern readers the heart has all kinds of mushy, sappy connotations that Lewis wants to avoid? Maybe, but I think there’s more to it. The image of the Chest is richer, more complex. Consider basic anatomy. The chest houses the heart, yes, but it also houses the lungs, and both are held in place and protected by bones: the spine and the rib cage. What if Lewis has all these parts of the physical chest in mind? The Chest encompasses the heart, which we popularly associate with emotions and conscience, but it can also encompass the lungs by which we breathe—and in the Bible, breath is linked to spirit—and it also recalls the English idiom we use to tell people to have courage: “show some backbone.” Thus, the Chest concept retains Plato’s emphasis on courage and honor while making room for other virtues and pointing to how we are ultimately spiritual beings, not just spirited ones. God breathed life into us so we could know and love Him. 

So what does it mean to be man (or woman!) with a chest? It means having strong bones, strong lungs, and a strong heart. It means having “the harder virtues” we need when the going gets tough and painful self-denial is called for (24). It means living in reliance on God just as we live by the breath he gives us moment-by-moment. And it means having an emotional life that is rightly ordered, meaning our feelings are appropriate and proportionate to the realities and situations that evoke them.

(An aside: Likening the parts of the soul to the physical body underlines why we must be led by the rational and spirited parts and not by the appetitive part. The human brain, just like the heart and lungs, is shielded by bones. The stomach is not. It is the most vulnerable of these essential organs. In the same way, the human soul is most vulnerable to falling into vice by way of the appetites.)

This post is indebted to recent conversations with Tim Lawrence about the tripartite soul, and to a Malcolm Guite lecture on Herbert’s poem “Prayer (I)” that I had the privilege of attending a few days ago. It was when Guite explained the line that prayer is “God’s breath in man returning to his birth” that he pointed out how in Scripture breath and spirit are inextricably linked; that was when I had the “Aha!” moment that resulted in this post.