Summary
“Affliction” describes the spiritual development of someone trying to understand how he should relate to God. It begins with the speaker feeling optimistic and full of life. In the first three stanzas, he has recently decided to devote himself to God and imagines that now everything will be joyful and pleasurable—an eternal springtime. The speaker pictures all of the positive things that God will bring to his life, using images like furniture, milk, and flowers. In stanzas 4-9 the poem turns in a different direction. The speaker experiences deep misery. His health declines, his friends die, and he feels alone. He thinks that God has betrayed him. In stanzas 10 and 11 the poem ends with the speaker trying to extract a lesson from his experiences. He is not completely successful. The speaker tries to abandon control over his life and put himself in God’s hands. Yet he is still not fully at peace. He wants to devote himself to God, but he is not sure of the best way to do it. The poem ends with the speaker trying to affirm his belief while also expressing worry that he might forget or be forgotten by God.
Analysis
George Herbert was a religious poet. Fittingly, “Affliction” raises a series of spiritual and philosophical questions: What is the relationship between human beings and God? Is it possible to choose your own life, or does God decide everything that happens? What does a life spent serving God look like? What should one expect from a life of service? Is it a joyful and peaceful way to live? Why does God allow sickness, sadness, and loneliness? If a life of devotion doesn’t ensure happiness and health, why bother embarking on such a journey? Is it possible to make peace with the fact of death? What can one reasonably expect of God, or is having expectations at all the real problem? The poem doesn’t provide any clear answers to all of these difficult questions. However, the speaker’s example does demonstrate what the wrong way to approach them might be. The speaker may not have had a completely successful spiritual journey, but he narrates his passage from optimism to despair to tentative acceptance as if offering a guide to others.
“Affliction” portrays one misguided way that people can approach their relationship to God. When the poem begins, the speaker is excited to devote himself to serving God, but he is spiritually immature and full of dangerous assumptions. He thinks of service as a transactional relationship: devote yourself to God and you will be repaid. There will be “no month but May,” the speaker thinks: life will be an eternal springtime. The speaker begins his spiritual journey expecting nothing but “milk and sweetness” and “flowers and happiness.” Images taken from the natural world and domestic space symbolize the spiritual joys and peace of mind that the speaker imagines is awaiting him. The frequent use of alliteration in this first part of the poem (particularly with /f/ and /w/ and /m/ sounds) provide a sonic parallel to this idea of a world in perfect harmony.
Despite the optimistic tone of the first part of the poem, specific aspects of the speaker’s language foreshadows the fact that something is wrong. Repeated use of “I,” “me,” and “mine” hint that this relationship between man and God is almost exclusively focused on the human side of the equation. The speaker is unable to think beyond his own point-of-view. He imagines that God’s role is merely to add to the speaker’s many positive qualities. He also imagines spiritual benefits in terms of material things: “household-stuff” (rich furniture), “wages” (money), and “pleasures” (food and drink). These unrealistic expectations reach their most hyperbolic point when the speaker imagines that even the stars will be his, once he has dedicated himself to God.
The poem has an abrupt shift of tone at the end of stanza 4. The word “But” used to begin a sentence signals a turn in mood. At first, everything was perfect, but as the speaker gets older “sorrow did twist and grow.” This image of sadness as a creeping vine signals the harsh images of sickness and death that fill the poem’s middle section. Now instead of “flowers” and “sweetness” the speaker mentions “groans” and “grief.” In an instance of personification, the speaker’s flesh begins to complain to his soul. He is in so much pain from fever and shivering that he fears he might already be dead. Then he recovers only to have God take away his real “life”—that is, his friends. In a memorable image, the speaker imagines himself blown about here and there in the “storm and wind.” In place of the confident, self-assured tone of the first stanzas, we now have a speaker who has been destroyed by life. His tone has become one of resignation.
This middle section of the poem also has a strongly accusatory tone. Because the speaker expected nothing but happiness and ease from God, he feels betrayed in his sickness and loneliness. The protagonist of the poem now presents God as the antagonist. Finding that his body is failing him, his friends are dying, and he’s left all alone, the speaker suggests that God tricked him into service. In a parallel to the description of sorrow as “twist[ing] and “grow[ing],” the speaker describes himself as “entangled” in the strife that God created for him. Trapped, he cannot make his own decisions. The speaker had wanted to pursue a non-religious career in the “town,” but says that God has wrapped him in the “gown” of an academic and priest instead. In an allusion to the figure of Job in the Hebrew Bible’s “Book of Job,” the speaker struggles with the seeming contradiction between God’s goodness and the reality of suffering and pain. Faced with life’s difficulties and his shattered expectations, the speaker alternates between blaming God and promising to be obedient from now on. He is conflicted, going from trying to assert his own human will to wishing he was a tree. This is a key image in the poem. A tree is silent. It bends with the wind and provides a generous home to birds and other creatures. It symbolizes obedience. Earlier he was thrown to and fro by the “storm and wind.” With the wind as a metaphor for the unpredictable will of God, the speaker imagines bending with each gust. This image also contains a Biblical allusion. In Psalm 92:12 trees are a symbol for moral righteousness: “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.” By wishing he could become a tree, the speaker expresses his desire to be useful to others.
As the poem moves toward its conclusion, the speaker is trying to find some way to make peace with his powerlessness. If he can’t shape his own life, then he wants to try abandoning control altogether. He tells God to do what he wants with him. He recognizes that God’s will is not something he can learn through study. It is unknowable. However, even after attempting to find peace, the speaker’s tone is still clearly unsettled. The poem moves rapidly between different thoughts and images. The speaker contradicts himself. One minute his tone is resigned, but the next it is agitated. Immediately after saying that he must now be meek and obey God (”meek” is a reference to Matthew 5:5 which says “the meek shall inherit the earth") the speaker wonders if rebelling might actually be a better option. The speaker even veers into blasphemy: he suggests that if serving God has not prevented his misery perhaps he should “go seek/some other master out.” The final lines show the speaker concerned about the possibility that God might forget him or that he might forget God. He calls out for help in direct address: “Ah my dear God!”
Does the speaker end the poem different than he was at the beginning? In some ways, yes. Faced with the inevitable fact of pain and aging, the speaker seems to realize that he was wrong to think that everything could automatically go his way just because he chose a religious way of life. By the end of the poem, he tries to give up control and put himself in God’s hands, hoping to be of use to other people while he still can. Is this then a poem of spiritual development? Up until the last lines the speaker is still arguing with God and trying to discover other ways out.
The poem does not offer a clear resolution to the speaker’s anguish. This is revealed by the difficult final line of the poem, which is addressed to God: “Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.” The speaker is trying to affirm his faith in God, but he does it through a confusing paradox. He says to God: I’m confident about my love to you. In fact, I’m so confident that if you find that I don’t love you after all, then you can cut me off from that most important thing to me—loving you. The use of the double negative (“Let me not love thee, if I love thee not”) shows the speaker’s hesitant state of mind. In the same way that describing something as “not unpleasant” is different than calling it “pleasant,” with his double negative the speaker both affirms his love while also suggesting it might not be so secure after all.
The poem ends on an ambiguous tone. While Herbert as a poet was deeply concerned with issues of religious devotion, the speaker of the poem appears to be an unreliable model for how one should relate to God. If, like a tree, the speaker hopes to be of use, it is perhaps as a negative example. Unlike him, the poem implicitly suggests, those who devote themselves to God should learn not to expect a reward.
While the poem is specifically concerned with religious issues, the questions it raises do have wider relevance. “Affliction” describes the inevitability of old age and decay. People cannot always choose how their lives will go. Where there is spring, there is also winter. Sometimes the best you can do is embrace paradox. It is harmful to have unrealistic expectations.
