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Meditation on Herbert’s “Church Monuments”

“…Mark, here below,
How tame these ashes are, how free from lust,
That thou mayst fit thyself against thy fall.”

—George Herbert, “Church Monuments”

In the Sinai death is mummified—
A corpse is a brittle puppet in the sand.
Men remember dust, and ash becomes
A smug reproach to vanity, in silence.
Nothing grows from death in that vile desert:
Blood does not seep into the warm, wet earth
Nor does the seed of flesh take root and bloom.
Only fanatic wind blows over all:
The ululating torment of the mad.

The rose bush rooted in dead Caesar’s breast
Draws up Imperium to its reddened petals;
A blood-charged, sweating Roman legionary
Waits in autumnal shade for Khayyam’s senses—
Life is the effervescence of his death.

The company of these stone-tokened dead
Who have no resurrection-dream beyond
The green that grows out of them, as did their hair,
Are neither tame, nor free from goading lust
But fester and move, beneath the living mold.

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Poet’s Note

ululating: howling, wailing.
Imperium: command, authority, the Roman right to rule other peoples.
legionary: a Roman soldier, assigned to a military legion.
stone-tokened: marked by a monument, my coinage to describe burial sites.

This poem was written in the early 1970s. George Herbert had long been a favorite of mine, along with others in the school of Donne. The poem’s basic structure is a comparison of two different cultural attitudes towards death: that of a Levantine desert-like dryness (which I associate with fanaticism and madness), and that of European-Mediterranean warmth and moisture (which I link with growth, regeneration, and seasonal change). The internal reference to Khayyam alludes to quatrain 24 of his Rubaiyat, in the FitzGerald translation:

I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her lap from some once lovely Head.

My grandfather described this quatrain as the most beautiful in the entire Rubaiyat.

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Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine TRINACRIA and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He taught in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.

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20 Responses

  1. Roy Eugene Peterson

    “Stone-tokened” is a great creative term for monuments. I agree with your grandfather’s assessment of the “Rubaiyat” quatrain now that you pointed it out.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank your for your comments, LTC Peterson. My grandfather translated the FitzGerald version of the Rubaiyat into Italian, so he knew it quite well.

      Reply
  2. C.B. Anderson

    For some reason, the third stanza reminds me of the practice of planting a tree above the buried placenta that is part of the afterbirth following the birth of one’s children. The practice is rare, since it is unlikely that a hospital would ever allow anyone to take the afterbirth home with them, because they probably regard it as hazmat. Only in home births may this happen. The whole poem is a strange reflection on resurrection and its limits, and evokes the image of “pushing up daisies.”

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Kip, one of my uncles was born with a caul, and it was saved and later planted under a fig tree in my grandparents’ garden. There seem to be a lot of superstitions about cauls.

      Reply
      • C.B. Anderson

        My maternal grandmother, who was Irish, claimed that she was born with a caul. She said it meant that she was gifted with a touch of clairvoyance. I don’t know about that, but she was a canny nanny.

      • Joseph S. Salemi

        Belief in clairvoyance, or “second sight” as the Highland Scots call it, is still strong among Celtic peoples. Much of the West’s mythic patrimony of magic, faeries, bewitchment, leprechauns, and charms comes from Celtic sources — and that includes the core of the Arthurian legends.

  3. Brian A. Yapko

    This is a fascinating poem, Joe, which might well be anthologized with Herbert’s “Church Monuments” – the inspiration for your poem which I just read to better appreciate your own work. In some respects, yours is a meditation upon a meditation, both poems dealing with the reality of death and the deterioration of flesh into dust. But in some ways you are having a dialogue with Herbert. Herbert’s poem is a first person contemplation while your voice is more that of a detached third person observer answering him and commenting on death from a greater distance – what “men” remember rather than “I.” Herbert says “How tame these ashes are, how free from lust” and you are inspired by such a thought towards the observation “Men remember dust, and ash becomes a smug reproach to vanity…” and then in a bolder reply to Herbert you observe that the company of the “stone-tokened dead… are NOT free from goading lust.” The connections between the two poets seems a deep one. In fact, THREE poets — for in addition to Salemi and Herbert we have Khayyam. Again, your poem seems to me to move beyond mere allusion to an actual exchange of views with your fellow poets. A collision and blending of minds. It’s rather daring and quite enjoyable.

    There’s much more going on for such a short poem. Your speaker contrasts the brittleness of death in the “vile” desert where life is reduced to mummification (thereby creating something of a permanent puppet-state of existence.) But in the land of Caesar, death has a sort of living power – that sense of Imperium drawn up the reddened petals (the red and the green in this section in stark contrast to the bleak desert). And then there is that striking line “Life is the effervescence of his death.” The legionary’s death seems the reality, the life he has lived a froth that is ephemeral.

    The contrasts you set up between the desert and Italy are interesting ones. I’m reminded a bit (perhaps bizarrely) of Emily Dickinson’s “Our Lives Are Swiss” which sets up a compare-and-contrast between Swiss and Italian sensibility. And then there is the crux of your poem: resurrection. Your consideration of resurrection is noteworthy for its non-Christian points of view which are decidedly materialistic – in one situation you have mummies (no sense of the Egyptian afterlife) and in the other you have a kind of rebirth of life is based on the harvesting of the body – that “living mold” which is vaguely Roman but with no mention of Elysium. Material views of death, yes. But unspoken here is the initial setting of your poem: Sinai. You chose a location that is infused with Judeo-Christian sensibility and, though you do not discuss it, that sense of Resurrection (with a capital R) exists in your poem is perceived as a huge vacant space rather than as something the poet has ignored. In this poem what you don’t say becomes as important as what you do say.

    There is more to be mined here I’m sure in terms of meditation and the enjoyment derived from multiple readings. I’m glad you published this older poem. It has so much contemplation to it, both in the writing and the reading. I enjoyed reading and analyzing this one quite a bit.

    Reply
  4. Joseph S. Salemi

    It’s rare that a poet receives the gift of such an insightful and sensitive reading of his poem. I wrote this piece back around 1970 or 71, but it had remained unseen in my notebooks until Evan posted it today. And after more than half a century, I am blessed with your laser-like interpretation, your clear commentary, and your appreciative perception. I am more grateful to you that I can ever hope to express.

    You have seen everything. I did write in answer to George Herbert’s poem, and I could not help thinking of Khayyam. And yes, the jarring contrast between death in a dessicating desert and death in a verdant Europe is at the core of what I wrote. The latter promises Resurrection in a material sense, while the former only offers mummification. I do not deal with the religious doctrine of Resurrection, but have kept it as a backdrop by mentioning Sinai.

    Brian, you are an extremely astute reader. Even when I wrote this poem so long ago, I said to myself “No one will understand it.” Happily, you have proven me wrong.

    Reply
  5. Paul A. Freeman

    A few observations and thoughts as they come into my head:

    My memories of Sinai are a barren, dun desert peninsula, a night climb up a mountain, a dust storm that lasted two days and unremitting daytime heat. An absence of green would be another noticeable feature.

    Ululation is an odd thing in the Middle East / Arab World. When someone dies, women ululate. When there’s a wedding, or someone graduates, the womenfolk ululate. It’s a bit like in Southern Africa. No matter whether mourning, protesting, or celebrating, folk get together and sing and dance.

    Of course because of the predominantly hot weather in the Middle East, burials, for good reason, are done hastily (Muslim and Jewish funerals generally occur within 24 hours) and may appear a bit irreverent because of the haste. To Muslims at least, the dead body is considered as an empty husk, so mourning as such is not considered obligatory, though not in Alexandria, I noticed, when I got stuck in the middle of a funeral procession of ululating, breast-beating, black-clad women.

    The starkness of the desert, and the lack of significant seasonal change, is indeed maddening, especially to Westerners (the country where I work at present there’s a high attrition rate of Westerners), and cemeteries are walled-in, unvisited and graves are supposed to be unmarked (though you may find a rock in place of a headstone).

    Compare this to the country church near where I worked over the summer, with its ivy and lichen clad stones set picturesquely in a grassy, leafy churchyard.

    This is a poem with much to consider in its comparison of East and West.

    As others have noted, ‘the stone-tokened dead’ is a wonderful image.

    Reply
  6. Joseph S. Salemi

    Paul, thank you for your comments and observations.

    I have heard the ululations on TV news reports and documentaries, but I have also heard them in some neighborhoods of New York City, where I live. (There is a significant Moslem population here.) It is a strangely disconcerting sound, like Irish keening.

    I have not been to the Sinai, but what I have heard about it is consonant with what you describe — the heat, the barren dryness, the lack of greenery and seasonal change. I have been to the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, and they also seemed to me to be profoundly anti-human places, utterly hostile to civilization. I understand why early settlers in those regions called such areas “the Badlands.”

    I wrote “stone-tokened dead” because Herbert’s poem is set in a graveyard in England, where every burial is marked by a tombstone of some sort. The speaker in that poem is meditating on death, and how the tombstones are a reminder that death is the end of all our lusts and pleasures and earthly delights. I wanted to suggest that a body buried in a Western churchyard had more possibility of metamorphosis into something living than did a body that was mummified and dessicated in the desert sands of the Levant.

    It should also be noted that Herbert’s poem, while a traditional meditation on death by a clergyman, makes no mention at all of a bodily Resurrection in the Christian sense.

    Reply
  7. Adam Sedia

    This is a beautiful yet incredibly logical poem (the influence of Herbert is palpable in that latter regard). I am quite taken by both sets of images you present: the howling, desiccating desert wind likened to the ravings of a madman contrasted with the luxuriance of the blood-fed rose. The third stanza ties it all together beautifully, and shows the rose through the desert-mind’s lens, so to speak. This is a true metaphysical poem, which can hold its own right alongside Herbert and Donne.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you for your kind words, Adam. I had planned to leave this poem among my notebooks and papers, but a re-reading of the FitzGerald Rubaiyat prompted me to submit it to Evan. I’m glad I did. The Metaphysicals were a strong influence on me.

      Reply
  8. Isabella

    Thank you for rediscovering this amazing poem! Reading your earlier comment I am so pleased that you didn’t leave it to languish in your notebooks and papers. I agree with an earlier comment in that it is indeed a true metaphysical poem which challenges the reader to think deeply. “Stone-tokened” is absolutely brilliant!

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      I am very glad that the poem has pleased you, Isabella, and I thank you for your comments. Poets are always happy when their work touches a reader.

      Reply
  9. James Sale

    Some lovely things in this poem. I particularly like the lines: “The rose bush rooted in dead Caesar’s breast
    Draws up Imperium to its reddened petals;” it’s lusher than, but reminds me of the terse lines in Shakespeare: ‘Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, /Might stop a hole to keep the wind away’. How Imperium falters. Wonderful.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      James, I appreciate your comments, and I thank you for mentioning this. I surely had those words of Hamlet in the back of my mind when I composed the piece. Shakespeare is so intricately embedded in our literary DNA as speakers of English that we often allude to him unconsciously! That certainly happened here.

      Reply
  10. Margaret Coats

    Joe, seeing the date of the poem, I reflect on it as something written by a young man while the Vietnam War was going on. Wednesday casualty reports came out on TV each week. Whether or not you were personally concerned about death, many your age and younger (students in my high school) saw it as a distinct possibility–undesirable, unheroic, and useless.

    Let me use the graveyard views in your poem to recall a poem comparable in some ways, namely, Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” That’s most easily done by gathering a few scattered lines of Tate’s lengthy work.

    “the inexhaustible bodies that are not/Dead, but feed the grass, row after rich row . . . midnight restitutions of the blood . . . smother you, a mummy in time/Whose verdurous anonymity will grow waves of the insane green”

    My interpretation of Tate is that he (a young man writing in the 1920s) said that the War Between the States (by then long past) had an impact on America that was indefinite yet strong and enduring. You use similar images, referring instead to a contrast of inherited cultures important to our country.

    Another poem springs to my mind as well, your own on Maurras at the Parthenon. It decidedly favors Europe (Greece in particular, whence settlers came to Sicily). It is much more emphatic about cultural clash. I’ll bring in only some lines of yours about the cultural losers.

    “Hebraic wranglings over the unknown . . .the arid desert’s thorns that thrive/Where raving winds sweep, harsh and biting,/Wastes wailing with the cry of nomad blood debt . . . Nomads scrubbing sticks to start a fire . . . hatred smoulders in the stomach’s pit–Stupidity and enthusiasm rule . . . the quaking superstitious world.”

    With these lines of yours in mind, no one would take “Sinai” as a favorable indicator in your clash with Herbert–who identifies himself with Aaron, high priest at Sinai. The poem where he does so is, in fact, the one in which Herbert seems to achieve the greatest resolution and satisfaction in his personal psychological ruminations over priestly identity.

    My reflections do not constitute an interpretation of your poem, but a series of notes for you to take or toss as you like.

    Reply
  11. Joseph S. Salemi

    Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Margaret.

    Yes, I was of prime military age in 1970, and many of my male friends and classmates had been called to service in Vietnam. Death was in the air, so to speak, but young males have always been somewhat dismissive of the possibility, which is one of the reasons they are good in combat.

    Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” is in my view the best ode of the 20th century, and it certainly must have lingered in the back of my mind when I composed this piece. Tate, Shakespeare, Herbert, the Rubaiyat — it’s clear that they all went into baking this particular loaf.

    You’re correct to bring up the Maurras poem. I have a real loathing for the West’s prime enemy — the windswept deserts of nomadic barbarians, with their savage god and their illogical fanaticism. I’ll never forget what the great Catholic Thomist Frederick D. Wilhelmsen said after the French left Algeria in 1961: “Algeria is sinking back into the cultural fever-swamp from which France rescued it in 1830.” And the great Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc spoke of the Maghreb as a cultural wasteland, under which the archaeologists would unearth beautiful inscriptions in clear Latin — a sign that the area had once been European.

    I have no idea what George Herbert may have felt personally about his priesthood, as apart from what he may have ritually suggested in print. Sinai is a long way off when you’re living in a parsonage in lovely England.

    Reply
  12. Susan Jarvis Bryant

    This poem, with its sumptuous language and vivid imagery, is exactly why I adore the craft and simply can’t put my pen down. Thank you, Joe, for this inspirational marvel.

    Reply
    • Joseph S. Salemi

      Thank you for your kind words, Susan. I’m sorry for this late reply, but I’ve been sidelined by final papers and exams from my students.

      When you can’t put your pen down, you know that writing is in your blood. Keep writing and posting! Your stuff is precious, Susan.

      Reply

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