“I got me flowers” from Easter
George Herbert (set by Ralph Vaughan Williams)
 
I got me flowers to strew thy way;
I got me boughs off many a tree:
But thou wast up by break of day,
And brought'st thy sweets along with thee.
 
The Sunne arising in the East.
Though he give light, and th'East perfume;
If they should offer to contest
With thy arising, they presume.
 
Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?
We count three hundred, but we misse:
There is but one, and that one ever.
 
This week, we’re doing something a little different!  I’m collaborating with Cathedral musician David Hoffman. This Friday evening, as part of our weekly musical prayer series, David will be singing Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs, settings of five poems by George Herbert. So, David will sing Herbert’s poem “I got me flowers” (Easter), and then I’ll be back with some brief commentary.
 
At the time he wrote these settings of Herbert’s poems, Ralph Vaughan Williams was a self-described atheist. It will be no surprise to those who listen to his settings of religious verse that later in life, he came to describe himself as a “cheerful agnostic.” His settings capture the meditative quality and the sheer beauty of Herbert’s language, and like the poems themselves, his settings have a depth to them that reward close listening. In his setting of “Easter,” for example, he plays with Gregorian modalities—and you can hear echoes of Gregorian chant throughout the Five Mystical Songs.
 
Herbert’s poem, too, has many layers. Herbert is playing with a familiar trope of Baroque poetry: the morning poem. What usually happens in this kind of poem is that the speaker urges the lover to awake, and to come and enjoy the spring flowers, because time is wasting and life is short. (A famous example of this is “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick, Herbert’s contemporary and, like Herbert, a priest of the Church of England. It includes the famous line, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”)
 
Herbert turns that trope on its head in this poem. “I got me flowers to strew thy way; / I got me boughs off many a tree: / But thou wast up by break of day, / And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.” The speaker does not need to urge the beloved to wake up and come forth; his beloved has anticipated him, both in arising early—“by break of day”—and in bringing “sweets.”
 
We know who this lover is, of course:  this is Easter morning, and it is Christ who was “up by break of day,” Christ who needs no spring flowers, since he has come with “sweets”—with the perfume of his rising from the dead. “The Sunne arising in the East, / Though he give light, and th’East perfume; / If they should offer to contest / With thy arising, they presume.” The sun and the perfumes of spring cannot hope to compete with this rising of Christ!
 
The third stanza speaks of time. In the poem by Robert Herrick I mentioned earlier, time is a key concept. “Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying…. The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, / The higher he’s a-getting, / The sooner will his race be run, / And nearer he’s to setting.”  Time passes; life is short. Seize the day. But here again, Herbert turns the familiar idea upside down. This day is not short, nor is time flying. This day is eternal. “Can there be any day but this, / Though many sunnes to shine endeavor? / We count three hundred, but we misse: / There is but one, and that one ever.” There is no other day but this Easter day; and this day will never end.
 
As with all Herbert’s poems, the language is simple, but profound and many-layered. “Easter” is a love poem to Christ on the morning of his Resurrection: a spring day with flowers that never fade, a sun that never sets, a love that never dies, and a life that never ends.