'The land of spices; something understood'

 George Herbert's resounding sonnet 'Prayer' is surely the greatest 'list poem' in the language, a sequence of glorious images, all evoking that mysterious, essential thing, prayer. 

Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,

God's breath in man returning to his birth,

The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth

Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,

Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

The land of spices; something understood.

When the American poet Dana Gioia wrote his own poem of the same name, he must have had Herbert's in mind. It begins as if it's going to be a list poem, but then develops into something else – a heartfelt but enigmatic elegy or lament. It is itself a prayer, rather than a poem about prayer...

Echo of the clocktower, footstep
in the alleyway, sweep
of the wind sifting the leaves.

Jeweller of the spiderweb, connoisseur

of autumn's opulence, blade of lightning

harvesting the sky.

Keeper of the small gate, choreographer

of entrances and exits, midnight

whisper travelling the wires.

Seducer, healer, deity or thief,

I will see you soon enough—

in the shadow of the rainfall,

in the brief violet darkening a sunset—

but until then I pray watch over him

as a mountain guards its covert ore

and the harsh falcon its flightless young.

'Watch over him...' – who? The tragic background to this poem is the death of Gioia's infant son, who is commemorated also in this moving poem, 'Planting a Sequoia' –

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth –
An olive or a fig tree – a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

We will give you what we can – our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.