When first my lines of heav’nly joys made mention,
Such was their lustre, they did so excel,
That I sought out quaint words and trim invention;
My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell,
Curling with metaphors a plain intention,
Decking the sense, as if it were to sell.
Thousands of notions in my brain did run,
Off’ring their service, if I were not sped:
I often blotted what I had begun;
This was not quick enough, and that was dead.
Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sun,
Much less those joys which trample on his head.
As flames do work and wind, when they ascend,
So did I weave my self into the sense.
But while I bustled, I might hear a friend
Whisper, How wide is all this long pretense!
There is in love a sweetness ready penn’d;
Copy out only that, and save expense.
The experience of writing has rarely been so exactly or succinctly presented as in "Jordan (II)". In the first verse the poet is brimming over with ideas and enjoying the expression of them in "quaint words and trim invention". A slight shadow falls in the last line, where he finds himself in the writer's trap of seeking his reader's approval, "Decking [adorning] the sense as if it were to sell" with ornaments...but the exhilaration of fertility carries over into the second verse, then turns into the business of correction and revision - even this in the same high spirits. One way and another he is carried away: and that is the trouble. The third verse surprises the reader. "So did I weave myself into the sense": surely this is positive, to wind self and sense, poet and his matter, into fusion? Yet it is the height of what he calls mere "bustling". Literary self-indulgence and self-preoccupation, however enjoyable, is precisely not, for him, the point of writing poetry. It should be objective, transitive, and deal with something other. That is what the "friend" indicates in a tactful whisper. And it was there all the time, "ready penn'd" in Holy Writ and particularly in the record there of Christ: yet again, love.
