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The simple eloquence of words that are, in Herbert's phrase, "heart-deep," may be illustrated by the following stanza from Herbert's poem "The Flower":

    And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
    I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: 0 my onely light,
                it cannot be
                That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night .[69]

The presence of God fills the ageing poet, even as spring advances on the frozen stem. The poet adds impetus to this sense of burgeoning growth with an accumulation of five present tense verbs in the first four lines: "I bud"-"I live and write"- "I smell ... and relish." The poets senses are roused into keenness, his creative faculties are quickened and his delight intensified. He records this inner plenitude in an exuberant but essentially straightforward manner and his unaffected simplicity we receive as "proof' of the experience and of the divine inspiration which has caused such blossoming. The imagery of this stanza is paralleled in a number of psalms celebrating God's transformation of the desert into a paradise. As the pattern of the psalms highlights the process of transformation itself, so Herbert's spring retains the consciousness of winter darkness' of the spiritual tempests that the poet has endured. Indeed, it is with reference to this same stanza that Arnold Stein says:

When the sense of joy is most moving it seems to emerge from a grief melting away, so barely past as to feel still present.[70]

Herbert concludes his stanza by establishing his newly found joy in terms of the absence, remarkable in itself, of his previous grief. Profoundly mystified by the action of God's grace, he attempts to express that which he does not fully understand.