Love is like sight, and since when do we speak of people being deserving of that? Also he is painfully aware of his shabbiness, but Love does not care a bit. Looking and seeing have a great meaning in this poem. ” ‘A guest’ I answered, ‘Worthy to be here’:/Love said ‘You shall be he.’/’I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,/I cannot look on thee.’/Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,/’who made the eyes but I?” The other thing that I like about this stanza is how he’s guilty of dust and sin–not just the things he’s done but his general dirtiness keeps him out of the door. However if you think about those that can use love the most, like babies, it’s not about being deserving or undeserving, real love doesn’t care about such things–it’s not something you can earn. One of the biggest follies about love is the idea that it somehow must be earned, that we must become people capable of deserving love before we can have it. “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,/Guilty of dust and sin./But quick-eyed love, observing me grow slack/From my first entrance in,/ Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,/if I lacked anything.” George Herbert makes his love a prodigal story: The other thing is that Love is such a universally acclaimed virtue that it can become easily meaningless–it’s an easy virtue to praise because it has no shape, no specificity and that is the problem a poet has in talking about it at all. I remember when I was in high school where the teacher forbid love poetry because as she said, there’s nothing original about talking about someone you love romantically, because they are always portrayed as perfect, therefore boring. One of the first major themes expressed in poetry and song, and one of the easiest to do badly.

George herbert love