My favourite poems IV: George Herbert

I am not religious. I don't pray. I know a lot of Christians who do and I'm not sure what they get out of it. Sometimes it seems to be a shopping list of requirements, sometimes a request for an answer confirming what they've already decided, sometimes a buttering up of a strangely narcissistic God, sometimes just ritual. George Herbert managed to come up with a definition that makes it far more meaningful. And I love the way the poem is just a string of mystical metaphors.
I'll post this one today, because this, of all days, needs all the prayers going as the doors slam shut.

Prayer 

Prayer the Church’s banquet, angels’ age,
  God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
  The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth;
Engine against the Almighty, sinner’s tower,
  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 dressed,
  The milky way, the bird of paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
  The land of spices; something understood.

George Herbert