ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
Others had proclaimed the priority of Sion Hill over Helicon: the Jesuit Martyr,
Robert Southwell, most explicitly in his prefatory note to his frequently
reprinted St. Peter’s Complaint in 1595 (thereafter 1597, 1599, 1602, 1608, 1615,
1634); and Sidney, to whom Herbert was related through Sidney’s sister Mary,
Countess of Pembroke, had defended the subject and practice of poetry in
general because of its Biblical roots, most evident in the Psalms, the Song of
Songs, Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs. Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke
had also translated the psalter, a translation which circulated widely in
manuscript in Jacobean court circles and was commended by Donne and
probably read by Herbert. (It was eventually published in 1823.) But not until
the publication of The Temple had any poet in England written so persuasively
and decisively of the devotional experience.
Ah my deare angrie Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sowre-sweet dayes
I will lament, and love.
The size of “Bitter-sweet” might remind us of Herrick; so too perhaps its subject
matter. (Herrick frequently writes of being sad or discontent.) But the
compressed anguish and the compulsion to particularize belong to a different
register altogether, as if Herbert were wringing the sentimental out of Herrick in
order to identify both the sweet and the sour as separate though related
experiences that stem directly from the utterly special conditions of address. “His
measure was eminent,” wrote Henry Vaughan, the most original of Herbert’s
many disciples, in the 1655 Preface to his own collection of “Sacred Poems and
Private Ejaculations” entitled Silex Scintillans and modeled to a great extent on
Herbert’s collection. “Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth a God,
and whose business in the world is most with God,” noted Richard Baxter nearly
fifty years after the publication of The Temple. “Heart-work and Heaven work
make up his Books.” 2 “My God must have my best, ev’n all I had” is how Herbert
phrased the ultimate nature of his commitment in “The Forerunners.”
In retrospect, it might seem almost inevitable that two of the most powerful
institutions in the seventeenth century—the court and the church—should
conspire to produce a devotional poet of Herbert’s quality; and it might seem
even less an historical accident that it should occur under James, whose interest
in divine poetry led him to publish a youthful essay on the subject. But wherever
the impetus originated—whether in a new cultural respectability devotional
verse acquired under the king, or in auspicious family circumstances that
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