ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
extended to include Donne (Herbert’s mother Magdalen was renowned for her
piety and intelligence and is sometimes thought to lie behind the idealized
personification of the British Church in the poem of that title), or in the
rhetorical training Herbert received that led to his becoming university orator—
and whatever the precise circumstances that caused Herbert, in Ferrar’s words,
to choose rather “to serve at Gods Altar, then to seek the honour of Stateemployments”
(and explanations have ranged from long-term, organicist
hypotheses to detailing specific reasons for his disenchantment with the world
of secular preferment beginning in 1623), 3 The Temple had immediate and many
readers.
That it did so is no doubt due in part to its subject matter. An increasingly
literate culture that consciously linked learning and godliness as part of the
legacy of the Reformation was likely to produce and consume a significant body
of religious writings at many levels. In this regard, we have only to think of the
phenomenal popularity enjoyed by devotional handbooks like Arthur Dent’s
Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety. (With
thirtythree editions in the author’s lifetime, the latter was reputed to be as
admired as the Bible.) If, moreover, recent historians are right in correcting the
popular view of the time by identifying the 1630s as a high water mark for a
literate clergy, commonly drawn from the middling and upper ranks of society, 4
then a work with a title like The Temple had almost a ready made audience in a
way, for instance, that even Donne’s religious verse, included in the more
generally designated Poems, did not. (The editorial tinkering with the order of
Donne’s poems in the second edition suggests, in fact, some uncertainty about
how the late Dean of St. Paul’s could best be presented to his readers.) In this
social and educational context, a fellow parson might take nearly as much
pleasure in “The Church Porch,” with its terse Solomonic attempt to rhyme a
youthful (and potentially dissolute) member of the gentry to good, as he did in
“The Church” proper, with its celebration of the liturgy and offices of the
Church of England and its highly personal focus on the individual’s relation to
God—what Herbert reportedly described as “the many spiritual conflicts that
have passed betwixt God and my Soul” pictured in The Temple. 5
But it would be wrong to limit Herbert’s audience, then and now, to fellow
members of the clergy. Coleridge did remark, rather intimidatingly, that in order
to appreciate The Temple “it is not enough that the reader possesses a cultivated
judgment, classical taste, or even poetic sensibility, unless he be likewise a Christian,
and both a zealous and an orthodox, both a devout and a devotional Christian…he
must be [also] an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church, and from habit,
conviction, and a constitutional predisposition to ceremoniousness, in piety as in
manners, find her forms and ordinances aids of religion, not sources of formality;
for religion is the element in which he lives, and the region in which he moves.” 6
Yet a good number of Herbert’s early readers, from Baxter to Emily Dickinson,
have been well outside the Church of England. And a good number continue to
be so today, even if Herbert is well represented in the Episcopal Hymnal. 7 Since
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