ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
But the appeal of “Aaron” is also hardly limited to an appreciation for
ceremony. As a number of readers have recently emphasized, “Aaron” combines
a fascination with formalism of the most intricate kind with a concern for the
most elemental of New Testament stories, especially for Protestants: the Pauline
conversion of the old man to the new. If we look at only the first line of each
stanza, in which the transmutation of the speaker into Christ is progressively
marked, we can see this drama enacted as a kind of silhouette on the horizon.
(It is typical of Herbert to signal so momentous a change by rewriting a line in
which the lexical shift would seem to be so small: from “Holiness on the head”
to “So Holy in my Head.”) But Herbert insists, too, that the change is fully
registered within—that it issues dramatically from the “inner” person, from the
body and the heart, upon which the head rests. As Helen Vendler remarks,
“poems are movements of hearts, as well as constructions of a pattern” 8 (or at
least they should be, and most of Herbert’s are); and movement in Herbert
almost always begins with key words—in this case with “only,” which initially
carries the meaning of “except for,” until this notion is magnified through the
repetition of “another head,” “another heart,” and “another musick,” and comes
to signify Christ’s exclusive presence identified in the fourth stanza: “Christ is
my onely head/My alone onely heart and breast,/My onely musick.”
I would even defend what Vendler refers to as the “strained” protestation
here, 9 although not because these lines describe a state in which “the convert
has now entered into a fever of self-obliteration.” “Feverish” would seem to be
just the wrong description of the effect achieved by the pressure of repetition.
The duplications are of a more exacting sort, as if Herbert were evaluating,
appropriating, and putting on (not merely trying out, as seems to be the case so
often in Donne) 10 the central doctrine of Reformed theology of salvation by faith
alone. His emphasis on “alone” and “only”—highlighted in the apparent
redundancy—underscores exactly how an individual is supposed to reach a sense
of certainty regarding salvation: through Christ, not through ceremonies. As
Richard Hooker argues, in a passage that bears a remarkable resemblance to the
concerns expressed here (including contesting how “only” ought to be
interpreted in Luther’s famous catch phrase), “Christ is the only garment, which
being so put on, covereth the shame of our defiled natures, hideth the
imperfections of our works, preserveth us blameless in the sight of God, before
whom otherwise the very weakness of our faith were cause sufficient to make us
culpable, yea, to shut us out from the kingdom of heaven, where nothing that is
not absolute can enter.” 11 Harmonious as it sounds, “Aaron” is a poem of
absolutes.
With such a poem, it is difficult to know precisely where to draw the line
between form and content. Or rather, it is difficult to know where the greater
emphasis should be placed in the act of reading: on unfolding (and admiring)
the intricacies of design and the pleasures they afford; or on responding
(enthusiastically) to the dramatic immediacy of the conversion account. And
this decision is, happily, not made easier by the ending, which, in its turn
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