ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
outward, from private to public, prevents us from placing an exclusive value on
inwardness. (Like Hooker, Herbert viewed “only” as a non-restrictive particle
that did not rule out the need for good works.) “Come people; Aaron’s drest.”
To find ourselves suddenly the target and the beneficiary of this elaborate
preparation is both slightly disarming and enormously gratifying. The reader who
has participated personally in this act of self-renewal, moreover, might even feel
at the end the further surprise of being introduced to his or her other, better half.
* * *
Highly civilized but persuasively simple, “Aaron” is only slightly atypical in that
it asks us to see Herbert in his professional dress. Otherwise, The Temple is
perhaps most extraordinary because it invites us to respond to a devotional
temper that seemed not at all limited by its subject matter, a point made
graphically at least by the sheer profusion of different poetic forms visible to the
eye. As one reader has remarked, Herbert seems “to include at least one example
of almost every known poetic species within his microcosmic ark”;12 and the
ark holds some 166 lyrics, nearly three times the number of poems in The Songs
and Sonnets. To compare the scale of The Temple with that of the poetic models
most immediately useful to Herbert, his book is approximately equal to the sum
of Astrophel and Stella and The Songs and Sonnets, or to the Book of Psalms itself,
with its 150 “poems.” Among major collections of seventeenth-century lyrics,
only Herrick’s Hesperides can lay claim to greater length (by a significant margin)
but not to greater variety; even if Herrick explores a number of poetic forms,
the song and the epigram are clearly his dominant genres.
With Herbert, however, we might begin a summary by noting his interest in
both genres and the several uses made of each. But we would quickly need to
extend our frame of reference to accord a significant place for other models and
traditions: the medieval liturgy for Holy Week powerfully revived in “The
Sacrifice,” a faint vestige of which does survive in Herrick’s Noble Numbers (“His
Saviours words, going to the Crosse”), fully renovated verse epistles like “To All
Angels and Saints,” a raft of lyrics that capitalize on contemporary interest in
hieroglyphs (“The Altar” and “Easter-wings” are only the best known), less
“sophisticated” poems that, with the help of the Bible and the metrical psalms,
reveal their popular roots (like “Time” and “The Elixir”), or that participate in
household literary traditions like the fable (“The Pulley”) and the proverb
(“Charms and knots”), or in familiar customs that mark the church calendar,
urgent dramatic monologues that recall Donne (“The Temper”), and a good
many poems of praise and blame, petition and complaint that remind us that
Herbert both knew the psalms and lived in a world in which the patronage
system was still a powerful discursive influence.
Indeed, the only form Herbert returned to with frequency was the sonnet.
Seventeen in all, their combined presence points generically toward The
Temple’s primary concern with the subject of love. (Two of his earliest poems
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