ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
were the pair of linked sonnets on love sent to his mother in 1609.) But even in
his use of this most traditional of literary forms, Herbert is rarely slavish or dull,
as a glance at “Prayer I” makes clear:
Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’Almightie, sinners towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-daies world transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices; something understood.
Unlike Calvin, who devotes some sixteen sections in the Institutes of the Christian
Religion (3,22,1–16) to defining prayer, Herbert seems to have conceived of the
occasion to describe “prayer” as an opportunity to baffle our sense of normal
expectation. He gives us some of the usual sonnet features, including
endstopping the lines and using a modified Shakespearean rhyme scheme; and
as far as punctuation is concerned, it is possible to speak of the poem as having
quatrains. But it is the departures that catch our eye: the surprising absence of
the defining copula, then the splendid burst of images that seem deliberately to
defy logical order (and on an individual basis, sometimes logic itself) and that
range from the most graphically immediate (“Christ-side-piercing spear”) to the
distantly mysterious (“Church-bels beyond the starres heard”) and include
startling juxtapositions within a line (“Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best”)
and between lines: until, of course, the final departure into “something
understood” when all efforts to describe prayer are acknowledged insufficient.
By the time of The Temple, the sonnet was hardly a novel form. Herbert’s
innovations here, among the boldest in the seventeenth century, ensure that the
everyday need not become routine.
* * *
So much attention to formal variety and experimentation helps to explain
Herbert’s broad appeal: The Temple has something for almost everyone. As
Herbert said elsewhere, “This is for you, and This is for you” 13 —something for the
most sophisticated reader and the apparent bare speller as imagined in invitingly
schoolish poems like “Jesu” and “Love-joy.” But Herbert’s reach is also hardly part
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