ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
of a populist program for poetry. If The Temple is widely habitable, it is so because
in his use of subject, forms, and language, indeed in his view of devotional poetry
in general, Herbert is not narrowly sectarian. Herbert worried about schism (most
explicitly in the poem entitled “Church-schism”), and in “The Church Militant,”
he wrote with an apocalyptic, global awareness of holiness being dogged by sin in
a manner that would have appealed to Wither. He was also highly sensitive to
matters of church worship: the veneration traditionally but no longer accorded to
all saints and angels (in the poem of that title) and the role of grace in preaching
(“The Windows”), for instance. But what he said of the parson’s preaching goes
generally for his poetry as well: devotion, not controversy, should be its focus. In
general, his engines were reserved for the Almighty. However much recent
criticism has helped us to understand the circumstantial dimensions to Herbert’s
verse, at the climactic moment in The Temple when Herbert writes at the end of
“Love III,” “You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:/So I did sit and
eat,” he is not insisting that a potential doctrinal dispute about how the Eucharist
ought to be taken during communion—whether kneeling or seated—be elevated
over the personal drama of the soul’s being cornered and finally won over by
Christ’s irresistible love. 14
At the same time, if Herbert anticipates more fully than any other poet of
his period Wallace Stevens’s claim that “all poetry is experimental poetry” (by
which Stevens meant all good poetry), 15 he did so in part by making the issue of
language itself a subject of major concern in The Temple. A great deal of what
feels new (and modern) about Herbert’s poetry is the central place allotted to
writing in The Temple. The two “Jordan” poems, “The Quidditie,” “The Quip,”
“A True Hymn,” and, most movingly, “The Forerunners” all ask that we attend
to the nature of religious verse as a special category of poetry: the way it differs
in general from other kinds of poetry (“The Quidditie”); the particular
challenges it poses to an authorizing self that must remain always subordinate to
the object of its praise (“Jordan [II]”); its precise relation to other genetically
related forms of discourse like the pastoral (“Jordan [I]”); the role of intention
in producing an acceptable poem (“A True Hymn”); and the subordinate place
of poetry—even devotional poetry—in the ultimate scheme of things (“The
Forerunners”).
Until Herbert, these issues were at best implied concerns of religious poets.
Even Donne only rarely attempted to define—or as we might say today, theorize
about—devotional poetry as a particular form of verse. As part of a long
tradition of Petrarchists, Donne simply extended his amatory language, witty
conceits and all, in the direction of God; he did not rethink the premises of
language itself. But as a Protestant responding more fully to the elevated
authority given to the written Word of God during the Reformation and writing
with an even closer, though more circumspect eye, than Donne toward a still
dominant court culture, Herbert breaks up the flow. As Milton was also to do,
Herbert urges us to observe the rift—the difference—between secular and
devotional language, and not from one but many angles.
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