ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
Apprehended in its simplest terms, the sense of the radically special nature
of religious verse could appear as a rather unexceptional list of what it is not:
My God, a verse is not a crown,
No point of honour, or gay suit,
No hawk, or banquet, or renown,
Nor a good sword, nor yet a lute:
It cannot vault, or dance, or play:
It never was in France or Spaine;
Nor can it entertain the day
With my great stable or demain:
It is no office, art, or news,
Nor the Exchange, or busie Hall;
But it is that which while I use
I am with thee, and most take all.
143
(“The Quidditie”)
Herbert is not worrying over measuring the divide here, although his series of
thumbnail accounts is a remarkably exhaustive summary of high and low uses
made of verse in his day. It is only when we reflect on the oddly utilitarian
praise of religious poetry for its communicative, rather than its commercial,
value that the poem acquires a slight edge to it. But it is not an edge that
Herbert chooses to hew and sharpen. A poem entitled “The Quidditie” is
mainly concerned with defining essences rather than developing attitudes, and
the gamesmanship of “most take all” assures that this poem ends on a
comfortable note.
On the other hand, to move from “The Quidditie” to “The Quip” is to shift
from a scholastic to a rhetorical system of difference and to enter a forum in
which combat thrives, in this case between “the merrie world” and the man of
faith. In “The Quip,” the boundary between the secular and devotional is not
merely observed; it is sharply and repeatedly drawn. Against the various
temptations offered—first beauty, then money, glory, and finally quick wit and
conversation (all marvelously personified)—Herbert invokes at the end of each
stanza the italicized refrain borrowed from the Psalms, “But thou shall answer,
Lord, for me.” 16 The battles are also remarkably inventive, written by someone
who knows both sides of the debate, even if we have no doubt where the speaker
lands at the end of each stanza and again at the end of the poem.
Then came brave Glorie puffing by
In silks that whistled, who but he?
He scarce allow’d me half an eie.
But thou shall answer, Lord, for me.