ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
There is nothing in Suckling quite as urbane as this quintessentially Caroline
depiction of “brave Glorie.” (Jonson’s “On Something that Walks Somewhere”
appears an even more deliberately clunky ancestor.) The wonderful play with
the sound of whistling silk to set up the airy repetition of “who but he” provides
Herbert with a perfect opportunity to introduce the Biblical refrain in all its
“quiet dignity,” as Chana Bloch describes its effects here and elsewhere. The
contrast between shadow and substance, between gesture and statement,
between a puffy redundancy and a pointed refrain, could hardly be sharper; and
in the last stanza, the difference between speaking “fine things” and saying the
right thing is played out conclusively:
Yet when the houre of thy design
To answer these fine things shall come;
Speak not at large; say, I am thine:
And then they have their answer home.
The two “Jordan” poems push the difference between “fine things” and
“speak[ing] not at large” into the more particular literary arenas favored by the
elite, indeed, into what we might even regard as the imagined homes of the
Sidneys themselves: Wilton house and the kinds of literary activity centering on
pastoral romance and Petrarchan sonneteering practiced there. In “Jordan [I],”
speaking “not at large” now becomes identified with the kind of plain speaking
Herbert associates with the original pastoral song at the nativity (further
anchored in Scripture through echoes from the Psalms), in contrast to the
fictitious authority accorded to fine things, including pastoral romance, found
in a place like Wilton. Until the last stanza, Herbert seems to be a latitudinarian
merely hoping to suggest an alternative to a dominant tradition. But the poem’s
ringing finish reverses this order by pointing in another direction, to the
different meanings of “becoming” at the heart of the poem: “becoming” in the
decorative (and for Herbert a merely mystifying) sense, and “becoming” in the
sense of signaling an ultimate transformation or change in the nature of an
utterance as it becomes a vow:
Who sayes that fictions onely and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beautie?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines passe, except they do their dutie
Not to a true, but painted chair?
Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow course-spunne lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lovers loves?
Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?
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