ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
Shepherds are honest people; let them sing:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:
I envie no mans nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.
That an utterance—or pledge—is plain according to a person’s intentions in the
act of speaking seems to be Herbert’s point, not that all devotional poetry should
be written in a plain style, or that language itself cannot have other uses or
functions in the course of achieving this ideal moment of communication. In
this regard, the surprising appearance of a miniature “defense of rhyme” in the
penultimate line serves to ensure that plain speaking ought to mean not
“without art” but, in the context of what has gone before, “without artifice.” As
has been recently suggested, it is also possible to see in this defensively stated
apology (“Nor let them punish me with losse of rime”) a Herbert alert to the
potentially subversive nature of a general defense of devotional poetry that
concludes by placing God ahead of the King. 17
Still, radical politics is hardly what this or the second “Jordan” poem is about.
If anything, “Jordan [I]” wrestles with the problem of retrieving a place for
authentic devotion in a genre that had highly politicized associations in the
Renaissance, while “Jordan [II]” (originally entitled “Invention” in the Williams
manuscript) re-examines, even more scrupulously, matters of intention in
attempting to distinguish a mistaken form of copia—narcissistic, self-involved,
and showy—from true copy:
As flames do work and winde, when they ascend,
So did I weave my self into the sense.
But while I bustled, I might heare a friend
Whisper, How wide is all this long pretence!
There is in love a sweetnesse readie penn’d:
Copie out onely that, and save expense.
For a poet as conscious as Herbert of out-courting the courtly (and few critics
fail to cite the Sidneyan “sources” in Astrophel and Stella underlying this poem),
the revision of the weak final rhyme from “preparation/alteration” in the
Williams manuscript to “long pretence”/“save expense,” is not only typical of
how Herbert pared away baggy abstractions and made his diction more emphatic
and resonant; it also brings the act of re-amateurizing the lyric to its absolute
genteel conclusion. For a moment one can almost imagine Suckling taking up
the call.
On the other hand, expanding the linguistic and artistic boundaries of what
might be acceptable poetry (and by implication, who might be an acceptable
poet) was a matter of special concern to Herbert. “A True Hymn,” that most
consciously definitional of poems in The Temple, seeks to extend the possibilities
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