ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
hear indirectly God’s thinking (which sounds like muttering, though of a slightly
different order than the heart’s). The final stanza then begins as if it is going to
be a dictum of sorts but then quickly flattens out into a homespun proverb
(“Although the verse be somewhat scant,/God doth supplie the want”) on its
way to a conclusion that asks us to witness a hypothetical drama (“as when”), in
which we are introduced not to one but to two further modes of mediation,
sighing and writing. As with “Prayer I,” Herbert clearly saw “A True Hymn” as
an opportunity not to delimit but to stretch our sense of the acceptable. So long
as the speaker’s intention is to love, then a word as prosaic as “somewhat” need
not be scrubbed from the text.
* * *
“A sweetnesse ready penned,” the heart’s muttering, even the plain saying of
“but thou shall answer, Lord for me” or “My God, My king”: these sentiments
identify a poet keenly alert to spelling out the difference between being virtuous
and being a virtuoso with art in the manner of the “rhetorical courtings” of a
“never Mark Anthony” or an admiring Lovelace in “Gratiana dauncing and
singing.” “My musick shows ye have your closes”—a line from a poem often set
to music (“Vertue”)—points to the edifying impulse that often chastens luxury
into love in The Temple and helps to authenticate devotion. But Herbert would
be less interesting (and finally less persuasive as a religious poet) if the choices
were simple or always the same. If he was conscious of the need to work through
courtly forms, as many have argued, he did so in order to go beyond them; if he
understood that the way to the simple was by way of the intricate, that beneath
the pattern lies the heart, as we discover in “The Church-floor,” patterns, verbal
as well as visual, were still immensely important and attractive to him. No poem
in the seventeenth century, perhaps no poem in English, makes a greater demand
on the need for rhyme than “Deniall”:
When my devotions could not pierce
Thy silent eares;
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse:
My heart was full of fears
And disorder.
Or makes a more enchanting case for rhyme’s answering call:
O cheer and tune my heartlesse breast,
Deferre no time;
That so thy favours granting my request,
They and my minde may chime,
And mend my ryme.
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