ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
And few poems can match the virtuosity of “Vertue” in creating a compact
allegory of sound. The most seductive rhythms lead to the grave, but not until
they are allowed to linger in the ear while the sweetness of each is seasoned in
the penultimate line and refrain of each stanza, and then again at the end
where the sexual connotations of “die” are absorbed into the restrained—and
restraining—final line:
Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie:
The dew shall weep thy fall to night;
For thou must die.
Sweet rose, whose hue angrie and brave
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye:
Thy root is ever in its grave,
And thou must die.
Sweet spring, full of sweet dayes and roses,
A box where sweets compacted lie;
My musick shows ye have your closes,
And all must die.
Only a sweet and vertuous soul,
Like season’d timber, never gives;
But though the whole world turn to coal,
Then chiefly lives.
The most taxing tightrope walk with “Beauty and beauteous words” belongs,
however, to the poem in which that phrase occurs. In “The Forerunners,” the
elegiac enters into the poem and nearly seizes the day—nearly but not quite. The
poem differs from the others we have been considering in its meditative reach: the
ebb and flow of passions and the comprehensive assessment of a religious poet’s
relation to language—“Lovely enchanting language, sugar-cane,/Honey of roses.”
Whereas “The Quip” and the two Jordan poems focus on drawing boundaries
between secular and devotional utterances, “The Forerunners” begins by defining
the difference and then turns to emphasizing the responsive, potentially trespassing
heart that, like the prodigal son, wanders a bit before returning home—away from
and then back to the talismanic phrase borrowed from Scripture that ultimately
lights the way to a place “within livelier then before.”
Although the poem has been suggestively compared to Yeats’s “The Circus
Animal’s Desertion,” 20 the mixture in Herbert of urgent sentiment and stoic
resolve does not issue from personal anxiety over what the author might or might
not write in the future but from what has been already written and must now be
left behind. The more relevant context is the more immediate one: Donne’s
several great valedictory hymns, “Upon the Author’s going into Germany” and
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