ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
Perhaps with more embellishment can say.
Go birds of spring: let winter have his fee;
Let a bleak palenesse chalk the doore,
So all within be livelier then before.
Had Herbert somehow written only the first stanza, the poem would have been
theologically neat, even profoundly compelling. As commentators have noted,
the italicized phrase, “Thou art still my God,” is borrowed almost wholesale from
a line in Psalm 31, a psalm referred to in the authorized version of the Bible as
“A Prayer in Calamity”; and recourse to the psalm only further reinforces our
sense of the climactic positioning of the scriptural phrase at the end of the
stanza. In the psalm, the line reads as a Job-like cry of triumph amid adversities
of many kind: “But I trusted in thee, O Lord: I said, Thou art my God.” Herbert’s
addition of “still” (meaning “always”) strengthens the vow. Indeed, it places the
speaker in a Davidic tradition of sufferers who have resisted persecution by
affirming their faith. Although Herbert has chosen to tone down the calamitous
note of the psalm, he has heightened the drama—our sense of his being in
imminent danger—by opening abruptly with an allusion to harbingers, who
make their portentous appearance in a phrase whose verb tense is marked by
the present perfect, the eternal present, we might suspect.
Whatever they signify, these servants who come before a royal progress and
yet leave marks on doors reminiscent of those indicating a plague, they have
come to stay. But though keen, the suspense is brief. Once the italicized line is
uttered, we know that the attack on the head (and the slightly outlandish puns
emanating from the speaker’s sparkling wit) has not caused Herbert to lose his
bearings. If he is led to think of himself as a clod—the earthen stuff of which
Adam was made—that admission carries with it a recognition of his maker; and
the final line emerges not so much as a defiant cry as a quiet reminder to himself
of an inevitable fact: “Yet have they left me, Thou art still my God.” God is more
than an answering rhyme for “clod,” but he is that, too.
But if Herbert had written no more than the first stanza, “The Forerunners”
would be also less interesting. We are used to thinking of Herbert as a poet of
patterns, a master of the categories of rhetoric and dialectic so prized by Renaissance
poets, but the remainder of “The Forerunners” reads more like a loose essay in
verse than a rigorous argument in rhyme: a kind of trial, not in the strenuous
Miltonic sense of being a trial by what is contrary (that honor is better reserved
for “The Quip”), but in the essaying sense of someone who knows where he is
going but still needs to settle his personal estate: “Ev’n all my heart, and what is
lodged there.” The “best room” that holds the image of God has room for other
sentiments as well.
In the stanzas that follow, Herbert slowly disengages himself from the subject
of writing through writing. The contingencies needing to be played out—exorcized
is too strong a word—and released are all emotional: tears of farewell that remind
the poet of his original efforts to baptize profane language and, like a proud parent,
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