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