ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
to bring it to Church “well drest and clad”; shades of jealousy over the prospect of
being abandoned (“Fie, thou wilt soil thy broider’d coat”); then a last-ditch effort
to salvage what is apparently his by forcefully separating the profane from the
sacred and taking the Platonic high road: “Ours is a flame/ But borrow’d thence to
light us thither./Beautie and beauteous words should go together.” Although highly
dramatic, nothing seems staged. Herbert’s emotions are too close to the surface;
the subject of poetry is too much a life-long concern to be given anything less
than a full hearing. But even more so is another. Way back in “The Dedication” to
The Temple, Herbert had begun: “Lord, my first fruits present themselves to thee;/
Yet not mine neither; for from thee they came,/And must return.” The desire by
Herbert to claim authorship is almost instinctive, and is one of the decisive
trademarks of his being a poet in the early seventeenth century; but so too is
Herbert’s priestly admission that he is merely an agent enabling the circulation of
language to honor the ultimate Creator. One recognition follows quickly upon
the other in a dialectical motion that, as Stanley Fish has argued, runs deep through
The Temple. 22
“The Forerunners” slows down this motion. It plays with this pause, opening,
as it were, the seams of a poetic career for possible inspection; but where a Jonson
could not imagine saying “farewell” without leaving a sign of himself in print,
where a Herrick and a Bradstreet write farewells that imagine prospective readers,
Herbert’s musings, unsettling and tempting as they are, yield only a closing wave:
“Yet if you go, I passe not,” a phrase that marks his release from the lure of a
paternal, blood connection to his verse—there is only one Father in his universe—
and from a parental desire to determine the future of his offspring. By the end,
“lovely enchanting language” too is dismissed with a wave: “Go birds of spring”;
and the “perhaps,” over which so much ink has been spilt, remains the only sign of
an earlier infatuation: shifting in emphasis with each reading (or reader), as a
reminder of both the rewards and the sacrifices of writing devotional poetry, but
ultimately irrelevant to the harbinger’s call except as a fee that must be paid if all
“within [is to] be livelier then before.” In the end, Herbert gets off the fence on
the side we knew all along that he would. What we had not anticipated is how
severely he would challenge our place as readers of poetry.
* * *
By all rights, a discussion of Herbert should end with “The Forerunners.” What
more can be said? But Herbert did not allow this poem to be the last word. (In
the next poem, he is, once again, busy defining the distance that separates
himself from the world.) Nor should we. For however far Herbert takes us in the
direction of silence in “The Forerunners” and elsewhere in The Temple, however
attractive the reflexive dimension of The Temple has proven to be to modern
readers, indeed however central Herbert made the act of writing poetry to the
devotional experience, what we also remember—perhaps most remember—
about The Temple are sounds, not merely those suggested on the title page in the
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