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