ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

And of complete happiness:
SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
How sweetly doth My Master sound! My Master!
As Amber-greese leaves a rich sent
Unto the taster:
So do these words a sweet content,
An orientall fragrancie, My Master.
153
(“The Odour”)
In moments like these, we glimpse Herbert’s extraordinary power as a lyricist: how
in “The Sacrifice,” for instance, the experience of suffering, with its excruciatingly
severe ironies, never deviates into bathos, or why gratitude seems beyond feigning.
Without ever trying to sound complex—in contrast to Donne, the printer does not
cast the reader as an “understander”—Herbert rarely comes across as merely simple,
and yet the desire for simplicity, for arriving at the core of being, is so explicit in
these utterances as to be palpable. Herbert is not a philosophical poet, if we mean
by that term a poet primarily interested in ideas, as Emerson perhaps wished him to
be. 23 But few poets have thought more deeply about the self in relation to another,
and fewer still have been able to convey that experience more directly and from as
many directions. When Herbert writes at the end of “The Flower,” “These are thy
wonders, Lord of Love,/To make us see we are but flowers that glide,” we do not
doubt his sincerity, but we owe what we “see” in this poem to Herbert.
We remember, too, the narratives—the many stories in The Temple and their
odd tellers: the afflicted but resourceful speller of “Jesu,” who discovers the
homonymic “ease” within the name of Jesus; the garrulous and benighted
speaker of “Love Unknown,” whose “long and sad” tale would appear to be a
test of patience for the master himself; and the Bottom-like tenant farmer of
“Redemption” who resolves not to be left out of a scene that seems still well
beyond his understanding, and yet get there he does.
Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancell th’old.
In heaven at his manour I him sought:
They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight return’d, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of theeves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.