ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

SUBSTANCE AND STYLE IN GEORGE HERBERT
The massive grief of “The Sacrifice” melts away like snow in May and leaves
only the finest of verbal traces in the pun on “eyes” and in the breathtaking
understatement regarding the consequences of the crucifixion: “And know you
not, sayes Love, who bore the blame.” In pointed contrast to “Love Unknown,”
this is a speaker who needs only to be reminded of the truth; he does not
require being shocked into another zone of reality. Nor do his replies seem as
potentially self-promoting as recourse to the courtesy literature of the period
might suggest. If that literature helps us to understand both the process and
power of social advancement as negotiated through the discursive forms and
codes of behavior relevant to a highly stratified society, it falls short of being
able to account for how one might respond when addressed not by a “Lord” or
even “The Lord” but by “Love”—“quick-eye’d” and dextrous in every sense:
“Love took my hand and smiling did reply.” In this most hospitable of poems, in
which as James Merrill, the most courtly of American poets, has remarked, “the
two characters are being ravishingly polite to each other,” Herbert is careful to
establish at the outset the spontaneous response of the soul. 25 Surprised by a
wave of the most casual order, it is momentarily disarmed: “Love bade me
welcome; yet my soul drew back.” Were it being welcomed to Penshurst Place,
one can imagine that Herbert might, like Jonson, have felt free to survey the
estate, to hold it in his gaze, but in “Love III” the “doxa” of God is enshrined by
the hesitation and the veil is, as it were, pierced only by talk. In “Love [III],”
communion is not quite holy, but nowhere in The Temple are we closer to
thinking that speech alone has that capacity.
155