Studies in Philology

Abstract:

George Herbert’s “The Forerunners” has not been given sufficient attention as a text remarkably invested in The Temple’s poetic project of approaching God through the spatial categories of stillness and motion. The thematic keystone of “The Forerunners” lies in the poem’s refrain phrase “Thou art still my God,” particularly in the word still, which Herbert inserts into a famous scriptural line. By demonstrating the centrality of Herbert’s alteration of this line to the poem’s exploration of divine and human language, this essay reveals the fundamental, but often overlooked, spatial and motional framework controlling the poem. Interpreting the inserted word adjectivally, this essay argues that “The Forerunners” defines God through his stillness, and in attempting to use lyric form to achieve that same ideal, exposes Herbert’s poetry, and even The Temple’s famous search for God, as spiritually suspect, born of compulsive restlessness rather than devotion. But even as “The Forerunners” recognizes the loss of the swiftness of poetic language in the shadow of approaching death, it draws on both lyric and scriptural forms to embody God and the poem within a “livelier” spatial and temporal stillness.