In ‘Denial’, George Herbert reveals a narrator appealing to God to help him reconfigure a disordered way of thinking, and yet the form of monologue is used to imply that there exists little expect that the narrator’s pleas will be answered, leaving clues at his fate to stay ever-alone. Through use of simile, the poet suggests that the speaker’s psyche and physicality must be restored by The almighty, and the anxious appeals through the poem job to convey the increasing security alarm of the loudspeaker in his belief that he cannot go on his lifestyle without work assistance.
Herbert’s make use of direct treat helps downroad the narrator’s desire for spiritual reconciliation with his God. This kind of desire is manufactured apparent in the exclamative used to address Goodness: ‘Come, arrive, my Our god, O arrive! ‘. The repeated verb and positioning of the expression in in the middle of the stanzas suggests that The lord’s absence is a primary method to obtain the narrator’s suffering, and use of �troite pronoun dramatises the narrator’s attempt to restore a personal and individual spiritual techniques rather than charm to abstract religious choices, which finds further grounding in the opening lines ‘When my devotions could not pierce/ Thy quiet ears’, in which the perfect manly rhyme between personal pronoun ‘my’ utilized to refer to the speaker, and ‘thy’ alluding to the holder is even more evocative with the narrator’s desire a close relationship with his manufacturer.
However, the monologue form of poem, paired with the poet’s decision to open and close the poem in comparison with the separated individual through personal pronoun ‘my’ is suggestive from the futility in the poet’s desire to reconnect with God, along with the key phrase ‘But not hearing’, twice repeated in the midst of the stanzas. The simplicity of the clause is made much more pejorative inside the phrase ‘My heart was at my leg, / But no hearing’, with the preceding part of the word suggesting a great utter distortion of the narrator’s physical being, thus heightening the audience’s pathos when we learn of the lord’s ignorance to his plight, which is instantly foregrounded in the title- ‘Denial’ which maybe alludes to God’s refusal to reply to the narrator’s constant prayer.
Throughout the poem, Herbert’s recurrent use of simile and metaphor works to provide the narrator’s persona because something that should be fine-tuned and improved with a divine number. There is a semantic field of high culture that filters throughout the verse (‘verse’, ‘unstrung’, ‘chime’) used to reflect the speaker’s soul like a precious enterprise deserving of work repair, and this is apparent in your opening stanzas’s declarative ‘Then was my heart busted, as was my verse’ in which the collection is literally fractured by a caesura to dramatise the commonalities between the ‘broken’ verse plus the heart, maybe heightening the emotional appeal of the composition itself while an expression in the poet’s heartfelt dejection.
The poem’s metaphors and similes not merely refer to the physical parts of the narrator’s being, nevertheless also the metaphysical, which can be suggestive from the persona’s desperation to be healed both mentally and actually: ‘my heart lay out of sight, as well as Untuned, unstrung’ comments the poet, as well as the separation with the dual adjectives as a one line improve the poet’s painful feelings of seclusion and abandonment from his creator. Indeed, to close the poem with a metaphor likening the persona’s mindset to music (‘They and my thoughts may chime, / And mend my rhyme’) additional marks your narrator’s ‘self’ as a thing that must be enhanced and developed, like a game, by Goodness, and the unnecessary repetition ‘m’ in conjunction with prior alliterated ‘t’ in previous lines (‘O brighten and melody my heartless breast’) develops the poem’s cadence right into a musical sign-up, implying the hopeful idea that his praying for spiritual rejuvenation happen to be progressively becoming answered: indeed, to end on a rhyming stance furthers this kind of suggestion through implying a great eventual getting back together between the identity and his creator, with the frequent rhyme scheme of the poem further implying that Goodness has not totally left the speaker’s heart ‘unstrung’.
Overall, in ‘Denial’, Herbert presents a narrator eager to regain a relationship with his God to be able to improve his physical and mental health. Whilst it initially seems that the speaker has very little hope to gain divine support from Goodness, the innate ‘music’ and rhythm of the poem prioritises the satisfying concept that God continually progressively answer his prayers as the poem grows.
