{"title":"Skilled at Delay: George Herbert’s “Justice (I)”","authors":"Jennifer A. Newton","doi":"10.1080/00144940.2023.2253554","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Despite Renaissance scholars’ increasing interest in George Herbert’s devotional poems over the past few decades, his poem “Justice (I)” has received surprisingly little critical attention.1 However, through wordplay, poetic form, and delay of thematic resolution, “Justice (I)” demonstrates Herbert’s lyrical skill in creating a deceptively simple, yet poetically rich, poem about the speaker’s failure to understand the justice of God’s ways with him. “Justice (I)” opens with the speaker’s complaints about God’s seeming injustice to him, but then takes a reflective turn as the speaker realizes that he has been the one acting unjustly toward God:","PeriodicalId":42643,"journal":{"name":"EXPLICATOR","volume":"81 1","pages":"77 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"EXPLICATOR","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2253554","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Despite Renaissance scholars’ increasing interest in George Herbert’s devotional poems over the past few decades, his poem “Justice (I)” has received surprisingly little critical attention.1 However, through wordplay, poetic form, and delay of thematic resolution, “Justice (I)” demonstrates Herbert’s lyrical skill in creating a deceptively simple, yet poetically rich, poem about the speaker’s failure to understand the justice of God’s ways with him. “Justice (I)” opens with the speaker’s complaints about God’s seeming injustice to him, but then takes a reflective turn as the speaker realizes that he has been the one acting unjustly toward God:
期刊介绍:
Concentrating on works that are frequently anthologized and studied in college classrooms, The Explicator, with its yearly index of titles, is a must for college and university libraries and teachers of literature. Text-based criticism thrives in The Explicator. One of few in its class, the journal publishes concise notes on passages of prose and poetry. Each issue contains between 25 and 30 notes on works of literature, ranging from ancient Greek and Roman times to our own, from throughout the world. Students rely on The Explicator for insight into works they are studying.