Skilled at Delay: George Herbert’s “Justice (I)”

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: