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  • Essay / Emotions and Inner Duties in “Denial”

    In “Denial,” George Herbert presents a narrator appealing to God to help him reconfigure a disordered state of mind, and yet the monologue form is used to let hearing that there is little hope that the narrator's pleas will be answered, hinting at his destiny to remain forever alone. By using simile, the poet suggests that the speaker's psyche and physicality must be repaired by God, and the desperate pleas throughout the poem are intended to convey the speaker's growing concern in his belief that he cannot continue his life without divine help. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Herbert's use of direct address foregrounds the narrator's desire for spiritual reconciliation with his God. This desire is manifested in the exclamation used to address God: “Come, come, my God, oh come! ". The repeated verb and the positioning of the phrase at the heart of the stanzas suggest that the absence of God is the main source of the narrator's suffering, and the use of a possessive pronoun dramatizes the narrator's attempt to rediscover a personal, individual spirituality rather than appealing to abstract religious values. entities, which finds additional foundation in the opening lines "When my devotions could not pierce / Your silent ears", in which the perfect masculine rhyme between the personal pronoun "my" referred to the speaker, and "your" making allusion to the recipient. » is further evocative of the narrator's wish to maintain a close relationship with his creator. Nevertheless, the monologue form of the poem, coupled with the poet's decision to open and close the poem with reference to the isolated individual with the personal pronoun "my", suggests the futility of the poet's desire to reconnect with God, all like the phrase “But I don’t hear,” repeated twice in the middle of the stanzas. The simplicity of the clause is made all the more pejorative in the phrase "My heart was in my knee, / But no hearing", the earlier part of the phrase suggesting a total distortion of the narrator's physical being, reinforcing thus the pathos of the audience. when we learn of God's ignorance of his plight, which is immediately brought to the fore in the title "Denial" which perhaps alludes to God's refusal to answer the narrator's constant prayer. Throughout the poem, Herbert's frequent use of similes and metaphors to present the narrator's character as something that needs to be refined and improved by a divine figure. There is a high-culture semantic field that filters through the verse ("worm", "unhung", "chime") used to describe the speaker's soul as a precious entity deserving of divine reparation, and this is evident in the declarative of the opening stanzas. “Then my heart was broken, as was my verse” in which the verse is literally fractured by a caesura to dramatize the similarities between the “broken” verse and the heart; perhaps increasing the emotional appeal of the poem itself as an expression of the poet's sincere despondency. The poem's metaphors and similes refer not only to the physical parts of the narrator's being, but also to metaphysics, which suggests the character's desperation to be healed. both mentally and physically: "my soul was out of sight, / Out of tune, unstrained", the poet comments, and the separation of the two adjectives in a single line reinforces the poet's painful feelings of isolation and abandonment by relationship to its creator. Indeed, concluding the poem with a metaphor comparing the state of mind of,.