Topic > Inner Emotions and Duties in “Denial”

In “Denial,” George Herbert presents a narrator who appeals to God to help him reconfigure a disordered mindset, and yet the monologue form is used to imply that there is little hope that the narrator's pleas will be answered, suggesting that his fate will be to always remain alone. Through the use of simile, the poet suggests that the speaker's psyche and physicality must be mended by God, and the desperate pleas present throughout the poem work to convey the speaker's growing alarm in his belief that he cannot bring forward his life without divine assistance. We say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Herbert's use of direct speech helps to foreground the narrator's desire for spiritual reconciliation with his God. This desire is manifested in the exclamatory used to address God: 'Come, come, my God, come!'. The repeated verb and the placement of the phrase at the heart of the stanzas suggest that the absence of God is the primary source of the narrator's suffering, and the use of the possessive pronoun dramatizes the narrator's attempt to regain a personal and individual spirituality rather than do appeal to abstract religions. entity, which finds further foundation in the opening lines 'When my devotions could not pierce / Your silent ears', in which the perfect masculine rhyme between the personal pronoun 'mine' used to refer to the speaker, and 'your' alluding to the recipient is further evocative of the narrator's desire for a close relationship with his creator. However, the poem's monologue form, coupled with the poet's decision to open and close the poem in reference to the isolated individual through the personal pronoun "mine," suggests the futility of the poet's desire to reconnect with God, as the phrase does "But I don't listen", repeated twice in the center of the verses. The simplicity of the sentence is made even more pejorative in the phrase "My heart was on my knees, / But no hearing", with the previous part of the sentence suggesting a total distortion of the narrator's physical being, thus increasing the audience's pathos. when we learn of God's ignorance of his situation, 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 simile and metaphor works to present the narrator's personality as something to be fine-tuned and improved by a divine figure. There is a high-culture semantic field that filters through the verse ("verse", "unstringed", "sound") used to represent 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 broke, so did 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 dejection. The poem's metaphors and similes refer not only to the physical parts of the narrator's being, but also to the metaphysical ones, which suggest the person's desperation to be cured. both mentally and physically: "my soul lay out of sight, / Untuned, unstretched" the poet comments, and the separation of the double adjectives as a single line heightens the poet's painful feelings of isolation and abandonment from his creator. In fact, closing the poem with a metaphor that compares the character's mentality to music ("Them and the,.