The speaker and the seeker in Hertha
I am thou that thou seekest to find him
The source is stanza 7 of Swinburne’s ‘Hertha’, in Songs Before Sunrise (first published 1871; inspected in the Project Gutenberg transcription of Heinemann’s 1917 edition, p. 73). Chesterton alters the opening ‘But what thing dost thou now’ to ‘What doest thou now’, and substitutes ‘that’ for ‘whom’ in the last line. He also suppresses the internal quotation marks: in Swinburne, the profession of separation is the worshipper’s speech, which Hertha answers by asserting identity. Read the poem.
The adjacent stanzas clarify who this ‘I’ is. Hertha identifies herself with both searcher and object of search (stanza 5), then with grain, furrow, ploughshare, deed and doer (8). She therefore means more than an isolated individual discovering personal wishes: the seeker belongs to the encompassing life that speaks. Chesterton’s version preserves this rejection of separation, but the shortened opening and missing inner quotation marks make the changes of voice harder to hear.
Sources
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