Of the group of 17th century poets, including John Donne and Andrew Marvel, to which Dr Johnson gave the name ‘metaphysical’, George Herbert is probably nowadays the least read.
This is almost certainly because his poetry is almost entirely religious. Apart from a few minor poems, everything he wrote appeared after his death in a book called The Temple. The collection is carefully structured to reflect not only an actual church building (it begins with a poem called The Church Porch and includes others such as The Altar, Holy Communion, Matins, Evensong, and Church-Music ), but the activities and concerns connected with it (Faith, Praise, and Confession ).
Many of these poems are very beautiful, and show, as do all his poems, his mastery of a variety of verse forms, but they are very much devotional poetry, and are unlikely to find much of an audience in an age like ours. As Coleridge acknowledged: “George Herbert is a true poet, but a poet sui generis, the merits of whose poems will never be felt, without sympathy with the mind and character of the man.”
Yet if this is true of some of the devotional poems, the story of Herbert’s inner life is shown in the others describing the struggle this remarkably gifted man passed through before achieving the serenity with which he faced his early death. Poems such as Affliction, Prayer, Jordan, Man, The Collar, and Love are among the finest poems in English literature.
Herbert was born in 1593, the fifth son of Sir Richard Herbert and Magalen Herbert, a woman of great beauty for whom Donne wrote The Autumnal. After attending Cambridge, he secured a seat in Parliament and seemed destined for a brilliant public career after attracting the attention of King James. But then something happened. His health had never been good, but the true cause was in himself. He seems to have become sickened by the corruption of court politics, and the divisions between the Church of England and the various dissenting groups.
What we know of his life comes from the biography written by Izaak Walton, whose Compleat Angler has been the fisherman’s vade mecum ever since it was published in the late 17th century. Walton described Herbert’s struggle to give up his life of privilege, wealth, and worldly ambition. A scholar, musician, linguist and noted public speaker, when the crisis came, he subjected himself to unsparing self-examination, questioning his motives, stripping away self-delusion. “He had many conflicts within himself, whether he should return to the painted pleasures of a court life, or betake himself to the study of divinity ... These are such conflicts as they only can know that have endured them; for ambitious desires, and the outward glory of this world, are not easily laid aside.”
In The Pearl, the most autobiographical of his poems, Herbert writes of the life he is giving up, the ways of learning, honour, and pleasure...
I know the ways of pleasure, the sweet strains,
The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot blood and brains;
What mirth and music mean; what love and wit
Have done these twenty hundred years and more;
I know the projects of unbridled store;
My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live,
And grumble oft that they have more in me
Than he that curbs them, being one to five:
Yet I love Thee
In 1626 he resigned his seat in parliament and took holy orders, and in 1630, at 38, became Rector of Bemerton, a tiny parish on the edge of Salisbury Plain, in Wiltshire. There, with his wife, Jane, he spent the remaining three years of his life, ministering to his small congregation – published after his death was a small book called A Priest to the Temple, a simply written, practical guide to the duties of priesthood. Herbert left all his papers, including his poems, to his great friend, Nicholas Ferrar, who had established a religious community at Little Gidding, near Bemerton, with instructions to burn them or print them as he saw fit.
The Pearl shows the scrupulous honesty and self-knowledge of the man Walton called “Holy Mr Herbert”.
I know all these, and have them in my hand:
Therefore not sealed, but with open eyes
I fly to thee, and fully understand
Both the main sale, and the commodities;
And at what rate and price I have thy love;
With all the circumstances that may move:
Yet through the labyrinths, not my grovelling wit,
But thy silk twist let down from heaven to me,
Did both conduct, and teach me, how by it
To climb to thee.
Barnaby ffrench
