41-) English Literature

41-) English Literature 

George Herbert 

Poetry

Herbert wrote much of his poetry during his Cambridge years. He began, auspiciously enough, with a vow, made in a letter accompanying two sonnets sent to his mother as a New Year's gift in 1610, "that my poor Abilities in Poetry, shall be all, and ever consecrated to Gods glory." The sonnets are written at a high pitch of enthusiasm—there are nine astonished rhetorical questions in the first poem alone—as Herbert yearns to be a fiery martyr, burning with love of God, not women. Herbert was not alone in wanting to redirect poetry from Venus to God: Sir Philip Sidney, Robert Southwell, and Donne, among others, urged the same thing, and even King James helped encourage this kind of revolution by writing and publishing his own religious poems. But these two sonnets have the force of personal discovery behind them, and they are a preview of a cluster of later poems in The Temple that examine his willingness and ability to write religious verse. As in so many of his best poems, exuberance betrays a deep sense of disorder and nervousness.

It is difficult to date most of Herbert's poems with certainty, but it is clear that not all his early poetic efforts were the kind of impassioned sacred lyrics promised by the sonnets he sent to his mother. His various occasional pieces—poems on the death of Prince Henry (oldest son of James I) in 1612 and Queen Anne (wife of James I) in 1619, to the queen of Bohemia in exile, to his friends Francis Bacon and Donne—show that Herbert, like his contemporaries, viewed and used poetry as a medium of social discourse, not just self-analysis and devotion. And even the bulk of Herbert's early religious poetry is public and didactic rather than introspective and meditative. His modern reputation rests almost exclusively on the devotional lyrics collected in "The Church," the middle section of The Temple, and while some of these lyrics may have been written as early as 1617, there is good reason to believe that most of them date from much later, from the mid 1620s to the last years of his life at Bemerton. But "The Church" is carefully positioned between two long poems, "The Church-porch" and "The Church Militant," both of which are early pieces much different from the later lyrics.

Amy M. Charles, Herbert's most thorough and meticulous biographer, suggests that "The Church-porch" was perhaps written as early as 1614 and that at least on one level it is a poem of advice addressed to his brother Henry, one year younger than George but already a man of the world and living in France. The two brothers shared a love of proverbs, and indeed what saves the poem from turning into a plodding collection of "thou shalt nots" is Herbert's ability to release the dramatic as well as the moral potential of some of these proverbs. In the context of The Temple, "The Church-porch" is intended as a kind of secular catechism instructing a young man in basic moral principles and manners to prepare him for life in society and, more important, entrance into the church, a place where he will encounter moral and spiritual problems of a different sort.

During this time at Cambridge, Herbert also composed a substantial amount of Latin poetry. This, of course, should be no surprise: grammar school and university education was largely a matter of immersion in classical texts and repeated exercise in copying, translating, and imitating Latin authors. The Renaissance turn to distinctively national literature and the Reformation turn to vernacular Bible translations and church services by no means displaced Latin as the international language for diplomats and scholars and as the common vehicle for many types of serious disputation, religious devotion, and intellectual and poetic wit and playfulness. Writing Latin poetry was a natural development of Herbert's day-to-day activities at Cambridge and—because of the particular traditions of Latin and Neo-Latin literature that he knew intimately and the learned audience to which Latin works would be directed—allowed him to use different poetic voices than the ones he cultivated in his English lyrics.

Musae Responsoriae (1662) is a series of energetically witty and satiric "Epigrams in Defense of the Discipline of Our Church" meant to counter the attacks of Scottish Presbyterian Andrew Melville, whose poem Anti-Tami-Cami-Categoria pictured the British church as insufficiently reformed and still too beholden to Roman Catholic ceremonies, rituals, and accompaniments to worship. The publication of Melville's poem in 1620 perhaps provided Herbert with an opportunity to assert himself as the newly appointed orator of Cambridge—the universities were, after all, under siege by Melville, who criticized both Oxford and Cambridge for not supporting Puritan reform—and an occasion to clarify his own notion of the ideal British church. As in "The Church Militant," Herbert was deeply critical of what he felt were the many excesses of Roman Catholicism, but he was not sympathetic to Melville's "vain fears of the Vatican She-wolf" and the puritanical drive to purge the church of music, traditional prayers, vestments, and bishops.

Herbert wrote poetry in English, Latin and Greek. Shortly before his death, he sent a literary manuscript to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, reportedly telling him to publish the poems if he thought they might "turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul", otherwise to burn them. In 1633 all of his English poems were published in The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, with a preface by Ferrar. The book went through eight editions by 1690. According to Izaak Walton, when Herbert sent the manuscript to Ferrar, he said that "he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus, my Master". In this Herbert used the format of the poems to reinforce the theme he was trying to portray. Beginning with "The Church Porch", they proceed via "The Altar" to "The Sacrifice", and so onwards through the collection.

Herbert described his poems as “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus, my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom.” Herbert shares his conflicts with John Donne, the archetypal metaphysical poet and a family friend. As well as personal poems, The Temple includes doctrinal poems, notably “The Church Porch,” the first in the volume, and the last, “The Church Militant.” Other poems are concerned with church ritual.

The main resemblance of Herbert’s poems to Donne’s is in the use of common language in the rhythms of speech. Some of his poems, such as “The Altar” and “Easter Wings,” are “pattern” poems, the lines forming the shape of the subject, a practice Joseph Addison in the 18th century called “false wit.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 19th century wrote of Herbert’s diction, “Nothing can be more pure, manly, and unaffected.” Herbert was a versatile master of metrical form and all aspects of the craft of verse. Though he shared the critical disapproval given the metaphysical poets until the 20th century, he was still popular with readers. Herbert also wrote at Bemerton A Priest to the Temple: Or The Country Parson, his Character and Rule of Life (1652). Herbert’s Works (1941; corrected, 1945), edited by F. Hutchinson, is the standard text.

Nestled in the age of Shakespeare and Milton is the literary stalwart George Herbert, poet and Church of England clergyman. Herbert's poetry would influence fellow poets such as Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, and then in later centuries Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, and, perhaps Robert Frost—although these later poets are more abstract in their devotion to Herbert than were his 17th-century followers. Herbert’s poetry, although often formally experimental, is always passionate, searching, and elegant.

Much of his early popularity—there were at least 11 editions of The Temple in the 17th century—no doubt owes something to the carefully crafted persona of "holy Mr. Herbert" put forth by the custodians of his literary works and reputation. In the preface to the first edition of The Temple, published in 1633, shortly after Herbert died, his close friend Nicholas Ferrar established the contours of Herbert's exemplary life story, a story that not only validated but was also presumably told in the poems of the volume. In a few short pages Ferrar indelibly sketches Herbert as one who exchanged the advantages of noble birth and worldly preferment for the strains of serving at "Gods Altar," one whose "obedience and conformitie to the Church and the discipline thereof was singularly remarkable," and whose "faithfull discharge" of the holy duties to which he was called "make him justly a companion to the primitive Saints, and a pattern or more for the age he lived in." This is not only high praise, but praise with political as well as religious implications: in 1633 the church was a place of contention as well as worship, and Ferrar helped establish Herbert as a model of harmonious, orderly, noncontroversial devotion for whom faith brought answers and commitment to the social establishment, not divisive questions and social fragmentation.

All of Herbert's surviving English poems are on religious themes and are characterised by directness of expression enlivened by original but apt conceits in which, in the Metaphysical manner, the likeness is of function rather than visual. In The Windows, for example, he compares a righteous preacher to glass through which God's light shines more effectively than in his words. Commenting on his religious poetry later in the 17th century, Richard Baxter said, "Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth in God, and whose business in the world is most with God. Heart-work and heaven-work make up his books". Helen Gardner later added "head-work" to this characterisation in acknowledgement of his "intellectual vivacity". It has also been pointed out how Herbert uses puns and wordplay to "convey the relationships between the world of daily reality and the world of transcendent reality that gives it meaning. The kind of word that functions on two or more planes is his device for making his poem an expression of that relationship."

Visually too the poems are varied in such a way as to enhance their meaning, with intricate rhyme schemes, stanzas combining different line lengths and other ingenious formal devices. The most obvious examples are pattern poems like The Altar, in which the shorter and longer lines are arranged on the page in the shape of an altar. The visual appeal is reinforced by the conceit of its construction from a broken, stony heart, representing the personal offering of himself as a sacrifice upon it. Built into this is an allusion to Psalm 51:17: "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart."[28] In the case of "Easter Wings" (illustrated here), the words were printed sideways on two facing pages so that the lines there suggest outspread wings. The words of the poem are paralleled between stanzas and mimic the opening and closing of the wings. In Herbert's poems formal ingenuity is not an end in itself but is employed only as an auxiliary to its meaning.

The formal devices employed to convey that meaning are wide in range. In his meditation on the passage "Our life is hid with Christ in God", the capitalised words 'My life is hid in him that is my treasure' move across successive lines and demonstrate what is spoken of in the text. Opposites are brought together in "Bitter-Sweet" for the same purpose. Echo and variation are also common. The exclamations at the head and foot of each stanza in "Sighs and Grones" are one example. The diminishing truncated rhymes in "Paradise" are another. There is also an echo-dialogue after each line in "Heaven",other examples of which are found in the poetry of his brother Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Alternative rhymes are offered at the end of the stanzas in "The Water-Course", while the "Mary/Army Anagram" is represented in its title In "The Collar", Joseph Summers argues, Herbert goes so far as to use apparent formlessness as a formal and thematic device: "the poem contains all the elements of order in violent disorder" until the end, when the final four lines' regularity restores the reader's sense of "the necessity of order".

Once the taste for this display of Baroque wit had passed, the satirist John Dryden was to dismiss it as so many means to "torture one poor word ten thousand ways." Though Herbert remained esteemed for his piety, the poetic skill with which he expressed his thought had to wait centuries to be admired again.

In Oley's introduction to Herbert's Remains (1652), containing among other works A Priest to the Temple: Or, The Country Parson, Herbert's prose description of the ideal way a priest would serve his country parish (written during the last years of his life when he was a country parson at Bemerton), Oley pictures Herbert as one who embodies traits that the current age has left behind: a person of charity, a lover of traditional, time-honored worship, church music and ceremonies, and a master of "modest, grave and Christian reproof" Oley's preface is apocalyptic throughout, and he frames Herbert's image in such a way that it may lead midcentury England to holiness and repentance, "Recovery, and Profit."

Herbert's two other collections of Latin poems written during the early 1620s are comprised primarily of sacred rather than satiric and controversial epigrams. Lucus (a "Sacred Grove") is a somewhat loosely arranged miscellany that includes poems on Christ, the pope, the Bible, and several biblical episodes and figures, including Martha and Mary, and examines an assortment of topics such as love, pride, affliction, and death. Several of the poems, like those in Musae Responsoriae, use irony for satiric purposes.

The decrepit fate of Rome is ingeniously discovered in its very name, "Roma," which can be construed as an anagram depicting its decline from the glorious days of Virgil ("Maro") to the present day, when hate has banished love ("Amor"). But in most of the poems irony and paradox are used to convey the miraculous and mysterious power of Christ. Herbert's emphasis is not on careful, rational argumentation but bold, dramatic astonishment, as in the brief but dazzling lines "On the stoning of Stephen": "How marvelous! Who pounds rock gets fire. But Stephen from stones got heaven." The longest poem in the collection, "The Triumph of Death," indicts man's ironic misuse of intelligence to create weapons and other instruments of death, but the greater irony, revealed in the following poem, "The Christian's Triumph: Against Death," is that benign images of Christ—the lamb, the Cross—overwhelm even the most threatening spears, bows, and battering rams.

The 21 poems of Passio Discerpta are much more unified than those in Lucus, each focusing on some aspect of Christ's Crucifixion. Like Richard Crashaw's sacred epigrams, written some ten years later, these poems are intensely, even grotesquely, visual, but, unlike Crashaw's, Herbert's prevailing emotion is calm wonderment rather than ecstatic excitement. The description of the Passion of Christ is remarkably dispassionate: the poetic witness is not cold or distant but is moved primarily by the redemptive purpose rather than the melodramatic circumstances of the Crucifixion. He is transfixed and indelibly marked by what he sees—"I, joyous, and my mouth wide open, / Am driven to the drenched cross"—and he is well aware that the death of Christ crushes the world and, as he imagines it, grinds the human heart to powder. But these poems, as baroque and intense as they may seem to be on the surface, are written from the secure perspective of one who feels at every moment that the inimitable sacrifice of Christ "lightens all losses."

Though the Latin poems of Musae Responsoriae, Lucus, and Passio Discerpta are relatively early works in Herbert's canon and represent a distinctive stage in the development of his style and ideas, they are by no means mere apprentice work, disconnected from his later efforts. Thematically, these collections have much in common with the poems of "The Church" and illustrate that these later lyrics are the result of lifelong meditation on certain themes, not spontaneous or occasional poeticizing. And, stylistically, the Latin poems, relying heavily on compression, paradox, wordplay, and climactic moments of understated surprise, are at least in some ways the foundation of what has been called Herbert's "metaphysical wit." Such poems as "The Agonie" and "Redemption" may be more finely crafted and powerful than any of the verses in Passio Discerpta, but they are deeply akin to them.

Many of the poems of "The Church" focus on the problems of finding a proper vocation. Some, such as "Affliction (I)" and "Employment (I)" and "Employment (II)", seem to be early meditations on Herbert's uneven progress toward finding a position that might satisfy both his and God's desires. Others, such as "The Priesthood" and "Aaron," are undoubtedly later poems reflecting on the specific implications of his decision to become a priest. "The Crosse," though, describes an intermediate stage, one at which Herbert was distressingly stuck in 1626, the probable date of this poem. The speaker seeks "some place, where I might sing, / And serve thee," but he comes to realize that the consequences of this desire are far more overwhelming than he had anticipated. "Wealth and familie," and indeed any sense that even the most dedicated believer brings something useful to Christ, prove to be irrelevancies and must be set aside. This "strange and uncouth thing," the Cross, completely disrupts one's normal life, and any potentially heartening illusions about "My power to serve thee" are replaced by an awareness that "I am in all a weak disabled thing."

Joseph H. Summers describes the years between 1626 and 1629 as "the blackest of all for Herbert," filled with anxious concern—conveyed in such poems as "The Crosse"—not only about his spiritual duties but also his physical health. In Walton's words Herbert was "seized with a sharp Quotidian Ague" in 1626 that required a full year of careful diet and convalescence. And not long after, in June of 1627, his mother died, an event that affected him in complex, even contradictory ways. The death of a parent—and in Herbert's case, of his one parent—can be an emotional shock that is both devastating and liberating, confusing and clarifying. Herbert indeed moves through this wide range of response in the 19 Latin and Greek poems that make up Memoriae Matris Sacrum, registered for publication along with Donne's funeral sermon on Magdalen Herbert on July 7, 1627, a month after her death.

Memoriae Matris Sacrum the only collection of poems he published during his lifetime. (Although Lucus, Passio Discerpta, and the poems of The Temple were carefully copied out in manuscript, no doubt in preparation for eventual publication, they did not appear until after his death.) This may be explained by the prevailing norms of poetic practice for nonprofessionals at the time, which allowed for the publication of heroic, historical, and occasional poems, particularly of public celebration and mourning, but discouraged anything more than the circulation of other poems in manuscript, followed perhaps by posthumous publication.

Prose

Herbert's only prose work, A Priest to the Temple (usually known as The Country Parson), offers practical advice to rural clergy. In it, he advises that "things of ordinary use" such as ploughs, leaven, or dances, could be made to "serve for lights even of Heavenly Truths". It was first published in 1652 as part of Herbert's Remains, or Sundry Pieces of That Sweet Singer, Mr. George Herbert, edited by Barnabas Oley. The first edition was prefixed with unsigned preface by Oley, which was used as one of the sources for Izaak Walton's biography of Herbert, first published in 1670. The second edition appeared in 1671 as A Priest to the Temple or the Country Parson, with a new preface, this time signed by Oley.

Like many of his literary contemporaries, Herbert was a collector of proverbs. His Outlandish Proverbs was published in 1640, listing over 1000 aphorisms in English, but gathered from many countries (in Herbert's day, 'outlandish' meant foreign). The collection included many sayings repeated to this day, for example, "His bark is worse than his bite" and "Who is so deaf, as he that will not hear?" These and an additional 150 proverbs were included in a later collection entitled Jacula Prudentum (sometimes seen as Jacula Prudentium), dated 1651 and published in 1652 as part of Oley's Herbert's Remains.

Musical settings

Herbert came from a musical family. His mother Magdalen Herbert was a friend of the composers William Byrd and John Bull, and encouraged her children's musical education; his brother Edward Herbert of Cherbury was a skilled lutenist and composer.[40] George Herbert played the lute and viol, and "sett his own lyricks or sacred poems". Musical pursuits interested him all through his life and his biographer, Izaak Walton, records that he rose to play the lute during his final illness. Walton also gave it as his opinion that he composed "such hymns and anthems as he and the angels now sing in heaven", while Walton's friend Charles Cotton described him as a "soul composed of harmonies".

More than ninety of Herbert's poems have been set for singing over the centuries, some of them multiple times. In his own century, there were settings of "Longing" by Henry Purcell and "And art thou grieved" by John Blow. Some forty were adapted for the Methodist hymnal by the Wesley brothers, among them "Teach me my God and King", which found its place in one version or another in 223 hymnals. Another poem, "Let all the world in every corner sing", was published in 103 hymnals, of which one is a French version. Other languages into which his work has been translated for musical settings include Spanish, Catalan and German.

In the 20th century, "Vertue" alone achieved ten settings, one of them in French. Among leading modern composers who set his work were Edmund Rubbra, who set "Easter" as the first of his Two songs for voice and string trio (op. 2, 1921); Ralph Vaughan Williams, who used four by Herbert in Five Mystical Songs, of which "Easter" was the first and "Antiphon II" the last; Robin Milford, who used the original Fitzwilliam manuscript's setting of the second part of "Easter" for his cantata Easter Morning (1932), set in two parts for soprano soloist and choir of children’s or women's voices; Benjamin Britten and William Walton, both of whom set "Antiphon" too; Ned Rorem who included one in his "10 poems for voice, oboe and strings" (1982); and Judith Weir, whose 2005 choral work Vertue includes three poems by Herbert.

Legacy

The earliest portrait of George Herbert was engraved long after his death by Robert White for Walton's biography of the poet in 1674. Now in London's National Portrait Gallery, it served as basis for later engravings, such as those by White's apprentice John Sturt and by Henry Hoppner Meyer in 1829.

Among later artistic commemorations is William Dyce's oil painting of "George Herbert at Bemerton" (1860) in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London. The poet is pictured in his riverside garden, prayerbook in hand. Over the meadows is Salisbury Cathedral, where he used to join in the musical evensong; his lute leans against a stone bench and against a tree a fishing rod is propped, a reminder of his first biographer, Isaac Walton. There is also a musical reference in Charles West Cope's "George Herbert and his mother" (1872), which is in Gallery Oldham: the mother points a poem out to him in a room that has a virginal in the background.

Most representations of Herbert, however, are in stained glass windows, of which there are several in churches and cathedrals. They include Westminster Abbey, Salisbury Cathedral and All Saints' Church, Cambridge. His own St Andrew's Church in Bemerton installed in 1934 a memorial window, which he shares with Nicholas Ferrar. In addition, there is a statue of Herbert in his canonical robes, based in part on the Robert White portrait, in a niche on the West Front of Salisbury Cathedral.

Veneration

In the liturgy Herbert is remembered in the Church of Englandand the Episcopal Churchon 27 February; also on 1 March in, for example, the Calendar of Saints of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, being the day of his death. There are various collects for the day, of which one is based on his poem "The Elixir":

Our God and King, who called your servant George Herbert from the pursuit of worldly honors to be a pastor of souls, a poet, and a priest in your temple: Give us grace, we pray, joyfully to perform the tasks you give us to do, knowing that nothing is menial or common that is done for your sake ... Amen.

The quote "All may have, if they dare try, a glorious life, or a grave" from Herbert's "The Church Porch" is inscribed on the outer wall of St. John's Church, Waterloo.

Works

1623: Oratio Qua auspicatissimum Serenissimi Principis Caroli.

1627: Memoriae Matris Sacrum, printed with A Sermon of commemoracion of the ladye Danvers by John Donne... with other Commemoracions of her by George Herbert (London: Philemon Stephens and Christopher Meredith).

1633: The Temple, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. (Cambridge: Printed by Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel).

1652: Herbert's Remains, Or, Sundry Pieces Of that sweet Singer of the Temple consisting of his collected writings from A Priest to the Temple, Jacula Prudentum, Sentences, & c., as well as a letter, several prayers, and three Latin poems.(London: Printed for Timothy Garthwait)

The Temple : sacred poems and private ejaculations. London: Jeffery Wale. 1703.

T. Y. Crowell, ed. (1881). The Works of George Herbert in Prose and Verse: Edited from the Latest Editions, with Memoir, Explanatory Notes, Etc. New York: John Wurtele Lovell.

Blythe, Ronald, ed. (2003). A Priest to the Temple Or the Country Parson: With Selected Poems. Hymns Ancient and Modern.