THE Anglican priest and poet George Herbert (1593-1633), whose day we mark on 27 February, has had his detractors. In Bad Blood, her coruscating memoir of a 1950s childhood in her grandfather’s rectory, the literary critic Lorna Sage describes Herbert as “saintly but insidious”.
“Saintly” suggests someone other-worldly; somehow above the ordinary concerns of daily life. It’s a view that has been around since Isaac Walton’s Life of Mr George Herbert (1670). But, in his magisterial and illuminating study of Herbert, Music at Midnight (2013), John Drury criticises Walton’s “saccharine inventions”, accurately nailing the hagiographic slant of the Life. What seems all wrong about “saintly” is that it just doesn’t fit the conflictual energy of Herbert’s poems, or the sheer down-to-earthness of The Country Parson (1652), his guide to pastoral practice.
And “insidious”? In Sage’s memoir, her grandfather (to whom she owed her love of books) is a somewhat scandalous priest. Herbert — one of his favourite poets — becomes for Sage someone just “posing as a plain man”; her use of “insidious” suggests that, like her grandfather, Herbert is full of pretence, mere posturing.
Even more negative is Justin Lewis-Anthony’s dismissal of Herbert’s legacy as “Herbertism”. In his attempt to “radically rethink priestly ministry”, If You Meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him (2009), Lewis-Anthony argues that Herbert — “this angel Gabriel in Jacobean clothes” — is responsible for all the unrealistic expectations of pastoral priesthood from which priests need to escape. But, just a dozen or so years after publication, his accusation seems wildly off-beam.
SO, WHAT is a just estimate of Herbert for us today? His poems, published posthumously as The Temple (1633), certainly don’t posture. Any pretence had been worked out of Herbert’s system by his years as Cambridge University’s Public Orator, where ornate, flattering, insincere Latin orations were the order of the day.
Herbert’s late vocation as a priest saw him — perhaps like the Yeats of “Responsibilities” (1916) — “withering into the truth”. The honest inwardness of Herbert’s self-examination in the poems, and of his fluctuating experience of his relationship with God, are well characterised in T. S. Eliot’s description of him as “the poet of the inner weather”; and some of that weather was stormy.
Herbert’s personal wrestlings with faith are reflected in his tightly wrought near-sonnet “A Wreath”: “Give me simplicitie, that I may live, So live and like, that I may know thy ways, Know them and practise them. . . ”
But that this was anything but simple for him is clear from “The Collar”, which enacts the anger — choler— of the writer’s frustration with the felt narrowness of his calling, the “cage” of “pettie thoughts” that occupy his inner world: “I struck the board and cry’d, No more; I will abroad.”
The final lines of the poem show frustrated anger resolving itself, after some dizzying mood-shifts, into acceptance of self, vocation, and God: “Me thoughts I heard one calling, Childe! And I reply’d My Lord.” That storm, at least, subsided.
ROOTED in daily life, Herbert writes dismissively in The Country Parson of “scholars” who “dwell in their books”. And “Divinitie” gives an insight into how he spoke about faith to his people. Summarising “all the doctrine which he taught and gave”, Herbert condenses the teaching of Jesus into: “Love God and love your neighbour. Watch and pray. Do as ye would be done unto.”
Writing of preaching, he urges that hearers “may plainly perceive that every word is hart-deep”; honesty to the truth of feeling is fundamental; for “the chief thing, which God in Scriptures requires, is the heart, and the spirit.”
In The Country Parson, Herbert offers his down-to-earth vision for parish priesthood. There’s a place for priestly light-heartedness, since “nature will not bear everlasting droopings”; what matters is good living: “Do well, and right, and let the world sinke.” And — at a time when Puritanism’s judgemental impulses were rampant — Herbert extols, above all, “the boundless Ocean of God’s Love”. The parson’s “business and aime”, in short, is “Love”.
And there is no finer, more delicate expression in verse of God’s gentle hospitality than Herbert’s poem “Love (III)”: “Love bade me welcome. . . ” On inspection, Lewis-Anthony’s “Herbertism” looks very much like warm, generous, classically Anglican practice.
IT IS the poems that remain Herbert’s greatest gift to us. His astonishing range of verse forms suggest that this skilled lutenist sought a new, musically crafted form for each poem. And they cover the gamut of religious emotion, “op’ning the soul’s most subtile rooms”. At times, God deserts him: “I scarce believed, Till grief did tell me roundly, that I lived.” But then: “How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! ev’n as the flowers in Spring.”
Elsewhere, Herbert exudes blithe confidence and joy: “Let all the world In every corner sing, My God and King!” His fine legacy of poems-become-hymns (“The Elixir”, “Antiphon”, “The Call”, “Praise”) displays that element of him.
They remain just part of the complex, ambivalent interior record that he has left for us; for Herbert’s poems reveal his inner world as a conflict zone, recalling that of the Psalms: relationship with God is changeable, uncertain. Above all, there is in his work a profound sense of ordinary humanity: he knows, he understands, the struggles of identity, and he offers a school of spirituality for those of faith or no faith.
Neither other-worldly nor “saintly”, never disingenuous, though in his own estimation “less than the least of all God’s mercies”, Herbert deserves our wholehearted celebration as a poet and priest who expresses the true soul of Anglicanism.
The Revd Dr John Caperon is a former head of the Bennett Memorial School, Kent, and a former director of the Bloxham Project, and was until recently Priest-in-Charge of Fairwarp, in the Ashdown Forest, East Sussex.