For anyone over 40 at least, George Herbert was a stalwart of English school texts in this country. Poems like Love, Life, The Collar and Vertue were mostly about God, and used simple language and all were to be found in Soundings, our English poetry book.
Could one have believed forty years ago that the latter anthology could have been reprinted as a cult classic which would go on to sell very well to nostalgic poetry lovers?This happened, folks, not so long back. Wonders will never cease, and certainly George Herbert' s sense of wonder will endure no matter what.
John Donne, we knew as schoolboys, wrote of sensual love as a young man. So we kind of bought into him, even if his later poems were suffused with religious intensity the equal of Herbert's, albeit of a different stamp from the work of that more elemental poet.
Yet pupils liked Herbert too, even if he lacked Donne's youthful flamboyance. “My favourite was probably Love by George Herbert (can`t explain why I like it without sounding like a tosser),“ is a comment on a discussion thread about poetry as once taught in Irish schools. “I couldn`t stand Dickinson or Hopkins and I never got much joy out of Kinsella’s two efforts, “ concludes the contributor.
The writer is recalling the poem which explores religious fervour, along with doubt and weakness as so many of Herbert’s poems do. If I quote the first line - “Love bade me welcome but my soul drew back” - the reader of a certain age may ecall the opening lines of Love, as referred to by the participator to the discussion thread quoted above.
The Limerick novelist Kate O’Brien took the title of one of her novels, The Land of Spices, from one of the poet's most famous lines: "Church‑bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood/The land of spices; something understood."
So Herbert may have left more of an impression than one might think for a man who never published any poetry in his lifetime but wrote lots of it. The Guardian newspaper ran a series some time ago on belief, which featured a writer who declared that Herbert's poetry had actually `converted' her to Christianity.
John Drury’s magnificent 393-page biography - published in paperback earlier this year - explores Herbert’s fascinating life and times with great flair, using sometimes scant material perceptively to elucidate the work.
Herbert was born near the Welsh/English border, in 1593 and died in 1633. At Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he won praise for his skill at oratory. He looked a likely candidate for high office, but took holy orders instead and became the parish priest of Fugglestone in Wiltshire. His marriage was happy, nothing untoward happened in the external details of his life, whatever about the man within.
His poems are often characteristically conversational in tone, and explore everyday feelings of happiness, sorrow, regret, rather than high-flown niceties of canon law or arcane theology. TS Eliot once wrote of Herbert: “What we can confidently believe is that every poem . . . is true to the poet’s experience.”
Paddy Kehoe
