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George Herbert (3 April 1593 – 1 March 1633) was an English poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional song lyricists." He was born in Wales into an artistic and wealthy family and largely raised in England. He received a good education that led to his admission to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1609. He enrolled intending to become a priest, but became the University's Public Orator and attracted the attention of King James I. He sat in the Parliament of England in 1624 and briefly in 1625.
After the death of King James, Herbert renewed his interest in ordination. He gave up his secular ambitions in his mid-thirties and took holy orders in the Church of England, spending the rest of his life as the rector of the rural parish of Fugglestone St Peter, just outside Salisbury. He was noted for unfailing care for his parishioners, bringing the sacraments to them when they were ill, and providing food and clothing for those in need. Henry Vaughan called him "a most glorious saint and seer". He was never a healthy man and died of Tuberculosis at age 39.
Herbert's eldest brother Edward (who inherited his late father's estates and was ultimately created Baron Herbert of Cherbury) became a soldier, diplomat, historian, poet, and philosopher whose religious writings led to his reputation as the "father of English deism". Herbert's younger brother was Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels to Kings Charles I and II.
Herbert entered Westminster School at or around the age of 12 as a day pupil, although he later became a residential scholar. He was admitted on a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1609, and graduated first with a Bachelor's and then with a Master's degree in 1616 at the age of 23. Subsequently, Herbert was elected a major fellow of his college and then appointed Reader in Rhetoric. In 1620 he stressed his fluency in Greek and Latin and attained election to the post of the University's Public Orator, a position he held until 1627.
In 1624, supported by his kinsman the 3rd Earl of Pembroke, Herbert became a member of parliament, representing Montgomery. While these positions normally presaged a career at court and King James I had shown him favour, circumstances worked against Herbert: the King died in 1625, and two influential patrons also died at about the same time. However, his parliamentary career may have ended already because, although a Mr Herbert is mentioned as a committee member, the Commons Journal for 1625 never mentions Mr. George Herbert, despite the preceding parliament's careful distinction. In short, Herbert made a shift in his path away from the political future he had been pursuing, and turned more fully toward a future in the church.
Herbert was presented with the Prebendary of Leighton Bromswold in the Diocese of Lincoln in 1626, whilst he was still a don at Trinity College, Cambridge, but not yet ordained. He was not present at his institution as prebend, and it is recorded that Peter Walker, his clerk, stood in as his proxy. In the same year his close Cambridge friend Nicholas Ferrar was ordained Deacon in Westminster Abbey by William Laud on Trinity Sunday 1626 and went to Little Gidding, two miles down the road from Leighton Bromswold, to found a small community. Herbert raised money (and contributed his own) to restore the neglected church building at Leighton.
While at Bemerton, Herbert revised and added to his collection of poems entitled The Temple. He also wrote a guide to rural ministry, entitled A Priest to the Temple or, The Country Parson His Character and Rule of Holy Life, which he himself described as "a Mark to aim at", and which has remained influential to the present day. Having married shortly before taking up his post, he and his wife gave a home to three orphaned nieces. Together with their servants, they crossed the lane for services in the small St Andrew's church twice every day. Twice a week Herbert made the short journey into Salisbury to attend services at the cathedral, and afterwards would make music with the cathedral musicians.
All of Herbert's surviving English poems are on religious themes and are characterised by directness of expression enlivened by original but apt 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 like "Altar poem", 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." 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", Luminarium 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", Christian Classics 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.
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.
More than ninety of Herbert's poems have been set for singing over the centuries, some of them multiple times. Herbert, G, Hymnary.org. 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 Methodism 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. "Tout l’univers proclame les exploits" Hymnary.org. Other languages into which his work has been translated for musical settings include Spanish, Catalan and German. Author, Lieder Archive.
In the 20th century, "Vertue" alone achieved ten settings, one of them in French. Among modern composers who set his work were Ralph Vaughan Williams, who used four by Herbert in Five Mystical Songs (1911), of which "Easter" was the first and "Antiphon II" the last; Edmund Rubbra, who set "Easter" as the first of his Two songs for voice and string trio (op. 2, 1921); Eva Ruth Spalding ('Easter Words' from Three Melodies, 1929); 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 included one Herbert setting in his "10 poems for voice, oboe and strings" (1982), and Judith Weir set three poems in her 2005 choral work Vertue.
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 virginals 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.
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.
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