Reviews of Biography of George Herbert
Above is the Leighton Bromswold Church, restored by George Herbert and Nicholas and John Ferrar of Little Gidding
Biography is one of the most marketable genres of our age, and literary criticism is not. It is therefore a bold move for Allen Lane to publish a book that fulfils its subtitle so exactly. Herbert's life does not superficially offer much for the biographer: no wars, no quarrels, a happy marriage, disengagement from the religious controversies of the day in favour of an unwavering adherence to the Church of England. What made him extraordinary in an age of colourful characters was the poetry, and that is accordingly at the centre of this book.
Converting it into biography is not, however, at all easy, as it is rarely possible to correlate individual poems with external events. When John Drury, chaplain of All Souls College, Oxford, couples the life and the poetry, it is in order to get inside not only Herbert's mind but his craftsmanship, to introduce his readers to the work as well as the man. Alongside his narrative of outward events he offers a running commentary on a full half of the 173 poems that make up the 1633 collection, The Temple, many of them quoted in full, plus four of the Latin poems. Readers who are tempted into the book by its focus on the life will finish with something far richer than more conventional biographies offer.
George Herbert was born in 1593 to a minor branch of the aristocratic Herbert family, probably in Montgomery in mid-Wales. His father died when he was three, and a few years later his mother moved to London, where she ran a household distinguished for its hospitality towards intellectuals. John Donne addressed some poems to her, and was to preach her funeral sermon. George was sent to Westminster School at the time when the great preacher and linguist Lancelot Andrewes was in charge. One of the translators of the King James Bible, Andrewes was a master of style, especially of the "terse and urgent" short clause. TS Eliot was an admirer ("A cold coming [they] had of it … " is lifted from one of his sermons); Drury demonstrates too how much Herbert could have learned from him.
A distinguished career at Trinity College, Cambridge, culminated in Herbert's appointment as university orator in 1620. The post required him to be the public face of the university, in charge of its formal Latin correspondence and orations. It was a role that could have led to a good position in royal service. Instead, he allowed his deputy to take over much of the work, while he himself withdrew, perhaps because of his recurrent ill health, perhaps to try to resolve his increasingly urgent personal dilemma as to whether to pursue a career that would satisfy his worldly ambitions, or to enter the priesthood.
n 1629 he married, and not long after he accepted the living of Bemerton, close to Salisbury and the cathedral music that he loved, but frustratingly distant from the Anglican community that his friend Nicholas Ferrar had founded at Little Gidding. He died in his parsonage in 1633.
Drury integrates the poems and his commentary skilfully into this narrative, operating on the principle that "the circumstances of a poet's life and times", together with the habits of thought and feeling that characterise them, "are the soil in which the work is rooted". So the introduction, on "Herbert's World", embraces his theory of poetry and the range of his references to the worlds of business and pleasure.
A number of the poems recorded in the early Williams manuscript allow for an exploration of how Herbert's poetry developed. His parents' tomb invites the poem on "Church Monuments"; his own death is the context for a discussion of his magnificent "Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing", a skeleton whose skull he re-imagines as the eggshells that "fledged souls left behind". An account of the annual liturgical cycle makes space for his poetry on Christmas, the Passion and Easter.
A discussion of his followers, in particular Henry Vaughan, suggests a comparison of poems that imitated his own. And for those works that haven't fitted anywhere else, there is a final, catch-all chapter called "The bread of faithful speech" that brings together 14 more. That favourite of Simone Weil's (and of William Empson's), "Love III" - "Love bade me welcome" - is a recurrent touchstone from the first page, but every chapter is given its share of his finest poems.
Herbert is at once a master of simplicity and extraordinarily complex. Many of the difficulties for modern readers come from unfamiliarity with matters that Herbert's contemporaries took for granted, and Drury is expert at summarising the basics needed for understanding each poem. His commentary assumes little advance knowledge, and he rarely omits any essential information that some readers might need (one instance is the image of human flesh as "but the glass, which holds the dust / That measures all our time": an hourglass, not an unwashed beer glass). Biblical, liturgical and classical references are explained, unfamiliar words are glossed, the processes of alchemy described, and the difference between an iamb and a trochee spelled out. The last, indeed, proves especially important: the poems show an exceptionally subtle mastery of rhythm within simple metrical frameworks, and Drury will not let us overlook either (though his discussion of Latin metrics is a little odd). The Complete Poetry that Drury is now editing for Penguin Classics should fill in the gaps and provide yet more riches.
A few decades ago, some knowledge of Herbert's poetry was a standard element of cultural literacy. His insistence on both inward and outward spirituality is scarcely fashionable now, though even atheist readers find him deeply attractive: Empson was a particular admirer, and I have never had a student who resisted him. Christian spirituality is perhaps seen as too politically divisive, or too unfamiliar, for him to be read much in schools, and he has tended to disappear behind the more obvious attractions of that teenage crowd-pleaser Donne. Donne writes of sex and passion, and is magnificent on the terrors of damnation; Herbert writes of love and spiritual dryness, and can positively look forward to the Day of Judgment as a time for the reuniting of friends.
It is hard to imagine a better book for anyone, general reader or 17th-century aficionado or teacher or student, newly embarking on Herbert. This is the kind of literary criticism that enables an immediate appreciation of the poems by way of minimal extras. Its preferred adjective is "bright", one of Herbert's own favourites. The title comes from a recorded remark of his, that the memory of having helped a poor man with a fallen horse would supply him with a better "music at midnight" than the real thing that he made with his friends.
It isn't easy to avoid hagiography in writing such a life (the earliest, Izaak Walton's of 1670, for example), but Drury can at least let the poetry carry most of the weight. Ours is too cynical an age to believe in sanctity. Without ever saying so, this book is a reminder that it may be possible.
• Helen Cooper's Shakespeare and the Medieval World is published by Arden Shakespeare.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/15/music-midnight-herbert-drury-review
Above is van dyck's group portrait of Philip Herbert, Fourth earl of Pembroke and family, Herbert's neigbour and kinsman, at Wilton house
The devil, whatever people may say, doesn't have all the best tunes. Of all the lyric poetry our language has produced, George Herbert's is among the most musical, poignant, direct and, at the same time, subtle and intelligent. It makes allowances for the weakness of the heart - often, indeed, that is its primary subject - and nine-tenths of the poetry that survives is about God. It may be no surprise that TS Eliot rated him; after all, they were both, in their different ways, pillars of the Anglican church. What is more surprising is that the arch anti-Christian William Empson championed him. Of "The Sacrifice", he wrote: "an assured and easy simplicity, a reliable and unassuming grandeur, extraordinary in any material, but unique as achieved by successive fireworks of contradiction, and a mind jumping like a flea".
That was Empson's idea of poetry as perfection. (Strangely, the poem of Herbert's with which most people are familiar, "The Elixir", not only has had its own internal music eradicated because it is now more famous as a hymn, but lines such as "A servant with this clause/ Makes drudgerie divine" come close to articulating precisely what Empson thought was wrong and disgusting about Christianity.)
But powerful poetry can have powerful effects; this paper ran a series a couple of months ago on belief, which started by the writer saying how Herbert's poetry converted her.
He was always, and continues to be, influential: WH Auden considered his greatness; Geoffrey Hill's 2011 collection, Clavics, uses Herbert's celebrated "Easter Wings" form extensively and as a link between the older and the newer poet. There are moments where Herbert's style, which verges on the conversational, sounds as though it could have been written today. Take the end of "Prayer (I)": "Church‑bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,/ The land of spices; something understood." (It's that "something understood" that does it.) Coleridge said you had to be a Christian of a highly specific kind to appreciate Herbert's poetry; everyone since then has disagreed, even sympathetic Christians of the kind Coleridge delineates.
That said, Herbert's life was hardly full of incident. He was born in Montgomery, near the Welsh border, at the end of the 16th century and died before he was 40. He went to Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was praised for his oratory, but was a bit of a prig to start with ("This kind of undergraduate is, to this day, hard to know and hard to like," writes John Drury). He seemed destined for high office, but took holy orders and became the parish priest of Fugglestone in Wiltshire, being, by all accounts, an exemplary incumbent.
His poem "The Answer" deals with his eventual diffidence about success with masterly ambiguity: "But to all/Who think me eager, hot, and undertaking,/ But in my prosecutions slack and small ... Show me, and set me, I have one reply,/ Which they that know the rest, know more than I." What is "the rest"? Drury asks. (Auden said the "they" of the poem could be compared to the persecuting "they"s of Edward Lear's limericks.)
Drury, then, does not have an awful lot to go on as a biographer. Not only is there not much in the way of event, the records themselves are patchy; yet he has managed to produce a very useful and good book indeed. It's not full of padding: rather, he quotes the poetry substantially and then takes us through it. Drury may be a fellow of All Souls, but he does not show off his intellect in an intimidating fashion (although he misses a trick by not pointing out that when, in the poem "The Rose", Herbert mentions the flower's purgative properties, the initial letters of the non-indented lines read "PISS"). It makes you wish more biographies were like this: free from silly speculation, concentrating on the works, and the social and religious circumstances that lay behind them. Happy Easter.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/15/music-at-midnight-life-poetry-george-herbert-review
Above is the Tudor Facade of Wilton House, the seat of the Earls of Pembroke, Herbert's kinsfolk in Wiltshire
George Herbert, perhaps the greatest devotional poet in the English language, is little known to readers today, and thus John Drury’s perceptive and wonderfully accessible account is particularly welcome. Born into the lesser nobility, Herbert was the star pupil of the churchman and linguist Lancelot Andrewes, a friend of John Donne and an outstanding scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, although he was frequently made ill by too much study.
A religious impulse was evident from the start. Upon arriving at Cambridge, Herbert wrote to his mother, declaring “that my poor abilities in poetry shall be all and ever consecrated to God’s glory”; other letters mention plans to become a beneficed clergyman. Yet Herbert was not immune to worldly ambition. He sat as MP for Montgomery in the 1624 Parliament, and campaigned for, won and held on to the prestigious post of University Orator for eight years in the 1620s. Both of his predecessors in this role had gone on to high state office. When a property deal brought financial independence, however, he resigned the oratorship and two years later was ordained as priest and instituted as rector of the rural parish of Bemerton in Wiltshire.
Drury’s book is especially valuable in its deft and insightful expositions of Herbert’s formal and stylistic brilliance
Early biographers romanticised his change of direction. For such a man to become a country parson was to “lose himself in a humble way”, and Herbert’s motto, “Less than the least of God’s mercies”, was taken as an epitome of self-punishing humility. But this may well be to overstate the case. His sense of spiritual vocation had been there from the beginning, and it is clear that Charles I’s presentation of Herbert to the vacant living at Bemerton was made at the request of his relations, the earls of Pembroke, whose ancestral seat, Wilton House, sits within the parish boundaries. Herbert died of consumption just three years later, aged 39, his early death encouraging biographers to present him as saintly and high-minded. Yet it is not impossible to think that had he lived, Herbert might have risen in the Church to occupy a deanery like Donne or a bishop’s palace like Andrewes, with Bemerton just the first rung on the ecclesiastical ladder.
Herbert’s life, however, would be of only passing interest to us now had he not written The Temple (1633), his astoundingly inventive collection of religious poems, crafted in private and published only after his death. Aldous Huxley called Herbert the “poet of inner weather”, amply demonstrated by any of the poems in The Temple. The most famous of these include The Collar, beginning with the dramatic outburst, “I struck the board, and cried, No more”; Love (III), a confessional allegory, “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back”; and Prayer (I), dazzling the eye and beguiling the ear with its astonishing sequence of epithets, “The soul in paraphrase…Engine against th’Almighty…Reversed thunder…Heaven in ordinary…”. Attempting to evoke the reciprocity felt between God and man in prayer, one of the strangest and most original sonnets in English builds to its paradisal yet homely conclusion: “Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,/The land of spices; something understood.”
From Andrewes, Herbert learned how to squeeze a world of meaning from a word; and with Donne, he shares arresting first and last lines, a keen ear for natural speech, and a delight in narrative compression. Herbert’s “easy style drawn from a native vein”, however, is his own. His dying wish was that his book of poems might be made public, “if it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul”. Six editions in seven years indicate just how advantageous The Temple’s first readers found it, and a large part of its appeal lies in its personal, confessional quality, what Herbert called “the picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul”. All the more reason, then, that Drury should explore the connection, as he does so illuminatingly, between what Robert Browning called the poet’s House and Shop, the life and work.
Bringing the life and the poetry together delivers numerous benefits. An allegorical poem such as The Family, ostensibly about internal tumult, takes on fresh life when also read as an affectionate picture of Herbert’s temperamental family in their crowded house in Charing Cross. Prose works by Herbert’s elder brother, the poet and philosopher Edward Herbert, read in conjunction with poems such as Employment (II) and Providence, enrich our understanding of the younger Herbert’s philosophy of nature. Knowing more about his contact with Andrewes and Donne casts light on the influence of the former on Herbert’s The Sacrifice, and of the latter on Sin’s Round and The Wreath. Music, gardening, church politics and theology all help us to read the poems with greater pleasure and understanding, and music in particular - its “measure, tune and time” - is the interpretative key that unlocks so many poetic doors in The Temple. The forms and conventions of Latin poetry and disputation leave their mark on poems such as Virtue and The Dialogue; and English poetic tradition, especially Sir Philip Sidney’s innovative sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, and the psalm translations undertaken by Sidney and his sister Mary, is also a crucial influence on Herbert’s design of both individual poems and of the entire sequence of The Temple.
Drury - a biblical scholar, former dean of King’s College, Cambridge and editor of a forthcoming Penguin edition of Herbert’s Complete Poems - manages wonderfully in bringing text and context profitably together. His book is especially valuable, and enjoyable, in its deft and insightful expositions of Herbert’s formal and stylistic brilliance; how the manner of Herbert’s poems - their verse forms, metre, syntax, diction and verbal patterning - enhance and intensify the matter: the complaints and praises, yearning and disappointments, griefs and joys. My only wish is that the book had taken some account of Adele Davidson’s recent contention that verbal game-playing in The Temple, the acrostics, anagrams, pattern poems and so on, goes much further than previously thought. Veiled meanings, hidden in plain sight, and the inexhaustible richness of the word are ideas that seem central to The Temple, yet such devices met with critical nose-holding, from John Dryden to Ernest de Sélincourt, who said “Such extravagances are little to our taste”. I would have been fascinated to hear what Drury had to say about it.
Herbert, of course, adapted his mode of expression to suit his present purpose, and the man himself is the sum of all of those modes. Thus he is equally present in The Temple’s intense focus on the soul’s tortured relationship with Christ: “Thou art/All my delight, so all my smart”; and in the model of sturdy common sense found in his amiably practical prose works, The Country Parson and Outlandish Proverbs: “Love your neighbour, yet pull not downe your hedge” and “Musick helps not the tooth-ach”. Ultimately, for this reader at least, it is Herbert’s poetry in The Temple rather than his life as scholar, orator and priest that generates the most engrossing questions, ironies and paradoxes. We should be grateful to Drury, then, for being such a sensitive and insightful guide, sending us back to Herbert’s poetry with renewed fascination and appreciation, to the “Words of the right sort to ask about the divine”.
The author
The Very Reverend John Drury, who was ordained in 1963, is chaplain and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. The biblical scholar and author lives “in Oxford and North London with my wife Caroline Elam, an art historian and once editor of The Burlington Magazine, who did wonders with my drafts”. Oxford’s attractions, he believes, are balanced by its vexations in the form of “large groups of tourists”.
Born in Clacton-on-Sea, he later lived in Norwich “under German bombardment”. He recalls being schooled “eventually very happily at Bradfield College” in Berkshire before attending university. “I was a studious child,” Drury observes. “A master at my prep school helped me understand architectural styles. We learned poems by heart.”
He took his undergraduate degree at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and cites a family connection in his decision. “My great uncle Sir Alan Drury, the pathologist who enabled blood transfusion during the war, was a fellow of Trinity Hall.”
Drury took up his present post at All Souls in 2003, following 12 years as dean of Christ Church, Oxford and, prior to that, 10 years (1981 to 1991) as dean of chapel and fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Asked if there is a building in Oxford to match the beauty of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, he unhesitatingly recommends All Souls College Chapel.
Views on the differences between the two ancient universities abound; some contrarians even like to argue that there is none. “There is a difference,” confirms Drury, whose observations of the two establishments span a half-century. “In Oxford the colleges take part in the appointment of faculty and can challenge professors. Not so in Cambridge. Oxford encourages the generalist, which suits me better. But King’s College, Cambridge was, as John Betjeman noticed, pretty much like Oxford.” Asked if any of his views have changed since he first studied at Trinity Hall, he says, “Since I was an undergraduate my sense of the power of imagination in history has grown.”
His academic career has not been confined exclusively to Oxbridge. In 1979 to 1981, he was a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Sussex, then still a young university not known for being a hotbed of conventional piety. Drury, however, did not find it uncongenial. Indeed, he recalls, “It was wonderful to teach students who were interested in religion but not at all committed to it. At Cambridge the power of orthodoxy over the New Testament Seminar was stifling. Also, the general courses at Sussex brought me up against Nietzsche, Feuerbach and George Eliot, causing me to refashion my religion.”
Asked if he, like George Herbert, has ever felt it difficult to square the demands of his faith with another calling, in Drury’s case the academy, he say he found “no problems. At King’s I remember complaining to an anthropologist friend that I was too heretical to be a clergyman - and she told me that I was incredibly lucky to have something to DO as well as think about!”
Of Herbert’s many proverbs, Drury names as his favourite: “To be beloved is above all bargains”.
Invited to reveal some of his hobbies or pastimes, he observes laconically, “I used to draw well. Might start again now.”
Karen Shook
Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert
By John Drury
Allen Lane, 416pp, £25.00
ISBN 9781846142482
Published 5 September 2013
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/music-at-midnight-the-life-and-poetry-of-george-herbert-by-john-drury/2006736.article#survey-answer
Below is George Herbert's chuch, Holy Trinity, at Bemerton
