1630 It doesn’t sound very exciting, but this date marks the point at which one of the best lyricists in the English language turned his back on the secular rewards of politics and high academia in search of his true calling: religion and poetry. In Herbert’s case the two vocations were inseparable.
Herbert had it all: brains, money, an influential family. His education took him through Westminster School, through Trinity College, Cambridge, to a university readership in rhetoric and the post of University Orator. This didn’t just mean going around giving speeches, but writing official letters to dignitaries, as well as greeting them when they visited Cambridge – always in Latin.
One of the dignitaries in question turned out to be King James I, who was so impressed with the rhetorical flourishes in Herbert’s Latin that he encouraged him to frequent the court and stand as Member of Parliament for Montgomeryshire, his home county. When the king died in 1625 and his royal patronage evaporated, Herbert returned to a long-standing intention to study divinity and enter the church.
At Bemerton he was a model parish priest, raising money to repair the church, bringing the sacraments to the infirm, providing clothing for the poor. In his ‘Life of George Herbert’ Izaak Walton recalls how, while walking to Salisbury, Herbert came across ‘a poor man with a poorer horse’ that had fallen over with its load. The good parson immediately threw off his ‘canonical coat’ to help the man to unload the horse, get it up, then reload it, leaving the man with the injunction, ‘that if he loved himself, he should be merciful to his beast’.
Herbert lived just three years as rector of Bemerton, until he was carried off by tuberculosis. In that same year, 1633, his collection The Temple was published. Only then did it become clear just how much sacred verse he had written in his short tenure in the parish, and how good it was. Take ‘The Agonie’, a meditation on Sin and Love as emblematised in the Crucifixion:
Who knows not love, let him assay,
And taste that juice which, on the crosse, a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud, but I as wine.
It could take paragraphs to analyse the subtle poetics here: the run-on between lines 2 and 3; the meaningful rhymes between ‘assay’ and ‘say’, ‘divine’ and ‘wine’; and the clever interweaving of Christ’s blood and the sacrament of the Eucharist. But the real marvel is how English the stanza is – and this from the great Latin rhetorician in another, more secular life. Clearly, for Herbert, leaving the court for his core faith meant dispensing with the Latinism brought in with Norman-conquest French and going back to the roots of his native language – its Anglo-Saxon origins.