A short life of the author
George Herbert is the greatest devotional poet in the English language — a writer whose poems about the struggle between the human will and divine grace achieve a combination of intellectual complexity, emotional directness, and formal inventiveness that has no parallel in English literature. His single volume, The Temple (1633), contains some of the most anthologised poems in the language — “Easter Wings,” “The Collar,” “Love (III),” “The Pulley,” “Virtue,” “Jordan (I)” — and its influence extends from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw through Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Simone Weil, who said that reciting Herbert’s poem “Love (III)” during a period of intense headaches led to her mystical experience of Christ.
The Worldly Prospects
Herbert was born in 1593 in Montgomery, Wales, into one of the most prominent families in the Welsh Marches. His father, Richard Herbert, died when George was three; his mother, Magdalen Herbert, was a woman of formidable intellect and piety who was a friend and patron of John Donne. Herbert was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow and then Public Orator of the University — a prestigious position that placed him at the centre of academic and political life and seemed to point toward a career in royal service or diplomacy.
For several years, Herbert pursued worldly advancement. He sat in Parliament and cultivated powerful patrons, including King James I. But the deaths of his principal patrons, combined with a deepening religious vocation, led him to abandon his secular ambitions. In 1630, at the age of thirty-six, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of England and became rector of the tiny parish of Fugglestone St Peter with Bemerton, near Salisbury, where he served until his death from tuberculosis in 1633, at the age of thirty-nine.
The Temple
The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (1633) was published posthumously — Herbert sent the manuscript to Nicholas Ferrar, the founder of the Little Gidding community, with instructions to publish it if Ferrar thought it might “turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul” and to burn it if not. Ferrar published it. The book went through thirteen editions by 1680 and has never been out of print.
The collection was structured as an architectural metaphor — the poems proceeded through “The Church Porch” (a long didactic poem of moral instruction), “The Church” (the central section, containing the devotional lyrics), and “The Church Militant” (a historical survey of Christianity’s progress through the world). This structure suggested the experience of entering a church, moving from the exterior to the interior, from public instruction to private devotion.
The poems within “The Church” depicted the drama of the speaker’s relationship with God — a relationship characterised by rebellion, submission, doubt, gratitude, despair, and joy, often within a single poem. Herbert’s God was not an abstract theological concept but a living presence — a friend, a lover, a parent, a host — whose relationship with the speaker was depicted with an emotional immediacy and specificity that made the poems feel like dramatic monologues addressed to someone in the room.
The Formal Inventiveness
Herbert’s most distinctive quality was his formal inventiveness. He never used the same stanza form twice. Each poem found its own unique structure — a structure that was not merely decorative but integral to the poem’s meaning. “Easter Wings” was printed in the shape of two pairs of wings, its narrowing and expanding lines enacting the fall and rise they described. “The Altar” was shaped like an altar. “The Collar” used increasingly irregular rhythms and rhymes to enact the speaker’s rebellion against divine authority, then collapsed into the regularity of the final couplet when the speaker hears God’s voice and submits.
This ingenuity was never merely clever. Herbert’s formal experiments always served emotional and theological purposes. The shaped poems were acts of devotion — offerings whose physical form embodied the spiritual reality they described. The metrical irregularities of “The Collar” were not technical exercises but performances of spiritual disorder.
The Plain Style
Herbert’s language was characteristically plain — Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, domestic imagery, the vocabulary of everyday life. “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back” began the poem that Simone Weil memorised, and its power lay precisely in its simplicity — in the way Herbert used the ordinary language of hospitality to describe the most extraordinary encounter imaginable. His metaphors were drawn from the world of craftsmanship, housekeeping, gardening, and music — pulleys, boxes, flowers, lutes — and this domesticity gave his devotional poetry a warmth and accessibility that distinguished it from the more baroque elaboration of Donne or Crashaw.
A Priest to the Temple
A Priest to the Temple, or The Country Parson (published posthumously in 1652) was Herbert’s prose guide to the duties of a parish priest — a work of practical theology that depicted the ideal country parson as a man of learning, piety, and pastoral attentiveness. The book reflected Herbert’s own ministry at Bemerton and was widely read by Anglican clergy for centuries.
Collecting Herbert
The first edition of The Temple (Cambridge, 1633) is one of the rarest and most valuable books of English poetry — surviving copies are held primarily in institutional collections. The numerous seventeenth-century editions are collected by specialists. Modern scholarly editions — particularly F. E. Hutchinson’s Works of George Herbert (Oxford, 1941) — are standard. Herbert’s surviving manuscripts are held at the Bodleian Library and Dr Williams’s Library.