Author: Tyler Hummel 

Every year, the Church of England commemorates the life and piety of one of its greatest thinkers on February 27th. The 17th-century priest and poet George Herbert, though mostly regarded in religious circles, holds great honor across Christendom as a unique voice of artistic achievement, having posthumously become regarded as the second greatest metaphysical poet of his century behind only his contemporary John Donne. 

In his lifetime, he was a modest figure. Despite graduating from Cambridge, serving in parliament, and nearly joining the court of King James I, his political career would fizzle out and he would seek holy orders. He would spend the final three years of his life as the rector of Bemerton’s St. Andrews Church before dying of tuberculosis at the young age of 39. In many ways, his was a sickly and sad life, brushing up against greater things without achieving them. However, those who knew him identified within him the glowing figure of a saint. His biographer Isaak Walton described him as “unspotted by the world” and “full of humility and all the examples of a virtuous life.” 

Throughout the final years of his life, he kept to himself a small personal project—a book of poetry composing his complex relationship with God. Upon his death, he gifted the book to a close friend asking if it ought to be published or burned, but its remarkable contents proved marvelous. Within six decades of his passing, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations would be printed eight times, setting its legacy as one of the greatest works of metaphysical poetry to come out of the Anglican tradition. 

Much has already been said about Herbert’s remarkable composition and structure. As a novice poetry critic though, I leave such commentary to greater critics than myself. As others have noted, his composition is tense and purposeful. Each poem is structured to place weight on the maximum meaning of every line in a manner that poet John Dryden once criticized as torturing “one poor word ten thousand ways.” Later critics like the apologist C.S. Lewis though found near-boundless depths within Herbert’s poetry, going as far as to describe the book as one of the ten most influential in his spiritual life. “Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment.” 

Herbert’s poetry is best meant to be savored, letting the slow stresses of his composition unfold in the mind and unfold their depths. As a thoroughly modern reader though, I instead binge-read it over a week like a sleep-deprived college student. I can’t recommend that strategy for this particular book, but overdosing on Anglican poetry still left a modicum of the desired effect in observation. 

The Temple reveals a tension between Herbert’s self-image and his spiritual foundations. He cannot be considered unorthodox in his theology, and his admonitions are firmly rooted in the theology of Elizabethan Protestantism, reflecting much of the Catholic heritage that the Caroline Divines sought to preserve in the face of Puritan agitation and violence. He wasn’t merely deeply educated. His works reveal he was also deeply devout. However, this devotion is in tension with his discomforts, his melancholy at the state of his life, and a noted sadness for the state of the world (he died just 116 years after the Reformation and 9 years before the outbreak of the English Civil War, witnessing much change and strife).

This is reflected in the spirit of his poems. Five poems alone are dedicated to his afflictions, in addition to decay, misery, temptation, frailty, agony, dullness, grief, judgment, and death. However, these poems are hardly despairing. They’re interspersed with poems about fasting, sacraments, the liturgical calendar, scripture, and hope. Like the ancient Psalmists before him, Herbert’s poetry is directional. It acknowledges the depth of human pain and experience before pointing in the direction of good. It makes it clear that good is a choice but doesn’t downplay the depths of pain that such goodness arises from.

Thou art my grief alone / Thou Lord conceal it not; and as thou art / All my delight, so all my smart: / Thy cross took up in one, / By way of imprest, all my future moan (Affliction 2). 

Why do I languish thus, drooping and dull, / As if I were all earth? / O give me quickness, that I may with mirth / Praise thee brimful! (Dullness). 

Beyond that though, they are, to borrow a phrase from English Professor Don King, conversational. His works are honest and vulnerable, speaking to the honest questioning that comes from an authentic faith expressing itself to God. Herbert’s tangible melancholy though can’t even be described as a fear of death or an anxiety as to the shortness of life, as he repeatedly mocks death throughout the book. His Christian outlook has defanged it. As he writes: Spare not, do thy worst. / I shall be one day better than before: / Thou so much worse, that thou shalt be no more (A Dialogue-Anthem). 

Conversely, he writes more exhaustedly about the nature of the flesh. His language borders on a nearly gnostic disdain for the prison of his body (one he faced challenges with after a lifetime of illness) and speaks poorly of the body as a metaphorical path to damnation. As he writes, And wanton in thy cravings, thou mayst know, / That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust / That measures all our time; which also shall / Be crumbled into dust. Mark here below / How tame these ashes are, how free from lust / That thou mayst fit thyself against they fall (Church Monuments). 

The Eastern Orthodox commentator Mother Maria Gysi ascribes the power of Herbert’s anxieties to a series of tensions inherent to Anglican spirituality that he fully imbibes. The via media between Catholic and Protestant theology creates uncertainties that can only be faced through radically trusting God. But by allowing God to indwell his spirit, he has nothing to fear and can embrace sincere humility and confidence against the powers of death and evil. 

“Herbert’s poems might seem to have been conceived as a unity, even on a narrow, almost world-less basis, if not for the naked problematic of existence, as such, revealed in the recurring image of the confrontation of man with God. Man discerns himself relentlessly as the meeting point of heaven and earth, suspended between time and eternity, destined to be the dwelling place of God, the agonised locality of conflict,” she writes.  

“Into this rebellion of his exhausted soul, subjected day and night to uncertainty, committed to a faith-based entirely on trust, allowing neither for reason nor doubt, comes the other voice of his inner consciousness. The voice pleads for his acceptance of the situation. It denies his incapacity to bear the burden of uncertainty. It claims the possibility of survival, of a harvest for the soul which accepts the condition of uncertainty, and remains ever awaiting the descent of grace.” 

This is the actually that Lewis speaks of, offering a view of life and faith that finds strength amid pain. As T.S. Elliot notes, this dimension has also explained his popularity among secular poets who have found Herbert’s  “exquisite craftsmanship” and “extraordinary metrical virtuosity” a “record of spiritual struggle which should touch the feeling and enlarge the understanding of those readers also with no religious belief.” 

Though I fail, I weep: / Though I halt in pace, / Yet I creep / To the throne of grace (Discipline). 

If you’ve never read Herbert’s work, this Thursday’s feast day commemorating his remarkable faith and works is a good day to start. His poems The Altar and Love (3) in particular are considered amongst the greatest in the English language and do well to reflect the heritage he came from and left behind, especially in a moment when despair and exhaustion hang so potently in the air. 

Tyler is a Wisconsin-based freelance critic and journalist, a member of the Music City Film Critics Association, a regular film and literature contributor at Geeks Under Grace, and was the 2021 College Fix Fellow at Main Street Nashville.