Kathleen McPhilemy reviews Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert by John Drury, Allen Lane (London 2013) Hbk. 416 pages. £25.
Towards the end of Music at Midnight, John Drury explores the attraction of George Herbert's poetry. He notes, but counters, Coleridge's claim that to appreciate the poet one must be an 'affectionate and dutiful son of the Church [of England]'. Nevertheless, Herbert does seem a supremely English poet who represented a moment when the Church of England had secured its position after the upheavals of the Tudors and before the schisms of the Civil War. Not quite forty when he died, he lived in what seems, retrospectively, to have been a bubble of tranquillity.
Perhaps this allowed him to pursue his spiritual struggle through the rigorous discipline of his poetry.
A striking revelation of this biography is how meticulous Herbert was in constructing his poems.
Drury examines the Williams Manuscript to show the poet's revision of many of the poems which would appear in the posthumous collection, The Temple.
Some of the changes were tiny, yet reveal the sensitivity to language and perfectionism which give Herbert's poems their lapidary quality. The Elixir, a poem familiar to us as the hymn 'Teach me, my God and King', went through many revisions. For example, in the stanza:
A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine:
the third line 'Who sweeps a chamber for thy laws / Makes that and th'action fine' is altered to 'Who sweeps a room as for thy laws'. The change from 'chamber' with its roots in French to 'room', which is monosyllabically Anglo-Saxon, reflects Herbert's consistent avoidance of pretentiousness, very different from the avoidance of artifice. The simplicity of his poetry is highly wrought, the product of a highly intelligent and educated mind.
Brought up in the most cultured circles of the day by his mother, Magdalen Herbert, the close friend of John Donne and highly respected as a devout, witty and cultivated woman, he was educated at Westminster School with Lancelot Andrewes at its head, a learned divine and renowned linguist who involved himself personally in the education of the students. He went on to Cambridge where he made his mark as a Latinist, both in poetry and oratory, becoming, not without some string-pulling, the University Orator, a post both academically prestigious and politically advantageous.
However, Herbert turned his back on worldly success for reasons which are unclear, possibly a compound of poor health, vacillation as well as the sense of vocation. The poem Affliction (I) reflects his struggle: 'Whereas my birth and spirit rather took / The way that takes the town; / Thou didst betray me to a ling'ring book, / And wrap me in a gown.' Later in the poem, he wishes that he could be a tree, to be of some use: 'at least some bird would trust / Her household to me, and I should be just.' At the end, he thrashes like a landed fish:
Ah my dear God! Though I am clean forgot, Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.
Herbert is not a love poet; indeed he deliberately eschews love poetry in favour of the poetry of devotion: 'Cannot thy dove / Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight.' Nevertheless, he is a poet of love. He battles constantly to be worthy of the sacrifice his God has made for him and it is a measure of his quality that he can create metaphysical conceits from the agony of the crucifixion without causing the reader to cringe:
Who would know Sin, let him repair Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair, His skin, his garments bloody be. Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein. Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike Did set again abroach; then let him say If ever he did taste the like. Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
Here, I think, is the reason why we respond to Herbert. He uses the furniture of Christianity to wrestle with himself, to express feelings of unworthiness and failure, the aspiration to be included in the communion of love, the conception and deifying of a love that is so strong that it will undergo any suffering on behalf of the beloved. Drury begins his splendid biography by quoting Love (III). Where better to end?
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.
Kathleen McPhilemy's poetry collections include The Lion in the Forest (2004) and A Tented Peace (1995), both Katabasis, London.