![]() ![]() Work is important so that man should worship the God who made Nature, rather than Nature itself. ![]() One of Herbert’s most widely acclaimed lyrics, ‘The Flower’ uses the metaphor of greenness and life returning to plants and flowers in the spring to convey the return of the poet’s strong sense of God.Ī Creation poem, this, which imagines God making man and bestowing all available attributes upon him – except for rest. The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Love is more powerful than fear of punishment.Īre thy returns! even as the flowers in spring Okay, he may falter occasionally, but he does so in his attempt to please God and reach heaven and God’s ‘throne of grace’. Herbert is fully amenable to God’s will, and will consent to whatever God wishes. his anger) and instead to ‘ake the gentle path’. In this poem, Herbert asks God to use love rather than punishment when dealing with him, beseeching God to throw away his ‘rod’, the instrument used to inflict punishment, and his ‘wrath’ (i.e. ‘Love’ here, as in so much of George Herbert’s finest poems, is more or less synonymous with God. In this poem, which begins with the famous line ‘Love bade me welcome’, Love is personified as a host inviting Herbert in to dine with him as a guest. Yet my soul drew backīut quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack So the movement from one line to next forms a chain: the first line ends with talk of ‘deservèd praise’, so the second line begins by talking about ‘praise deservèd’ this second line in turn ends ‘unto Thee I give’, leading into the third line which begins ‘I give to Thee’ and so on, until we end up where we started, with ‘a crown of praise’ returning us to the first line of the poem, ‘A wreathèd garland of deservèd praise’. The progression of its lines, and its rhyme scheme, both reflect the wreath’s circularity, a symbol of totality and connection. The wild and unpredictable nature of some of his best verse – ‘ The Collar’, for instance, or ‘ Love (III)’ – is offset by the poems lovingly and carefully carved into the shapes of birds’ wings, or crosses, or altars.Since this poem is about a wreath, Herbert creatively suggests the shape of a wreath through the rhyme scheme of his poem. We feel, when reading a George Herbert poem, as though we are being personally addressed – even though, in many of his greatest poems, Herbert addresses himself not to us, but to God. The volume contains the now rather unfortunate subtitle Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, but it’s a succinct description of Herbert’s curious mixture – like the poetry of his contemporary, John Donne – of complex metaphors combined with plain-speaking. ![]() Thankfully for posterity, Ferrar chose to publish them and they appeared, as The Temple, in 1633, shortly after Herbert’s death. Herbert left it up to Ferrar to determine whether the poems were worth publishing at all if Ferrar didn’t like them, Herbert instructed, then he should consign them to the fire. Fearing that his days were numbered, Herbert had sent a manuscript containing his poems to a friend, the clergyman Nicholas Ferrar, who led the religious community at Little Gidding (which would later be written about by T. Well, that only appeared posthumously, following his death in 1633, aged just 39, from consumption. This much constitutes a brief but reasonably full summary of George Herbert’s biography in terms of his official work and his married life. ![]() In the same year he married Jane Danvers, after a courtship of just three days. Three years later he became an MP, but seems to have gone off the idea of a life in politics, for he later became a deacon, canon of Lincoln Cathedral, and then, in 1630, rector of Bemerton in Wiltshire. He became Public Orator at Cambridge in 1620. George Herbert intended to go into the Church – he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge on a fellowship to train as a priest – but the secular life caught his attention. At age sixteen, Herbert sent his mother, who was named Magdalen (and who was friends with John Donne he would preach her funeral sermon in 1627), a letter announcing his calling as a poet enclosed were two devotional sonnets, his first known poetic efforts. Herbert also became an accomplished musician, learning to play the lute among other instruments. He studied at Westminster School, being taught by Lancelot Andrewes, influential bishop and one of the masterminds on the committee which translated the King James Version of the Bible. George Herbert was born in Powys, Wales, in 1593, into a wealthy and artistically gifted family. ![]()
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