A Poet’s Life of Love for God

George Herbert’s challenge to evangelicals

George Herbert, admired by such men as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and T. S. Eliot, is praised in twentieth-century universities as the greatest poet of seventeenth-century England apart from John Milton and John Donne. Yet in recent decades, as many evangelicals have lost contact with their rich cultural heritage, Herbert’s poetry has fallen into unwarranted neglect in the very circles where it was formerly most cherished.

Praised and quoted by Richard Baxter in The Saint’s Everlasting Rest (1650); respected by other Puritan leaders like Thomas Hall and Peter Sterrey; quoted affectionately by Nonconformist preachers like Philip Henry and his son Matthew Henry; beloved by John Wesley, who adapted no fewer than forty-nine hymns and sacred poems from Herbert’s The Temple (see Elsie A. Leach, “John Wesley’s Use of George Herbert,” Huntington Library Quarterly, Feb., 1953)—in spite of all this, “holy Mr. Herbert” is rarely quoted, rarely read, and rarely reprinted in evangelical pulpits, homes, and publications. And few evangelical pastors have availed themselves of A Priest to the Temple, Herbert’s excellent treatise on the characteristics of the ideal minister. In this day when evangelical leaders are once again emphasizing the relevance of Christianity to every aspect of human endeavor, the time has arrived for a renewed awareness of George Herbert’s mind and art.

Herbert had a lifelong love affair with God. When he was only seventeen, he sent his mother two sonnets that expressed his passionate desire to write love poetry for God rather than for Venus:

Sure, Lord, there is enough in thee to dry

Oceans of Ink …

Each Cloud distills thy praise, and doth forbid

Poets to turn it to another use.

Herbert never did turn his poetry to another use; when he was dying he sent his book The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar, describing the collection as “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master, in whose service I have now found perfect freedom.” The dedicatory poem also indicates something of Herbert’s spirit:

Lord, my first fruits present themselves to thee;

Yet not mine neither: for from thee they came,

And must return. Accept of them and me,

And make us strive, who shall sing best thy name.

Turn their eyes hither, who shall make a gain:

Theirs, who shall hurt themselves or me, refrain.

So sincerely did Herbert desire God’s will before his own reputation that he gave his saintly friend Nicholas Ferrar permission to burn his life’s work if Ferrar should think that the poems would not be helpful to anyone.

T. S. Eliot has commented that “people who write devotional verse are usually writing as they want to feel, rather than as they do feel.” (The application to many evangelical prayers, testimonies, and hymns is painfully obvious.) But Herbert is never guilty of “pious insincerity,” of emotional dishonesty or disguise; in poem after poem he confronts the agony of being a man of God who sometimes feels cut off and alone:

O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue

To cry to thee,

And then not hear it crying! all day long

My heart was in my knee

But no hearing.

(“Deniall”)

At times Herbert became angry in his anguish; and for him, as for many twentieth-century Christians, the ultimate anguish lay in feeling useless:

Now I am here, what thou will do with me

None of my books will show:

I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree;

For sure then I should grow

To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust

Her household to me, and I should be just.

Herbert longs for a sense of being needed, or “just”—that is, justified for existing because he is at least as useful as a tree is. Tortured and tormented by his longing to do something that he could consider worth-while, Herbert concludes his first poem entitled “Affliction” with the following struggle and resolution:

Yet, though thou troublest me, I must be meek:

In weakness must be stout.

Well, I will change the service, and go seek

Some other master out.

Ah my dear God! though I am clean forgot,

Let me not love thee, if I love thee not.

That is the worst punishment Herbert can think of: simply being permitted not to love God. If he must be unhappy, he would at least like to be useful; but if he must be unused (“clean forgot”), he will simply love God for the sake of loving God. The occasional urge to leave God’s service he does not attempt to deny or to hide; as a matter of fact, in “The Collar” he gives to rebellion perhaps the most intense lyric expression it has ever received. He can afford to be honest about these aberrations, because he believes that “fractures well cured make us more strong” (“Repentance”).

The cure for Herbert’s “fractures” is never intellectual or argumentative; it is experiential, creatively emotional. In the midst of his rebellious ravings in “The Collar,” having suggested the possibility that what he had considered God’s will for him might be nothing but the product of his own “petty thoughts,” his thrashing is suddenly silenced:

But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild

At every word,

Me thought I heard one calling, Child!

And I replied, My Lord.

Just that: no more. Herbert has had an experience of being a member of God’s family; and all he needs is his heart’s reminder that relationship to quell his insurrection.

“The Flower” is a poem devoted to the sudden relief when the sense of alienation from God is dissolved:

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns!

Herbert goes on to express the human tendency to disbelieve former anguish as soon as it has been removed:

And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

I once more smell the dew and rain,

And relish versing: O my only light,

It cannot be

That I am he

On whom thy tempests fell all night.

Herbert’s place in the canon of great English poetry is secured partly by his superb and original craftsmanship (at least 116 of his 169 poems are in stanza forms he never repeated!) and partly by his utter honesty, which expands most of his private Christian experience to universal validity. L. C. Knights remarks in Explorations that Herbert’s poems “are important human documents because they handle with honesty and insight questions that, in one form or another, we all have to meet if we wish to come to terms with life” (p. 148). Thus “The Collar” demonstrates that true freedom is never incoherent or purposeless, while “Affliction” demonstrates the painful process of achieving maturity, of overcoming what Helen Gardner has termed “the nerve-center of egoism,” the frantic desire to be useful.

Records of George Herbert’s life support the impression of passionate commitment one gains from his poetry. The best modern biography is Marchette Chute’s Two Gentle Men: The Lives of George Herbert and Robert Herrick, published by E. P. Dutton in 1959. The best edition of his poetry is still The Works of George Herbert, edited with a commentary by F. E. Hutchinson and published by Oxford University Press in 1941.

Perhaps the most important insight that Herbert’s poetry offers the twentieth-century evangelical is his concept of organic Christian living, of the significance of every “insignificant” act when it is performed in submission to the Lord. “Teach me,” he prays in “The Elixir”:

Teach me, my God and King,

In all things thee to see,

And what I do in anything,

To do it as for thee:

Not rudely as a beast,

To run into an action;

But still to make thee prepossest

And give it his perfection.

Here Herbert puts his finger on one of the chief faults of Christians in all ages: the tendency toward activism, toward running hither and yon doing all the “right” things instead of living with a quiet sense of the eternal repercussions of their motives. No action, Herbert implies, can be perfect unless it is performed in the eternal as well as the temporal dimension. Value lies not in external conformity but in deep-dwelling obedience to a Person.

He continues by touching on a second great destroyer of significant Christian living:

A man that looks on glass,

On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,

And then the heav’n espy.

All may of thee partake:

Nothing can be so mean,

Which with his tincture (for thy sake)

Will not grow bright and clean.

By means of the metaphor of looking either at a window or through it, Herbert dramatizes the shortsightedness of many human beings who have not realized that the heavens can be seen through any window that human life affords: through making or hearing music, through washing dishes, through writing books, through teaching school, through polishing shoes, through talking to friends—through absolutely anything done in willing obedience to God as he makes his will known through reality, through necessity. The secret lies in the parenthetic expression “for thy sake.” That phrase is “the elixer,” the philosopher’s stone that medieval alchemists sought in order to turn base metal into gold. “For thy sake,” added to even the meanest task, transforms it into a many-splendored act of affirmation and of love, appreciated by God even if overlooked by men:

A servant with this clause

Makes drudgery divine:

Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,

Makes that and the action fine.

This is the famous stone

That turneth all to gold:

For that which God doth touch and own

Cannot for less be told.

These stanzas take on added significance when one realizes that George Herbert came of an aristocratic family and had occupied the important post of public orator at Cambridge University, yet willingly spent the last three years of his brief life ministering to country people in the tiny parish of Bemerton.

Ministering—and writing poetry “for thy sake.” Herbert recognized that writing verse was nothing very glamorous as compared to the career his education and breeding might have secured for him:

My God, a verse is not a crown,

No point of honor, or gay suit,

No hawk, or banquet, or renown,

Nor a good sword, nor yet a lute.

It is no office, art or news,

Nor the Exchange, or busy Hall:

But it is that which while I use

I am with thee, and most take all.

(“The Quidditie”)

The highest calling for each man, Herbert had discovered, is that which God through circumstances indicates that he should pursue:

Peace mutt’ring thoughts, and do not grudge to keep

Within the walls of your own breast:

Who cannot on his own bed sweetly sleep

Can on another’s hardly rest.

Gad not abroad at every quest and call

Of an untrained hope or passion.

To court each place or fortune that doth fall,

Is wantonness in contemplation.

Then cease discoursing soul, till thine own ground,

Do not thyself or friends importune.

He that by seeking hath himself once found,

Hath ever found a happy fortune.

(“Content”)

Know thyself; accept thyself; “till thine own ground,” no matter how humble. In his little-known sonnet “The Holdfast,” Herbert expresses his realization that man has no good gift to give to God anyway, except that which he has been given by God in Christ; and in his marvelous third poem entitled “Love,” Herbert dramatizes the ultimate reality of man’s relationship to God—that man cannot be worthy, cannot even serve at God’s feast, but must “sit and eat,” humbly accepting everything.

Again and again Herbert strikes at the “nerve-center of egoism,” man cannot outgive God, cannot even match God’s love, cannot make himself worthy, yet eagerly offers himself to God and is overwhelmed with yet greater love in return:

I got me flowers to straw thy way;

I got me boughs off many a tree:

But thou wast up by break of day,

And brought’st thy sweets along with thee.

(“Easter”)

In A Reading of George Herbert, Rosamund Tuve remarked that “Herbert’s poetry is personal for the same reason that it is Christocentric; the central principle of life as he in his person has been able to discover it is self-abnegating love. No man discovers this without pain; most of us will never do more than hear about it …” (p. 126; italics mine).

Paradoxically, as Miss Tuve implied, it was precisely Herbert’s Christocentricity that made him most completely himself as a creative individual. In “The Holdfast,” when the speaker is reduced to confessing that he has nothing to offer God and that God alone is his comfort, he finds that he must descend even lower:

But to have naught is ours, not to confess

That we have naught.

Even the confession is God’s! Bothered by this final blow to human pride, the reader is relieved to see Herbert’s admission and resolution:

I stood amazed at this,

Much troubled, till I heard a friend express,

That all things were more ours by being his.

The loss of self-reliance was the beginning of an enriched selfhood; he had lost himself to find himself.

The words of “holy Mr. Herbert” are as relevant to the whole spectrum of twentieth-century Christianity as they were to those seventeenth-century individualists, the Puritans—and to the King they executed. Even more important is the fact that after more than three centuries Herbert is still able to command respectful attention from the world at large because of his honest and precise artistic expression of Christian experience. For evangelicals, Herbert’s example provides an exacting challenge.

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