Divinity saturated his world....It followed that proofs or disproofs of God's existence just didn't arise: there was no place outside God where they could be contrived, nor any to which they could reasonably be addressed.
John Drury explains at an early stage that for George Herbert, God is everywhere and in everything and thus his relationship with God is the theme that dominates his poetry to the exclusion of almost all else. It is so absolute that the shifting interest of his poems is more in how he views the 'recalcitrant matter of human life'.
Drury makes the poem Love (III) central to Herbert's work, beginning with it and referring back to it regularly. There is no sound basis for dating the poems since they were only in manuscript until published after his death, as were Donne's and the poems of others, which was not unusual at the time, and so they are not calibrated against events in Herbert's life.
It comes as no surprise, of course, to find that Love is really about God but Herbert is devoted in style to a clarity and cleanness in his highly formal poetry that makes his 'mysticism' quite accessible. He is not a puritanical spiritualist, though, but open to pleasure, sensuality, music and good times. His attachment to the scriptures is equal to that of any Calvinist without it having the same effect on his morality.
The title of the book refers to an anecdote in which he helps a poor man with a poorer horse in distress on his way and is dirtied in the process but he explains that the knowledge that he played the part of such a good Samaritan will be like 'music at midnight' when he thinks back on it.
We get every indication from Izaak Walton, Aubrey and contemporary accounts of Herbert as a gifted, devoted and devout man who suffers illness from an early age before his untimely death but Drury does enough to detain him on this side of sainthood. In his career at Cambridge, he was eminent enough to take up the duties of Orator, involving writing official speeches, addresses and tributes. His flattery of Buckingham, 'the subject of the king's headlong and spectacular infatuation', was 'incongruous, to say the least' but more so when put together with the story a few pages later where, also with reference to Buckingham, he 'could also enjoy playing the cynical courtier with appropriate innuendo'. I'm sure we would have liked to have heard more about that.
Drury's account of the life is accompanied throughout by discussions of the poems in which he provides appreciative, workmanlike summaries. After a while both the poems and the summaries started to look a bit similar to me but there are times when Herbert's sustained devotion flows over into genuinely entertaining 'metaphysics', as in both Affliction (I) and Employment (II) in which he considers the prospect of becoming a tree as a solution to the problems of being a flawed, inadequate man in the face of an absolute, perfect God. In C20th atheist terms, this equates to existential anguish causing a Being-for-others to envy the condition of a Being-in-itself.
Herbert dies with still about 100 pages of his biography to go, a bit like Julius Caesar dying half way through the play Shakespeare wrote about him. Drury offers a long coda on such themes as Herbert's critical treatment since then and a consideration of Herbert's days and years.
I immediately became more of a fan of Coleridge, whose attitude seemed to pre-echo what I had been thinking, when he wrote,
G. Herbert is a true poet, but a poet sui generis, the merits of whose poems will never be felt without a sympathy with the mind and character of the man.
Drury says that 'sympathy with Herbert is not difficult'. But, in one sense, it is impossible.
Herbert's legacy was to foster a few minor imitators before Vaughan and Crashaw took up differing but similar lines and I suspect Vaughan is more likely to be my man in this specialist area. But when, in the C20th, the likes of Elizabeth Bishop and Helen Vendler are very sympathetic to Herbert then it looks like he does have the angels on his side.
There is a very minor inconsistency in John Drury's approach in the way the he takes time to helpfully explain to the reader such terms as 'conceit' and 'synecdoche', which I would have thought most readers of this book would be familiar with, but then he describes Abraham Cowley as 'eupeptic' and doesn't tell us what that means and so I have to look it up. I think it suggests that Cowley was of a generally happy disposition.
The book does what it has to do. It is neither Drury's or Herbert's fault that Herbert wasn't Wyatt. It will look good alongside such books as Stubbs' Donne, Bate's Clare, Donaldson's Jonson, Coote's Keats as well as all the accounts of Shakespeare, plus Motion's Larkin, Feinstein's Hughes, a few versions of Auden and even one of Mina Loy. I wonder whether to reorganize the bookshelves to make that possible.
I never used to read biographies. I was taught to think that the text was all that mattered but now we find out that Elizabeth Bishop said that,
the only real way to understand poetry is to know the life and beliefs of the poet.
And perhaps that is truer than it appeared to be when Roland Barthes prematurely announced the 'death of the author'.
All things considered, though, it hasn't done enough to promote Herbert to a higher position in my estimation. I just know more about him now and I am grateful for that.
