George Herbert in Bemerton

 One makes eye contact with the weather forecast and stares it down. 'Showers' could mean almost anything but it decided to amount to almost nothing. Having gone so rainless for so long it seems somewhat unjust that it should all come in these end-of-summer, early Autumn days which can be so good for days out.

Bemerton isn't too much of a walk from Salisbury station once you are pointing in the right direction. I like to think I have some sense of direction but when it fails, it is hopeless. St. Andrew's, Bemerton, is as modest as modest gets with a capacity of no more than 50. The Old Rectory is literally five paces across the road, door to door, and one assumes the Christian community mostly now gather in the other, more recent, church only 100 yards up the road. The difference between Herbert's church and that where John Donne worked could hardly be any greater.

But that probably suited them both, Donne being a bit of a showman with his crowd-pulling sermons and Herbert devoting his time to his writing before dying just before his 40th birthday after only three years at Bemerton. It's not unlike the Handel House in Brook Street claiming Jimi Hendrix because he had a flat next door for 18 months but we can feel that Herbert had found his proper place.

I was unable to find the recommended walk back to Salisbury Cathedral along the River Nadder and Herbert's twice weekly journey there might not have suffered from the industrial estate on the more direct route but the sinisterly-named Nadder was gently
picturesque. His burial place is thought to be approximately here in the chancel.

 

On the train there I had reminded myself of the background detail from John Drury's Music at Midnight. One needs a 'way in' to a poet to achieve some appreciation. I was most taken with the line,

We are all but cold suitors, 

in The Church Porch 

and so I put that in the visitor's book. And Death took a very different line to those words by Donne and Dylan Thomas, and those set by Handel, by accepting it rather than trying to argue that it is vanquished.

Such might be my way into Herbert, having less time for his devotions to and communing with God. Maybe some implicit acceptance that we are otherwise alone as individuals in a hostile universe makes him more vulnerable. God might not be a be-all-and-end-all solution for all of us but if it's some kind of partial aid to survival then it might be allowable on certain terms.