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.

Larkin and Herbert, via Thwaite

An essay somebody else might have to write could outline the compare and contrast between Philip Larkin and George Herbert. There's mileage in almost any comparative project if there's a point to be made but by the time I've finished my Gioia-Larkin effort I might have used up all available lines on Larkin. For me, they were brought together by Anthony Thwaite, regaling anybody within earshot at the bar at the first Larkin Society conference in 1997, with his view that they were both 'great, minor poets'.

Given the amount of work Thwaite put into editing Larkin, he could be credited with proving himself wrong and helping to reverse the process described by Cole Porter in turning him 'from minor to major'. 

 

One's own firmly held views become sacrosanct and we defend them for as long as we can and even well beyond any such point. A major recurrent theme here over the years has been an unhealthy need in me to establish that An Arundel Tomb in Larkin does not say that 'what will survive of us is love'. That last line is thoroughly undermined and hollowed out by the lines that lead us up to it. The reason why it is one of the greatest poems in the language of the C20th is how it hangs out such a resonant line on such fragile foundations.

And yet, still waiting for more books to arrive to proceed with Gioia Studies, I spent some time outside with Letters to Monica and could see the poem taking shape.

There is a possibility that when the line first occurred to him he might have thought he meant it. But before he finished it, he made it considerably less clear. And, at the time, still didn't like the poem much. He had also had serious doubts about Church Going. We should all be so lucky to be able to doubt such poems but his 'quality control' perhaps depended on doubting everything and one's shelves would be less laden if other poets had been quite so scrupulous and not troubled us with quite so many poems. 

That poem got through by the skin of its teeth, being sufficiently amended to eventually say what I'm still fairly confident it says and then squeezing into the book. One wonders how many other masterpieces were lost when their authors took against them and made the safety-first decision of not including them. Maybe not many because most writers weren't quite so fastidious and were glad enough to have something to fill a page but it makes one wonder when, later, Larkin said he had all the 'fillers' for his next book but not the good ones, quite where his cut-off point was.

--

George Herbert is allotted a label here after all these years. He's never been anywhere near a favourite, probably because his faith and religion are as intrinsic to everything he ever wrote as Larkin's downbeat ordinariness were to him.

But the end of summer is almost touchable. While it's not an attractive proposition to go on excursions in such heat as might not once have been prohibitive but now seems so, September needs to be made use of because it can be perfect. 

Bemerton has by now been swallowed up by Salisbury but in the C17th was outside of it. It makes for a gorgeous tableau, the rural rectory and mundane church with a vicar poet who would still be read 400 years later. John Drury's Music at Midnight was one of those sumptuous hardbacks that are good to have even if one isn't a believer in its subject but I remain open to being convinced. He analyses some poems to show there might be more to them than blinding devotion and doctrinaire Christianity and his work lasted so well that Let All the World in Every Corner Sing lent itself to being the theme tune to Songs of Praise.

I'll go and have a look with my senior railcard, willingness to walk and need to think I've been somewhere and done something and not just read it in a book. 

 

Music at Midnight

John Drury, Music at Midnight, The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (Allen Lane)

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.