George Herbert

George Herbert (1593-1633), English poet of the metaphysical school. He was born in Wales of an aristocratic family (his brother was the philosopher and poet Baron Herbert of Cherbury; and his mother Magdalen was the addressee of the John Donne elegy “Autumnal Beauty”) and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was made a Fellow of Cambridge University in 1616 and served as Public Orator from 1619 to 1627. It was through this prestigious post that he was introduced to men of influence at court and became friends with Francis Bacon and John Donne. This period of worldly ambition seems to have disillusioned him though, and he gave up his secular ambitions, and took holy orders in the Church of England in 1630. He spent the rest of his life as rector in Bemerton.

Herbert is best known for his poetry, which was published posthumously under the title The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (1633). The Temple is intended to be read as a sequence of poems, which together, as the critic Helen Wilcox notes, “make an architectural structure, a metaphorical temple building which the reader enters and within which God is 'praised' and the conflicts of devotion and rebellion are 'bewailed'“. The poems are characterized by a precision of language, a metrical versatility, and an ingenious use of imagery or conceits, the points of style favoured by the metaphysical poets such as Donne.

Many of Herbert's poems are of a religious nature, often revealing his own spiritual struggles and the solace he found in the priesthood. The poem “Prayer”, for example, is made up of a series of statements or epithets exploring the nature of prayer as a personal, communal, and sometimes violent response to God. The outpouring of phrases and clauses without a main verb help to convey the idea of the last two words; a form of comprehension beyond ordinary human thought or language.

Herbert's work is also wittily inventive, making much use of acrostics and of various typographical devices, as in the poem “Easter-Wings”, whose shape reflects its title and is an example of what the 18th-century critic Joseph Addison was to call “False Wit”, and which is now commonly referred to as “concrete poetry”: