Music at Midnight: the Life and Poetry of George Herbert by John Drury is a brilliant biography as this review by Diarmaid MacCulloch makes plain:
'Drury triumphantly delivers the goods, artfully weaving the poetry through the life (little of Herbert’s verse can be pinned to particular dates, which Drury turns to his advantage). He opens with what he rightly calls a masterpiece, “Love III”: “Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back”. So much of Herbert is packed into it: a disarmingly domestic scene of a cheerful meal, in which the poet’s sense of unworthiness, doubt and self-loathing is lovingly subverted by a Host – both innkeeper and that which Catholic Christians term the bread of the Eucharist. “So I did sit and eat”: what Reformed Protestant simplicity to cap the verse!'
'Because he published no English poems during his lifetime, and dating most of them exactly is impossible, writing Herbert's biography is an unusual challenge. In this book John Drury sets the poetry in the whole context of the poet's life and times, so that the reader can understand the frame of mind and kind of society which produced it, and depth can be added to the narrative of Herbert's life. (T.S. Eliot: 'What we can confidently believe is that every poem in the book [The Temple] is in tune to the poet's experience.') His Herbert is not the saintly figure who has come down to us from John Aubrey, but a man torn for much of his life between worldly ambition and the spiritual life shown to us so clearly through his writings. The result is the most satisfying biography of this exceptional English poet yet written.' (Trinity Hall, Cambridge)
Drury is particularly good on Herbert's relationship with John Donne and his influence on poets such as Richard Crashaw and Henry Vaughan. Herbert was himself influenced by Nicholas Ferrar who 'transformed his mercantile family into a religious and educational community, a voluntary society that he hoped would preach to contemporaries by their example. While that hope was at best only partially fulfilled in his lifetime, those who had known him at Little Gidding were able later to form networks that adapted that piety and voluntarism to create societies acceptable within the church. These men led the way to voluntary Anglicanism that characterized a 'Church of England' in transition from a national to an established but essentially voluntary institution.' The memory of the community survived to inspire and influence later undertakings in Christian communal living, and one of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets also called "Little Gidding."
On his deathbed Herbert sent Ferrar the manuscript of The Temple, telling him to publish the poems if he thought they might "turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul" and, if not, to burn them. Ferrar decided to publish them and Herbert's poetry has remained in print ever since.
Malcolm Guite is particularly illuminating on Herbert's poetry in his excellent Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination. Also worth reading are his post on Herbert's poems about prayer and his sonnet for George Herbert.
Justin Lewis-Anthony and Sam Norton are provocative and relevant on the George Herbert model of ministry as an overwhelmingly impossible task. Lewis-Anthony suggests in If you meet George Herbert on the road, kill him: Radically Re-Thinking Priestly Ministry that the memory of Herbert celebrated by the Church is an inaccurate one, and, in its inaccuracy, is unfair on Herbert himself and his successors in the ordained ministry.
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Ralph Vaughan Williams - The Call.
