Fifteen in Fifteen: George Herbert

9. George Herbert

I have been struggling for most of the previous month to work out what on earth I can say about George Herbert. Why, of all the poets I could have chosen, was he the one who ended up on my list of fifteen? Hasn’t any influence he may have had on me been superseded by my rediscovery of John Donne? If I was writing again, would I even pick him, or would I swap him for Liza Picard, Wendy Cope, Tony Harrison, Jostein Gaarder?

There is a certain amount of sheer blind chance when it comes to which poets I become most familiar with. I buy almost all of my poetry books cheap, in charity bookshops or clearance sales, and I’m sure there are many poets whose work I don’t know at all (Yeats) or very patchily (Tennyson), simply because I haven’t found a dog-eared, annotated selection of their work going for two or three pounds. In the case of George Herbert, I was introduced to him (or rather, his work, Herbert being from the same era as John Donne) via Girton Chapel in my first year at Cambridge , spent quite a lot of time reading a borrowed copy of his work on train journeys, and was fortunate enough to stumble across a selection of his poems in a second-hand bookshop a couple of months later. This volume, by virtue of being small, light, paperback and sufficiently battered that a bit more won’t harm, has been my companion to places as diverse as a monastery in North Yorkshire and an island fishing town in Adriatic Croatia. I’ve not always opened it, but it has been there.

But there is a reason to why I like George Herbert which goes beyond mere chance and portability. The influence he has had is subtle enough that it’s hard to recognise, but important enough for me to consider him a valid and valuable part of my list. George Herbert is a Christian poet, a man from the 1600s who devoted his poetry to trying to work out something of what God was and who we are in relation to Him. It’s a task that joins him with poets, hymn-writers, musicians and psalmists through the ages – people who believed and doubted and questioned and wrote down their beliefs and doubts and questions in the best words they could, for those of us who followed. I’m fairly sure that reading George Herbert did not inspire me to use my poetry to explore my faith. Nor can I pin down any particular teachings from Herbert’s work which have altered or improved my understanding of God. Poetry isn’t a sermon, or a book by Philip Yancey – it doesn’t work in that way. What I find in George Herbert is what I find in the Anglican liturgy, the hymnals, sacred choral music, contemporary worship songs, albums by U2, the poetry of Donne and Coleridge, and the sight of a church spire when you’re a long way from home. It is a rooting in the past and a connection in the present, a reminder of just how far our communion spreads. It’s something you don’t even notice until it isn’t there. It is a message I find both in good poetry and at the base of Christian faith – and the message is simply, “You are not alone.”       

Fifteen in Fifteen: Charlotte Bronte

8. Charlotte Bronte 

A classic, according to Mark Twain, is something everyone wants to have read but that nobody wants to read. I have a certain degree of sympathy with this view. There is very little “classic literature” dating from the 18^th century onwards which counts as an “easy read” – Hardy is depressing, Austen upper-class and subtle, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald deeply alien. Even the authors I appreciate – Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Gaskell – can all be a bit of a slog. Foreign classics are scarcely better – if it’s Russian, it’s long; if it’s French, it’s longer (unless it’s Maupassant, in which case the least said the better); and if it’s Spanish it’s very very weird. “Modern” classics are, if possible, even worse – I have not come across a single person who has enjoyed Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. That’s not to say that some tough classics aren’t worth reading, but it does go some way towards explaining why, when my brother presented me with a copy of Jane Eyre whilst we were on holiday in Austria, I was less than thrilled. He told me it was “a damn good read” – I thought it was more likely to be “a damn good cure for insomnia”. Fortunately, I was wrong.

Guys, bear with me. Jane Eyre is one of those rare books which appears to have a universal appeal to women, matched only in its extent by Dirty Dancing. Part of its appeal may lie in the fact that it is a typical rags-to-riches narrative, and a rags-to-riches story twice over, as Jane goes from orphan to governess to runaway to heiress. Part of it could be to do with the fact that it is such an unusual love story. Unlike Gaskell or Austen, which end with the perfect relationship established between Margaret and Mr Thornton, Lizzie and Mr Darcy, Emma and Mr Knightley, the relationship between Jane and Mr Rochester is never entirely equal. From the outset it needs to be worked at and managed – just like a real relationship. For me, however, the appeal of the story is mostly to do with the character of Jane herself. Most heroines are beautiful, intelligent and outspoken. Jane is poor, plain, modest, somewhat unusual, and yet indomitable. Her first person narrative lets us in to all of her flaws and failings. Most of us, most of the time, do not feel as intellectually-superior as Elizabeth Bennett or as charitable as Margaret Hale. We don’t think of ourselves as particularly attractive or as having anything all that much going for us, and most of us are acutely aware that we might be considered a little bit weird. Which of us cannot sympathise with Jane when she decides that as a poor, plain governess, Mr Rochester cannot possibly love her in preference to the beautiful, wealthy Blanche Ingram? And which of us cannot celebrate the fact that, poor, plain and unusual as she is, he does – and more, that these are the very qualities he loves her for?

Jane Austen, in Pride and Prejudice, wrote the nineteenth-century love story par excellence. Elizabeth Gaskell, in North and South (the TV adaptation of which also appears to be oddly popular with us girls), gave it teeth and social unrest. Jane Eyre follows a similar pattern, but manages to be a very different story, with quite a remarkable protagonist. Following that holiday in Austria, where I read Jane Eyre with more avidity than I had ever read a classic novel with before, I have read good classics, bad classics and indifferent classics. I made the mistake of thinking all Brontes were the same – a mistake which was only rectified by a tough few weeks with Wuthering Heights. I could not get on terms with Austen’s Emma, but completely fell for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas, was thoroughly enjoyable, whereas I’ve never got beyond the first chapter of The Three Musketeers; and Victor Hugo… well, he’s a story all of his own. But Charlotte Bronte, and Jane Eyre, stand to me as a reader as proof of two essential points. Firstly, a novel written before the twentieth century can still be enjoyed by a reader today - a belief which has sustained me through thin (A Christmas Carol) and thick (Les Mis). And secondly, whatever Mark Twain might say, some “classics” can be a damn good read.        

For those who are still Sussex-bound...

A very happy new year to everyone reading! New years bring many excellent things: resolutions, the end of Christmas, slightly longer evenings, and, in my case, the awful realisation that my railcard has just expired. Not being a natural driver, I spend a lot of time travelling around Sussex on the train. I hope the following "litany of names" poem is recognisable for all of us who grew up on the weald and the downland, and the London to Brighton line.

Weald and Downland 

The next train to depart across the ancient Weald

Keeping sunrise on the left as it arrows down south

calls at Three Bridges, Balcombe, Haywards Heath…

Set the capital behind you and dare to breathe

Deep. Into the oak woods and the drifted leaves,

The dead in their barrows on the silvered Downs.

Plumpton, Cooksbridge – the castle keep.

Some kind of homecoming, to stand again

in the land of your ancestry, the resonating names

full of the history stretching deep below your feet,

steeped in the silence of those who loved this land before.

Lewes, this is Lewes. Please change

for services along the riverside and past the ditched hillfort.

East to Polegate, Pevensey, Hastings and Ore,

Into the dawn. Or swing southeast: Southease;

Newhaven; Bishopstone; Seaford. The sea.