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 Hasn’t any influence he may have had on me been superseded by my rediscovery of John Donne?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.”