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 Hasn’t any influence he may have had on me been superseded by my rediscovery of John Donne?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

6. Philip Larkin

I spent much of last year living on a 1960s former council estate in York. For a southern girl from rural Sussex, the unremitting urban bleakness of the view from my window was something I never quite got used to. No trees, no greenery, no omnipresent magpies or startled ducks, no visiting fox – not when you look out onto the backyards of the Victorian terrace opposite. Sure, it was convenient for town, but nothing quite compensated for my first sight in the morning being the flock of mangy pigeons converging on the roof of number 26, or the chap from number 27 climbing over his back gate on his way to work.

I’ve always liked Larkin’s poetry - his direct, accessible style and his very subtle use of rhyme and meter do endear him to the novice poetry-reader. But in the shock of finding myself treeless and penned in by houses, his poetry started to become important. Poets have a tendency to celebrate beauty – Coleridge certainly spends a significant amount of time grumbling about a childhood spent “pent” in cities, unable to spend time in the countryside which was his source of inspiration. Larkin is one of the few poets who dares instead to find inspiration in bog-standard urban landscapes. Read Sunny Prestatyn. How anyone can possibly write a poem about a billboard holiday advertisement getting graffiti drawn on it is beyond me, but Larkin proves it possible. Adverts also feature in Essential Beauty, while the sense of urbanism runs more subtly through poems such as Afternoons, Sad Steps, Here. Even in poems such as Going, Going – which mourns the rapid spread of the towns, and which goes straight to my heart every time I remember the fields at the back of us are due to be built on shortly - the countryside is for Larkin a place to be visited, not lived in. For me, it was a comfort to realise that, however devoid of nature my new environs seemed, they were not therefore by necessity devoid of poetry.

It’s not just Larkin’s settings which are challenging. I own two books of his poetry – The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows. Of the two, I’ve long preferred The Whitsun Weddings – not least because it contains An Arundel Tomb – but I find now that I’ve started to grow into High Windows. The reason, I think, is as follows. Larkin is a cynic, who through his poetry chooses to express decided opinions which run contrary to the received moral wisdom of our time. The most famous instance is This Be The Verse (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad…”), which is a serious shock to the system in a society where parents are always right – but for further, more subtle critique of parenthood try Reference Back, in Whitsun Weddings. The Hollywood version of love doesn’t escape – read High Windows, Love Songs in Age, The Whitsun Weddings, even An Arundel Tomb. If you’re fed up respecting the elderly, read The Old Fools; or of having to feel homesick, read Home Is So Sad – and any bookworms will be profoundly shocked by A Study of Reading Habits. Despite the occasional exception, Larkin tends to be rather more tempered in The Whitsun Weddings, and thus more easily palatable for those of us who are made uncomfortable by having all our fundamental values called into question. But it is – and becoming more so as I grow up - hugely liberating to, for example, be able to come home from a desperately dull birthday party spent making conversation with people you don’t know (“asking that ass about his fool research”) to read Vers de Société in High Windows. When the pressure is on to be sociable, popular and well-liked, having Larkin to tell you that being anti-social can be ok is immensely valuable.

Good poetry describes the world in a different way, and in so doing gets close to the heart of our own experience. It is a delight and a relief and a comfort to find written down somewhere some lines which describe your own feelings, particularly if you suspect you are somehow held guilty for feeling this way. In describing his world so differently, so cynically, so contentiously, Larkin appeals to that bit of me which stands somewhat aslant to what society calls “normal”. In his landscapes, his subjects and his opinions, Larkin celebrates the uncelebrateable and says the unthinkable. No wonder he recognised, on his return from Ireland in The Importance of Elsewhere:

Living in England has no such excuse:

These are my customs and establishments

It would be much more serious to refuse.

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

Fifteen in Fifteen: A blogger’s defence of English literature

Part 1. Wendell Berry

The rules of the game are very simple. Give yourself fifteen minutes. In no order of preference, write down fifteen authors whose work has affected you and which will always stay with you. In my case, the sight of the resulting list makes me smile almost as much as my (two) well-stocked bookcases do. The omissions glare at me more than the occasional inclusions whose presence on the list may not be entirely merited – where is Jostein Gaarder? CS Lewis? Liza Picard and her wonderful social histories? Have Richard Holmes’ biographies in fact had more influence on my opinion of Coleridge than Coleridge’s work itself? On the opposite side of the equation, what influence has George Herbert really had on my life? But on the whole, a desert island library stocked with these authors would contain for me many pathways into being human. And with the recession tightening and the government busy reducing funding to everything that makes life worthwhile – as well as in order to do my bit for National Novel Writing Month - maybe now’s the time to celebrate those authors who have a special place in my life.

Wendell Berry feels like an odd place to start, because all I know of him is a single poem. It’s called “How To Be A Poet”, although to me it reads like a guide not only to how to be a poet, but how to be a Christian and, in many respects, how to be a person. It’s easily available online, and I’d advise everyone to take a look. I was introduced to it six months ago by a dear friend and fellow poet – he read it out to me over a cup of tea, and it was the first (and thus far only) time a poem has left me speechless. Once I’d recovered, we quoted back to one another all the best phrases from the list of instructions Berry gives, and in so doing repeated much of the poem.

As with all the best poems, I’m not sure I understood it all right away, nor do I think I understand it all now. Many of the lines contain a wealth of treasure, of possible meaning, which will need a lot of living with before I feel I’ve got to the bottom of them. “Accept what comes from silence” is a line I’ve spent the past month trying to live out – accepting what comes from the silence of prayer, of unemployment, the silence of waiting, the silence of no place you have to be and nobody needing you around. Other lines are more straightforward, although making a place to sit down can be remarkably time-consuming, and staying away from screens (or “anything which obscures the place it is in”) is great advice, but something I signally fail to do. Maybe I should pay attention, since most my poetry comes from my “three-dimensioned life”. Places I have seen, people I have met, feelings I have experienced first-hand – these all seem to translate more easily into verse than things I’ve only read about in books.

I don’t want to read any more of Wendell Berry’s work. “How To Be A Poet” is, for me, such an extraordinary poem that to know anything more about the author or his work would be to break the spell. And it’s a poem I fully intend to carry on living with, exploring what it might mean for there to be no unsacred places, or to depend upon more affection, knowledge and skill than I have, in the hopes that I might yet be able to “make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came”.

Croatian Dust

So I wake myself up and try a smile on for size.

It shrank in the cold, now it doesn’t quite fit;

And the certainty that you’ll call round in a bit

Is slipping away – guess I’ll let it slide.

And the dust of Croatia’s on my high-heeled boots:

Strong coffee and cheap European hotels,

Your hand on my shoulder, and lessons learned well –

You ain’t ever big enough that it ain’t gonna hurt.

Zagreb mornings – the wide open space

Where hope stretched as far as the distant hills

And you, haloed, leant on the windowsill -

Faded to homecomings, drizzle and rain.

Guess we let it slide, what we had of love:

Sea sand to ashes; Croatian dust.