Herbert’s art, as the Puritan Richard Baxter put it, was “heart work and heaven work.” But his famous manual of advice to country parsons proved a lasting legacy, shaping the self-understanding of clergy for generations to come.Īnd his poetry! Such astonishing verbal images in a century famous for great language, where words could be bent to the subtlest purposes without losing a speck of passion or truth. He died of consumption only four years after being ordained. In his late thirties he had given up worldly ambitions to enter the priesthood, and he spent the rest of his life at a country parish in the English village of Bemerton. Herbert,” they called him around his parish. As Walton relates, they “saw him prostrate on the ground before the Altar at which time and place (as he after told he set some Rules to himself, for the future management of his life.”
So they went up to a window and peered in. His friends assumed he’d only be a moment, but they waited and waited and he still didn’t come back out. Suddenly, without saying why, he excused himself and returned to his church. Izaak Walton tells a story about a time Herbert set out for a walk with some friends.
As one admirer put it, “Herbert wrote most of it, but God wrote quite a lot.” That’s a proportionality to which every creative, and every priest, might aspire. Today is the feast day of George Herbert, the seventeenth-century Anglican poet and priest whose remarkable verse was inseparable from his prayer life. Robert White portrait of George Herbert painted 41 years after his death.
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