Poems From The Country Parson

by Dish Staff

Reviewing John Drury’s Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert, Mark Jarman traces the distinctiveness of Herbert’s religious vision to his years as a priest in a country parish – a situation quite different from that of his contemporary John Donne:

I don’t think we can ignore this dimension of George Herbert’s career, even as it seems to be the mirror opposite of John Donne’s. Where Herbert forsook the aspiration of a career at court for a life in the country, Donne extricated himself from his country exile and got himself installed in a big urban church. … Herbert got his taste of worldliness at Cambridge, and as the son of his remarkable mother, and the rest from observing and living among and serving the good country people of his parishes. Increasingly, I think it is helpful to understand how George Herbert lived and believed in order to appreciate fully the beauty of his poetry. So much of the poetry acknowledges an ordinary human ambivalence with regard to faith. With John Donne, I recognize something else, something more dramatic, especially in his religious poetry—and that is the lineaments of ambition thrown into relief by apprehension and anxiety about the grace of God and the fear both that he may not be worthy of it and that he may not believe in it. I do not mean to imply that Herbert by contrast is more complacent, but he is more aware of the subtlety of belief, especially in its daily practices and encounters with God.

Recent Dish on Herbert here. We featured his poetry Easter weekend here, here, and here.

(Photo of stained glass depicting Herbert at Saint Andrew’s church in Bemerton, Wiltshire, where he was a rector, by Flickr user Granpic)