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Not for Herbert the attitude struck by Donne, who can begin a poem by telling off a heavenly body (“Busy old fool, unruly sun”).

To him we owe that durable cliché: “His bark is worse than his bite.”īut Herbert is most dear to us because his poems suggest an intimacy of discourse between the poet and his creator. Herbert was also an inveterate compiler of proverbs. He has one in the shape of an altar and another, “Easter Wings,” that demands to be viewed as a pair of winged birds in flight. Where Herbert is most obviously innovative is in his use of c armen figuratum – shaped or patterned poems. He has a poem, “The Pulley,” in which God pours all his pleasures on man except “rest.” Anyone who doubts that the lowly pun can perform sublime feats need only consider these two lines in which “rest” meaning “remainder” and “rest” meaning “repose” are entangled to their paradoxical enhancement: “Yet let him keep the rest, / But keep them with repining restlessness.” Herbert is one of the so-called “metaphysical” poets, who rely on cunning wit and use elaborate, sometimes incongruous metaphors to explore complex themes. Before he died in 1633 he entrusted a gathering of his poems, The Temple, to a friend. He served as rector in Bemerton near Salisbury, delivering sermons and writing poems, for the rest of his short life. In 1630, a year after he married, Herbert took holy orders.

Like John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins, though not as flamboyant as the first or as metrically inventive as the second, George Herbert proved that devotional poetry can generate high intellectual excitement.īorn in Wales in 1593, Herbert distinguished himself at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was elected to Parliament twice.