George Herbert

George Herbert was born into privilege and expectation on April 3, 1593, at Montgomery Castle in Wales, the fifth son of Richard and Magdalen Herbert. His father died when George was three, leaving Magdalen to raise ten children with a fierce intelligence and deep piety that would mark them all. She moved the family to Oxford, then London, cultivating connections at court and ensuring her sons received the finest education available. George excelled at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he distinguished himself in classics, rhetoric, and mathematics. By 1620 he had been elected Public Orator at Cambridge, a position that traditionally led to high office in government. He seemed destined for a brilliant secular career.

But something shifted. The deaths of key patrons, including King James in 1625, closed the expected doors to advancement. More significantly, Herbert found himself increasingly drawn toward ordination. His mother had always hoped one of her sons would enter the church, and George began to sense this calling as political ambition faded. In 1630, at age thirty-six, he was ordained as rector of the rural parish of Bemerton, near Salisbury. The appointment surprised those who knew him — Herbert was giving up the possibility of preferment and wealth for a country living worth perhaps thirty pounds a year.

The three years at Bemerton transformed both Herbert and his understanding of pastoral ministry. He threw himself into the work with characteristic intensity, visiting parishioners, catechizing children, and rebuilding the church at his own expense. He married Jane Danvers in 1629, and by all accounts their brief marriage was deeply happy. But Herbert's health, never robust, deteriorated rapidly. He died of consumption on March 1, 1633, at age thirty-nine, having served at Bemerton less than three years.

His Writing and Its Influence

Herbert began writing poetry seriously during his Cambridge years, initially in Latin, following classical models. His English devotional poetry emerged gradually, much of it written during his final years at Bemerton as he wrestled with his calling and mortality. Shortly before his death, he entrusted the manuscript of The Temple to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, asking him to publish it only if he thought it might "turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul." Ferrar published it within the year.

The Temple appeared at a moment when English religious poetry was flowering, but Herbert's voice was distinctive. Where John Donne's holy sonnets dramatize spiritual struggle through elaborate conceits, Herbert found the sacred in simpler images — household objects, agricultural rhythms, the architecture of worship itself. Poems like "The Altar," "The Collar," and "Love (III)" map the geography of a soul learning submission through rebellion, finding God's presence in apparent absence. His technical mastery was extraordinary — he invented stanza forms, played with typography and shape, and achieved effects of naturalness that concealed rigorous craft.

The influence was immediate and lasting. Richard Baxter called The Temple "a book worth all the verse of an age." The Puritans embraced Herbert despite his Anglican loyalties, finding in his work a model of experimental religion that transcended party lines. Through the eighteenth century his reputation dimmed, but the twentieth century brought rediscovery. T.S. Eliot championed Herbert's integration of thought and feeling, while scholars recognized his influence on writers from Henry Vaughan to Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Temple has never gone out of print.

Who should read Herbert: Readers seeking poetry that takes both craft and devotion seriously, without sacrificing either to the other. Herbert is particularly valuable for those who find the language of systematic theology inadequate to their actual experience of faith — his poems map the real contours of belief and doubt, obedience and resistance. He is not for those looking for theological argument or mystical transport, but for those who want to see ordinary life transfigured by attention to God's presence within it.