George Herbert

George Herbert was born in 1593 in Montgomery, in Wales, the fifth son of Richard Herbert, a member of parliament of an established Anglo-Welsh gentry family, and Magdalen Newport, a woman of strong piety who later became a well-known patron of letters and a friend of John Donne. After Richard Herbert’s death in the mid-1590s, Magdalen moved her children toward Oxford and then to London. George was educated at Westminster School and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his degrees in the 1610s and was elected a fellow. His learning, Latin eloquence, and family connections marked him as a young man expected to pursue public life rather than a purely clerical career.

At Cambridge he advanced rapidly. He served as reader in rhetoric and in 1620 became Public Orator of the university, composing official Latin addresses and coming to the notice of the court of James I. For several years he combined academic office with secular ambition: he sat in Parliament for Montgomery in the mid-1620s and hoped for preferment through royal patronage. The death of James I in 1625, the fading of his principal patrons, and a deepening religious vocation turned him from the court toward the Church of England. He had already taken deacon’s orders in the later 1620s. In 1629 he married Jane Danvers, a kinswoman connected with his stepfather’s family. In 1630 he was ordained priest and instituted rector of the small rural living of Fugglestone St Peter with Bemerton, near Salisbury in Wiltshire.

The roughly three years Herbert spent at Bemerton defined both his pastoral reputation and his later literary fame. He devoted himself to the ordinary work of a country priest—preaching, catechizing, visiting the sick, and caring for his churches—with a seriousness that impressed those who knew him. He set down that ideal in a prose treatise, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Country Parson, which circulated in manuscript and was printed after his death. In the same years he wrote and revised the English religious poems collected as The Temple. Formally inventive and spiritually intense, they treat the soul’s relation to God through images of church architecture, music, and everyday objects, and include pieces such as “The Altar,” “Easter Wings,” “The Collar,” “Virtue,” and “Love (III).” Herbert entrusted the manuscript to his friend Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding, who saw The Temple through the press in 1633.

Herbert’s health, never strong, failed rapidly. He died of consumption in early 1633 at Bemerton, still in his late thirties, and was buried in the chancel of St Andrew’s Church there. The marriage to Jane Danvers was childless; she later remarried. The Temple went through many seventeenth-century editions and established Herbert as one of the principal metaphysical poets, a standing that has lasted in English letters. He was never formally canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, but churches of the Anglican Communion commemorate him as priest and poet, commonly on 27 February. His combination of courtly education, parish seriousness, and lyric craft has made him a central figure in English devotional literature.