Love bade me welcome; yet my soul
drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me
grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lacked anything.

So begins the ‘most beautiful poem in the world’ – in Simone Weil’s judgement, as she read these lines at a moment of deep personal and political crisis in 1938 – continuing with wry humour through a steady march of monosyllables to its quiet conclusion: ‘You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat / So I did sit and eat.’

Love was the great theme of seventeenth-century poets, but in Herbert’s view – expressed with precocious vigour to his mother, Magdalen, at the age of seventeen – these poets were largely concerned with love of an earthly, and therefore inferior, kind. His own aim was to celebrate love in its more transcendent form, though he did so through homely figures, taken from the everyday world. The subject of ‘Love (III)’ is nowhere named as God, and as Drury observes, the poem would feel quite different were this equation to be so openly stated. The figure of ‘Love’ who invites the poet to partake of Holy Communion is instead human and decisively female in nature, sexier than any secular mistress.

Herbert’s religious poetry enjoyed immense popularity in the years following the publication of The Temple, and – thanks to such subtle touches – continues often to speak to present-day readers, whatever their beliefs. Herbert is rarely sentimental, and never seeks to conceal the basic hardships of life. Five different poems in The Temple carry the title ‘Affliction’. He writes eloquently of depression and disappointment – as William Cowper and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poets both well acquainted with these experiences, later gratefully recognised – and of the inexorable slipping away of the opportunities for human happiness.

But we are still too young or old;
The man is gone
Before we do our wares unfold;
So we freeze on,
Until the grave increase our cold.

(‘Employment' [II])

For readers of all persuasions and capabilities – devout and sceptical, learned and uninitiated – John Drury provides an illuminating account of Herbert’s work and its historical and theological contexts. Drury is a biblical as well as a literary scholar who is also comfortably at home in the classical world in which Herbert himself was deeply immersed. For readers less familiar with these fields, he opens the way into often neglected areas of the poet’s writing, such as Memoriae Matris Sacrum, the nineteen Greek and Latin elegies written after the death of his mother in 1627: elegies ‘varied in form and metre, intimate and graceful, often bursting with strong emotion’. But it is Herbert’s English poems that prompt Drury’s most sustained and rewarding analyses, driven by an obvious delight in Herbert’s metrical subtlety and invention. It is these readings that give the present book its principal strength and value.

Loosely interwoven throughout these accounts is the story of George Herbert’s life: a life not always easy to reconstruct, and not as obviously dramatic as that of his elder brother, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury: poet, philosopher, historian, diplomat, and adventurer, who dashed with some verve across Europe, and the intellectual landscape of the day. George moved by gentler steps from his native Wales to Oxford, where, at the age of seven, he first met the young poet John Donne, a fascinated admirer of Magdalen Herbert; from Oxford to Westminster School, where he started to show unusual scholarly distinction; from Westminster to Trinity College, Cambridge, and to his eventual appointment as University Orator, a post which he may have hoped would lead in due course to preferment at court. For reasons not wholly clear, Herbert chose instead to reject both courtly and academic life and to enter the church, being ordained as a deacon in 1624 while in his early thirties. He held livings in turn at Leighton Bromswold in Huntingdonshire, close to his friend Nicholas Ferrar’s small community at Little Gidding, so admired in later times by T.S. Eliot; and, during the last three years of his life, in the villages of Fugglestone and Bemerton in Wiltshire, not far from Salisbury. Despite occasional ventures into a larger political world – the composition for example (as part of his duties as Cambridge Orator) of a University Oration urging national calm after the failure in 1623 of the projected ‘Spanish match’ between Prince Charles and the Infanta of Castile – Herbert’s sphere of action was always communal, always locally defined, his primary loves and loyalties being closely focused on the family, the school, the college, the university, the parish, the duties of a country parson.

Posthumous portrait of George Herbert (by Robert White in 1674. National Portrait Gallery (UK))

John Drury, former Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, is well attuned to the attractions of such communities, and writes engagingly of them. He provides an enchanting account of the two small Wiltshire villages where Herbert ended his ministry, that ‘lie beside water meadows in the valley of the little River Nadder, whose stream flows down to Bemerton and Salisbury from the grounds of Wilton, the great mansion of the Herberts, earls of Pembroke’, past scenes that would later be captured in the paintings of John Constable. He inspects church architecture lovingly, with Pevsner in hand, alert (as was Herbert himself) to the doctrinal implications of ecclesiastical furnishings, noting for example the manner in which the pulpit and reading pew of Leighton Bromswold church were set at an equal height, implying that prayer and preaching should be seen as of equal value.

While Herbert’s poetry clearly responds in a general sense to the pressures and experiences of his life, the precise relationship of particular poems to particular episodes in that life is notoriously difficult to trace. Izaak Walton, author of the most influential early life of Herbert (published in 1670, by which time Herbert was already famous, ten editions of his poems having by then been published), had had no personal acquaintance with the poet during his lifetime, and concocted his adulatory narrative of Herbert’s life largely through selective deduction from the poems. But Herbert was a resourceful writer, skilled in the arts of rhetorical invention, whose poems cannot be regarded as simple transcriptions from life. Drury repeatedly challenges Walton’s more facile biographical assumptions, together with his hagiographical impulses. While Herbert was undoubtedly an admirable man in numerous ways, he was not altogether a saint: he could be at times, as Drury shows, insufferably priggish; at times recklessly ambitious; at times excessively restless; at times too easily downcast.

Herbert is sometimes regarded as a poet whose supposedly simple verse reflects the supposedly similar qualities of his life. Yet as William Empson showed with virtuoso brilliance many years ago – taking Herbert’s ‘The Sacrifice’ as an instance of his seventh type of ambiguity, in which seemingly plain utterances can be read in two wholly contrary ways – Herbert was far from being a ‘simple’ poet, his verse often revealing ‘successive fireworks of contradiction, and a mind jumping like a flea’. Herbert’s life, in so far as we can read it, is similarly marked by contradictions and irresolutions: it also jumps at times like a flea, and is not always easy to align with his art. Music at Midnight, which is neither quite a biography nor purely a critical study, is a brave attempt to unite divergent modes of enquiry: to press patiently into the mental and creative processes of this remarkable early modern writer. It is an impressive study: lucidly written, sumptuously illustrated, continuously absorbing, even in its more digressive excursions. It is the work from which all fresh assessment of the life and poetry of George Herbert must now begin.