← In Our Time
In Our Time
George Herbert
00:52:27
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss arguably the greatest devotional poem writer in English.
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- [00:00]
Melvin Bragg
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
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Victoria Mole
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Melvin Bragg
In our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello George Herbert, 1593-1633, wrote Latin poetry of extraordinary quality and in great quantity. Yet it's for his English devotional poems, unpublished in his lifetime, that he's been especially treasured. Towards his death, Herbert handed these to a friend in case they might offer comfort to others, and they vividly show Herbert enduring the pain as well as feeling the joy of his faith and working through his relationship with God. And his book soon found readers on all sides in the coming civil wars. Before entering the fabric of poetry in English to be taken up by Coleridge, Eliot and Heaney, among others, and set to music still sung in parish churches up and down the country, we need to discuss George Herbert, poet, orator and priest, as Simon Jackson, Director of Music and Director of Studies in English at Peter House, University of Cambridge Victoria Mill, formerly Professor of Early Modern Latin and English at UCLA and Helen Wilcox, Professor Emerita of English Literature at Bangor University. Helen, what do we need to know about George Herbert's early years?
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Helen Wilcox
Well, as you said, he was born in 1593. He was the seventh of 10 children, and he was born in Wales, in Montgomery, and I think his Welshness is something that we shouldn't overlook. Both his family's mother and father were distinguished Welsh families, although his mother was recently from Shropshire, so he's from the borders of Wales and England. I think an important fact to remember is that he lost his father when he was only three years old. In fact, his mother was still pregnant with the last child when their father died, and so his mother was very important to his upbringing and she moved the family first to Shropshire and then to Oxford and finally to London. By the last years of Elizabeth's reign and in 1601, when they were first in London, it's worth remembering, that was the time of the Essex Rebellion, so a very unstable period. And when they lived there, we must be aware, I think, that Herbert as a young boy would sense the change of monarchy and the uncertainty in the religious situation. For example, when he was first a boarder at Westminster School, where he was trained, it was the time of the Gunpowder Plot just across the road from him in Westminster. But he came through all that. And in 1609, when he was 16, he went to Cambridge, to Trinity College. And when he graduated in 1613, he was ranked second out of 193 students in that year. A distinguished scholar, in other words.
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Melvin Bragg
Indeed, his mother was a great influence, his greatest influence, and support these 10 children, she brought them all up in a way that seemed to astonish everyone else. Can we say something about her?
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Helen Wilcox
Yes, I think her independence, being a widow for 15 years, bringing up that large family, and very unusual to have all 10 reach adulthood, she was clearly a great spiritual guide to the family. You have a strong sense of the devotional life of the family that Herbert grew up in educationally. Herbert says, she taught me how to write. And I don't think he just means his letters, I think he means to use language. And indeed, she was the recipient of his earliest poems that we are aware of. In 1610. He wrote two sonnets about how it was a shame that rage for sonnets was only for secular use, for earthly love. Shouldn't they be turned to God? So get a bit of a hint of what's coming with those very early poems. But they are sent to his mother. And I would add also she ran a good social household. We have her kitchen book from the year 1601, and it's clear that their house in Charing Cross was quite a crossroads for many people. Welsh visitors. I think he would have heard Welsh in those conversations there. But also William Bird, the composer, and. And William Camden, the historian. So Herbert was being given through his mother a really rich education at home before he went to school.
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Melvin Bragg
And John Donne.
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Helen Wilcox
John Donne probably also came to the house when they were in Oxford, even before London. Yes, she was very close to Don.
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Melvin Bragg
Dunn and he wrote her eulogy, didn't he?
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Helen Wilcox
Yes, yes, indeed. So the funeral sermon for Magdalene Herbert is really a wonderful account of. Of a distinguished and spiritually alert and important woman.
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Melvin Bragg
Thank you, Victoria. Victoria Mole. Latin was the language of the poetry Herbert shared with his friends, coming after Shakespeare and all that. It Seems rather surprising, should it?
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Victoria Mole
No, it shouldn't at all. So early modern England was a bilingual literary culture, just like the rest of Europe. And that means that literature was being read and written in two languages, above all, the vernacular. Obviously in England, that's English and in Latin. And there are various reasons for this. Latin is the international language at this period, a bit like English or Spanish or Arabic today. English wasn't any good for those purposes at this point. It's also the language by which you learned anything that you needed to know. So any serious advanced level of knowledge in science, in philosophy, in literary theory, in theology, in other languages, all of that could be gained through Latin. But very little of that could be gained without Latin. So it's the access point for knowledge in general. It's also important to realise that Latin at this point was still a spoken language. It's no one's mother tongue, but it's still a spoken language and it was the medium of education. So when you went to grammar school and university, you were taught in Latin. It was the language of instruction, the language of the classroom. So it's still a spoken language as well. There's an enormous international book trade in Latin at this period. So if we think about someone we don't know that much, I don't think about Herbert's library, but for instance, Ben Jonson's library, someone who wrote only in English. Actually, we know about 229 of his books and only 27 of them are in English. So that gives you a sense. Almost all the rest are in Latin or Latin, Greek parallel text. So it's really quite hard to overstate the importance of Latin and the extent to which this was a literary culture functioning in two languages, not just separately either. It's not that you did one kind of literature in Latin and another kind of literature in English. They're constantly in conversation with each other. So, for instance, in Herbert's work we see the influence both of Protestant European writers and of Catholic European writers, especially Jesuit poets, coming from Latin into his poetry, his poetry both in English and of course his poetry in Latin as well.
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Melvin Bragg
Though he's known as a priest nowadays, mostly he was an orator. Ended up as a very distinguished, famous orator at Cambridge. Can you tell us a bit about that?
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Victoria Mole
Yes. So he became orator in 1620 at Cambridge University, which was quite an important post. It was one that often led to sort of further state appointments. So it could be the stepping stone, obviously to a high level university career, but it could also be the Stepping stone to a more public kind of career, like that of his friend Francis Bacon, for instance. And he held that post until 1627. It involved writing formal correspondence in Latin on behalf of the university, making speeches and so on. We have a poem, for instance, that he wrote to be recited at a dinner in 1623, when the university was receiving the king, but at a really slightly tricky political moment, because the prince had been involved in this expedition to try and secure the hand of the Spanish infanta. The Spanish match, which had all just kind of collapsed. It was all quite embarrassing. And we have a little Latin epigram that Herbert wrote because this situation obviously needed to be acknowledged, but it was also slightly awkward. It's a bit unfair to bring it up because it's probably Herbert's worst poem. But we have a great letter in the archives in London from someone who was there at the dinner and who wrote every few days to his friend in the country with all the gossip. And he tells how the messenger came in with the epigram, and it was read out to the king. And he was kind of craning over his shoulder and trying to memorize the first two lines. So the first letter only has the first two lines. And then he writes three days later when he's managed to get a copy with the. The second two lines, which kind of resolve the conundrum. But that gives you a sense as well, of the kind of orality and the topicality of Latin literary culture at this time.
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Melvin Bragg
Simon Jackson, in this extraordinary household of 10 children and this amazing mother who brought them up with help, of course, all over the place, but still they were her children. What part did music play in this? It seems to have played a considerable part from the beginning. So can you develop that?
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Simon Jackson
Music was extremely important for the entire Herbert household. And again, I think we have Herbert's mother, Magdalene Herbert, to thank for that. She gathered her whole household every Sunday to sing psalms as an act of family worship and devotion. We've already heard that she invited William Bird and other composers. John Ball, William Heather, who's associated with the chair of music at Oxford University, came to dinner as well when Herbert was 8. And she took a great deal of attention towards her children's musical education. So that we know that her sons, George and Edward, both learned the lute and viol and both continued that throughout their lives. We have Edward's lute book with several compositions in it. Herbert, throughout his life, was associated with institutions that had great musical foundations as well. So he was at Westminster School closely associated with Westminster Abbey with its choir. When he moved to Trinity College, Cambridge, the choir there was hugely significant and had recently been developed by the Master, Thomas Neville. And of course, there's Salisbury. When he moves, I'm jumping ahead. But when he moves to Benerton, he's at Salisbury. And he's often attending choral, even song there.
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Melvin Bragg
He had a particular attachment to music as an expression of God's view, universe of life. Can you develop that?
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Simon Jackson
That's right. In the 17th century and for many centuries before, there was this strong sense of music having two forms. One is a kind of theoretical, Pythagorean understanding of music as a symbol of God's order that's based on mathematical ratio and the proportions of harm. And that seems like a very sort of abstract, mathematical, intellectual way of thinking about music. But Herbert also, I think, is very involved in the pragmatic, practical side of music making as well. And in his poetry, I think we see a poet who is interested in trying to bring those two things together. So the perfection of God's concord, God's harmony that symbolizes the perfect order of creation brought into contact with something perhaps a little rougher, a little more rough around the edges, you know, not every institution is perfectly in tune at all times. Not every musical performance is perfect, but it can still be expressive and still bring us into tune with that music of the spheres.
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Melvin Bragg
At that time, in his early manhood, this country was very unsettled in terms of its religious identity. Let's say that. How did he manage to straddle that or work his way through that?
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Simon Jackson
Well, yes, so church in the early 17th century is facing a tension between a really sort of radical Protestant puritanical view that looks to the continent and wants a much plainer, simpler style of worship, and another faction that maybe prefers the idea of worshipping God in the beauty of holiness. The idea that church music, that vestments, that architecture and all these kind of beautiful things can help us worship God properly. Herbert's poetry, I think, sits very much in the middle of those two extremes. But that's not to suggest that it's a bland compromise. Herbert's poetry constantly moves back and forth. He's drawn towards beautiful, elaborate, sophisticated music making, for instance. But at the same time, there's a wonderful poem called A True Hymn where he talks about the most sincere expression of the soul being all that is all that God needs. He's not interested in the poem Zion. He talks about all Solomon's sea of brass is not as good to thee as one good groan Sometimes it's the simplest, most heartfelt expression that can be the greatest music for God.
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Melvin Bragg
Thank you, Helen. Can you introduce us to the Temple, the work that he entrusted to his friend? What is it and what does it contain?
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Helen Wilcox
The Temple is a book of English poems published in 1633. And we think that the title was given to it by his friend Nicholas Ferrar from Little Gidding, who brought it to publication when Herbert devised it, and we know that he was working on it as early as the early 1620s. He saw it as a three part construction drawing on the idea of the church. So the first part is called the Church Porch and it's where you enter the book as you enter a church building through the porch. And it's a long poem of moral advice. And then the central part, the middle section of the temple is called the Church. And you're in the building of the church. And there are some references to parts of the building. It begins with the altar, for instance. But what we are really in is the soul. It's the inner temple, it's the devotional life. And this is the section where the remote. More than 160 short lyrics, which I think are his most famous poems, probably the greatest devotional poetry in English. And it's an amazing collection, partly ordered with patterns of the sacraments and the seasons of the year and as I said, parts of the church building. But also there's an element of randomness, the randomness of everyday spiritual life, the ups and downs of the experience of being related to God. And then the final third section is called the Church Militant. And we are leaving the church then and going out. The Church Militant is a phrase used in the Book of Common Prayer. Church militant here on earth. And it's going out and it's about church history and it's kind of apocalyptic prophetic poetry. Another long poem to end this three part structure.
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Melvin Bragg
This collection contains what Simon Weil said, the most beautiful poem ever written. It's quite short. Do you agree with her?
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Helen Wilcox
I do. I think she's absolutely right.
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Melvin Bragg
If you'd like to tell the listeners or read it to the listeners, I.
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Helen Wilcox
Will read it and then say just a little bit about it. But yes. Love. 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, a guest I answered, worthy to be here. Love said you shall be he, I, the unkind, ungrateful. Ah, my dear, I cannot look on thee Love took my hand and smiling did who made the eyes but I Truth, Lord, but I have marred them. Let my shame go where it doth deserve and know you not, says Love. Who bore the blame, my dear? Then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat. I think what Simone Weil was responding to initially is the beauty of the idea of God as love. Love bade me welcome. But I'm sure she was also alert to the beauty of the construction of the poem. It's a very complex stanza form, and yet within it, interwoven is this narrative and dialogue. This is the work of an orator. This is a work of somebody who knows how to use language creatively persuasively. And it's typical of Herbert in that it seems quite straightforward, it seems quite simple, and yet I think there are at least three layers of meaning in it. First of all, it's as though somebody is going into a pub, into an inn, and being made welcome and saying, sit down, have a meal. The question that Love asks if I lacked anything is exactly what a bartender would ask in a tavern in the 17th century. Secondly, it is clearly a Eucharistic poem. It's a poem about receiving Christ's meat, which is his body and blood, and eating and drinking. But finally, it's also the heavenly banquet, and it is the last poem of the sequence in the church, and it arrives at the moment in heaven when the speaker sits and eats with that wonderfully simple final line.
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Melvin Bragg
Thank you, Victoria. His image, as we've just heard, is vivid. And he worked on his Latin poems, He worked some of them into English. Can you give us an example of that?
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Victoria Mole
Yes. So there's quite a lot to say, obviously, about Herbert's imagery. And one could think about the ways in which the imagery in the Latin is different, all the ways in which it's similar kind of continuities between the two. So I guess we might come back to some of the differences, some of what's distinctive about the Latin. But if we're thinking about continuities and places where he seems to have reworked an image, reused it in English, a couple of really good examples. So, for instance, there's a very famous poem by Herbert called Prayer, and the first prayer poem, that's the one that begins prayer, the church's banquet, angels age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, the soul, in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, the Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth. It's an Extraordinary poem. I'm sure many listeners will know it, but it's just a series of epithets. It's just a series of statements describing prayer. There's no main verb. And in 1620 Herbert wrote a poem, actually one of his most circulated Latin poems during his lifetime for his friend Francis Bacon, commending him on the publication of a book of his called the Novum Organum in that year, which set out his kind of theory of science which uses exactly the same technique. It has a little two line introduction, but then it's just a series of epithets describing Bacon's brilliance and his scientific intuition. Phrases like hive of honey and the mustard seed of knowledge. The mustard seed, of course, because it's in the Bible and because a mustard seed is very, very tiny, but it produces this huge big bush and it's just a whole series of phrases. So I think we can see there. Herbert having experimented with a highly stylized, very unusual form of poem, very rhetorical, and it was a big success. It gets circulated by many of his friends in the 1620s and at some point he tries it out in English as well. And that's where we get prayer one from.
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Melvin Bragg
Thank you, Simon. Simon Jackson. Come and look at the Collar. One of his best known works. Quite long and the first line gives an indication. Do you want to say that before you get cracking?
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Simon Jackson
I struck the board and cried no more. I will abroad. He just launches straight in there. What shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free. Free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store Shall I be still in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn to let me blood and not restore what I have lost with cordial fruit. We've moved from love to sin here. So this is, this is a poem. It's a poem full of voices. It's a poem full of frustration and anger. Sonic qualities. Is there even in the title, which is a sort of three way pun, between the yoke, the collar that restrains the collar, that is anger, and then the caller who comes in at the end of the poem. But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild at every word methoughts I heard one calling child. And I replied, my Lord, can I bring in here?
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Melvin Bragg
It seems, coming in from left field. But he was chronically ill. What was a chronic illness that he bore.
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Simon Jackson
It's very difficult to reverse engineer that kind of diagnosis, I think, but I think generally it's sort of as a sort of tuberculosis or some sort of.
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Helen Wilcox
It's consumption of various Kinds. And he has agues and various sicknesses. He thought he was close to death in 1629, for instance. And that's possibly when he first sent his early manuscript to his friends, rather than on his deathbed, actually. Yeah. He talks about ill health in his letters all the time. He's in Cambridge, for instance, as a.
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Simon Jackson
Young man, and he's a great poet of affliction and ill health and illness. And I think, again, that where a lot of the frustration in that relationship with God comes is that sense of not being healthy and not being able to.
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Helen Wilcox
Not letting me do the job I want to do is often seems to be. He talks about employment a lot.
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Melvin Bragg
He hoped his works would provide comfort for his friends. Did they?
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Helen Wilcox
They certainly did. The reactions of that. Yes. Lots of evidence of people sending for copies immediately, of copies being made in people's private commonplace books, notebooks, manuscripts. Six editions being published by 1641. So within eight years, we've got six editions and 13 by the beginning of the 18th century. We have, yes, a great deal of evidence, but the comfort that's given. I think it's not just from the early material that we have letters asking for copies to be sent to Virginia, for instance, from the little Gidding papers. It's not just that. I think there's a continuing sense even today, that reading these poems gives comfort because they are like a kind of book of psalms. There are a few more than in the book of Psalms, but roughly equivalent number. And like the psalms, they are musical, they have a personal voice, and they range across all the moods that are experienced by believers struggling to come to terms with their sin and their faith and trying to understand life in God's terms, as it were. So you've got joy and despair, and we heard anger and frustration in the collar. You have reconciliation, as in love that I read. And that range of material, that variety of moods and presentations of the devotional life, seems to be what has appealed across the ages and I think is his greatest strength.
- [24:31]
Melvin Bragg
Thank you, Victoria. He wrote some extraordinary poems on the death of his mother. Can you tell us something about that?
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Victoria Mole
Yeah, certainly. So his mother died at the beginning of June in 1627, and as Helen said at the beginning, they were very close, and she'd been particularly influential upon his education and shaping the collection of poetry that he wrote very quickly in the weeks immediately after her Death, which contains 14 Latin and five Greek poems, is called the Memoriae Marches Sacrum, a gift sacred to the memory of my mother. It's the only complete verse collection of any kind that he published in his life, and it was published in a pamphlet alongside the sermon that Donne preached at her funeral. It is a really extraordinary collection. It's a much more original Latin collection than anything that Milton wrote. For instance, people that know a little bit about Latin literary culture in the 17th century often know that Milton wrote Latin poetry as if that's unusual, which it's not. Milton is totally, totally typical. He writes incredibly beautiful Latin, but he writes absolutely the genres, the forms that you would expect him to write. This collection is really genuinely original. It's very unusual, very striking. Lots of overlaps with the imagery of the religious poems in the temple. But about his mother, about his incredibly physical grief for his mother, his longing for her presence. We have some fascinating and quite lengthy depictions of her kind of her domestic management and all her virtues. I think for a reader coming to this fresh, especially if you know the rest of Herbert's poetry, the most striking thing might be actually some of the more baroque elements. So, for instance, there's quite an obsession with pregnancy and breastfeeding in this collection. He is taunted by a kind of ghost or image of his mother in the form of a cloud offering him her breast. And there's a lot of breastfeeding imagery in the poem, and as I said, pregnancy imagery as well. Her pregnancy with him, but also his pregnancy with grief for her, an extraordinary poem in which she says, no, doctor, no, doctor, you can't cure me. I can't take any medicine because pregnant women can't safely take medicine. And I am pregnant with my mother, with the grief for my mother that is kind of consuming me. So it's a remarkably intense collection. We're used to the intensity of religious feeling in Herbert's poetry, but this is similar intensity in Latin. Very highly fashionable Latin verse and Greek verse really up to the minute in terms of its metrical choices and its forms. But about this most intense and personal emotional experience of grief.
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Melvin Bragg
Thank you very much, Simon. Simon Jackson, what was his relationship with God? This is central. He had a relationship with God which many people listening, many people won't. They'll say, oh, yes, but what does it mean?
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Simon Jackson
Well, I mean, we know that Herbert described the Temple as a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that passed the English poems. That's right, yeah. The Temple was a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that passed between Herbert's soul and his God. And so there's this sense very often that the relationship is quite a fraught one, as we heard in the Collar. This isn't necessarily a meek and submissive relationship between power and a subject. Often God is figured as my God, my King. So there is a kind of monarchical image, but more often than that, it's a very personal relationship. It's one that is deep in the heart, that is reciprocal. Reciprocal?
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Melvin Bragg
You mean God speaks back to him?
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Simon Jackson
Well, very often God's voice turns up in the poems to either mend his rhyme, as happens in a poem called Denial, or as we've heard in the Collar, God's voice enters to reassert metric. So, yes, absolutely, there is a sense in which the poetry tries to imagine that conversation with God, which is extraordinary.
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Melvin Bragg
I think the job he wanted to do towards the end of his life, four years before his death, he became a priest. He died when he was 40, but he became a priest. What kind of priest was he? What did his illness and belief enable him to do?
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Helen Wilcox
He was deaconed quite a lot earlier. He became a deacon. That's the sort of stepping stone to becoming a priest in 1624. So we know he was intending that for a long time, and then he became a priest towards the end of his life and in a parish. What we can imagine of his life there is depicted for us in his prose work called the Country Parson, which is a kind of handbook for the skills and vocation of a country priest, because he was in a country parish, even though rather near to the stately home of Wilton where his distant cousins lived. But it was a small parish, and so we have a very strong sense of his calling. I love the fact, for example, that despite all his learning, he says that the parson's library isn't books, it's a holy life. And he gives advice on sermons. He says, don't go on beyond an hour. We might think that's terribly long. But that was really quite restrained. And he says, use images appropriate to your listeners. So if you're speaking to farmers, talk about ploughs, use agricultural imagery. So he's a true orator. He was thinking of his audience. He was using language that would appeal, that would mean something to his listeners. But he had a high sense of the importance of the ordinary priest, not the bishop, not the person in a high office, but the daily relationship of a priest and his people.
- [30:00]
Melvin Bragg
Victoria, what was he doing with his Latin poetry that might seem surprising to readers of the English version or of his English poetry?
- [30:10]
Victoria Mole
Yes, well, there's lots you could say here. We've already touched upon the collection written for his mother, which is quite unlike anything in the English, although similar in its level of intensity. And we've also touched very briefly on that sense of his kind of public dimension with a little epigram written for the King. So if you look at the totality of the Latin poetry, you have a much more kind of rounded sense, I suppose, of his poetic personality. So you have a lot of public facing poems, bits of panegyric and commendation and so on. Poems for Bacon and the King and bishops, but also polemic. So his first collection of Latin verse, the Musae Responsoriae, was written in response. This is a complicated issue, but basically it's in response to Andrew Melville, a giant of the Scottish reformation, then pushing 60, who'd been chucked into prison for quite a long time for writing rude Latin poems about the King. And this is basically a sequence about church practice, about how much kind of music and liturgy and ritual of what kind you should have in church. So it deals with real specifics of what was kind of being contested at this time. But it's a polemical collection. So it's really going for Melville, it's going also for the Pope. So we have anti Catholic poems as well. So that sense of a kind of public position, the way in which Herbert carved out his position quite carefully and, you know, with quite delicate judgment as to where he wanted to position himself in terms of church politics, for instance, that's something that we'd get from the Latin. You also see a scriptural poetics of a different kind from the Temple. So the Temple is intensely scriptural, of course, but we have in the Passio Discerpta, which is another Latin collection, a kind of set of epigrams that go verse by verse through the narration of the crucifixion. So a bit like a kind of Station of the Cross kind of idea, but verse by verse. And that's something that we don't quite have again in the English, but is very much out there in the literary culture of the time. And finally, I'd just say in general, I think from the Latin you get that really strong sense of the way in which Herbert is being shaped by the wider continental Latin poetic culture. So we see him imitating, responding to poets like Buchanan and Theodore de Bes, even Calvin's successor at Geneva, major Latin first generation Protestant poets, especially their psalm paraphrases. But we also see him responding intensely over and over again, nicking things all the time from the super fashionable Jesuit poets at the beginning of the 17th century.
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Melvin Bragg
Simon, we know that he sang some of his poems. Well, can you give us an example? We do.
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Simon Jackson
I mean, we know that on his deathbed he sang one of his poems. Frustratingly, not many of the notes have survived. But we can work backwards from the metrics, from the poetic structure of his poems. And one instance we might think about is his one metrical Psalm translation, Psalm 23, which is still sung in churches today. The God of love, my shepherd is. We do know what tune Psalm 23 was sung to, and it's one that's very familiar today, though not the one that we use in the modern church for that particular hymn.
- [33:21]
Melvin Bragg
Can you illustrate this?
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Simon Jackson
I shall. It goes like this. The God of love, my shepherd is and he that doth me feed While he is mine and I am his, what can I want or need? It's a tune related pastorally to shepherds, but not the one that we might expect for Psalm 23 these days. Wenduno. He also often wrote one song to the tune of another, if you like. He practiced something called Contrafactum, which was taking an existing song and writing new words. And we have a song, a poem called a parody. It's parody again. That's in a technical, musical sense, not as a satire, but a parody of a lute song written by his aristocratic cousin, William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, which is reconsecrated to sacred ends in Herbert's poem Soul's Joy. So there's again this sense of take. We had this with his poem to his letter to Magdalene Herbert, this translating from the secular world of musical entertainment into the church and into domestic devotion.
- [34:27]
Melvin Bragg
Helen, can you tell us, give us a brief survey of the poets subsequently whom he has influenced?
- [34:35]
Helen Wilcox
Certainly they are legion. Herbert is, in a way, a poet's poet. That's not to say that other people don't appreciate him, but he writes about the process of writing. He's very conscious of being a writer. He thinks of his writing as singing his songs. And he's very conscious of how to do it and how he goes wrong in doing it and how best he could find a true hymn. As Simon has mentioned, so many poets picked up on that, but also on the simplicity, the directness with which he speaks to God and his technical ability, his technical skills. A poet who really responded to that was Henry Vaughan, the Welsh mid 17th century poet, who said he was converted by reading Herbert's poems from writing secular verse to writing sacred verse. And he was the first of many, many across the range. That's so interesting in the 17th century, from Catholic Richard Crashaw To Presbyterian Richard Baxter, the great Presbyterian writer, who said, I think one of the best things about Herbert's writing, which is that heart work and heaven work are combined in the poems heart work and heaven work, that sense of the personal and the divine divinity and poesy met is what Bacon said about Herbert's writing. Other poets who've been influenced by him include, as you mentioned, I think, coleridge, Christina Rossetti, T.S. eliot, Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, R.S. thomas, the Welsh devotional poet, and Vikram Seth, Wendy Cope, Rowan Williams, to bring us up to date, just an enormous range of writers who have been not necessarily also writing about God, but inspired by Herbert's tone, Herbert's technique and I think the nature of his voice and the range of mood that Herbert's utmost art, as he calls it, can express a huge panoply of responders, mentioning Even a Radio 4, a program on Radio 4 called Something Understood, which is the last phrase of the poem Prayer that Victoria was talking about Victoria.
- [36:43]
Melvin Bragg
He was something of a unifying figure, we're told. Can you develop that?
- [36:46]
Victoria Mole
Yes, I think that chimes very much with what Helen's just been saying, that he was a. He's always been a kind of poet's poet, but also had immense genuine popularity among readers. I think Herbert pulled off something that very few poets do, which is to make what was actually highly fashionable, highly trendy, innovative poetry seem almost immediately classic, sort of almost immediately seem transparent, seem not highly fashionable, seem just kind of what it should be. Very few examples of this, something like Virgil's Eclogues obviously did exactly the same kind of thing. But it happens really quite rarely. And it makes it hard as a kind of literary critic to unpick. Because once it has that quality, kind of monumental quality, it can be difficult to get back under the surface of it. But if we think just for instance, about the Psalm that we heard sung so beautifully there, the God of love, my shepherd is. And he that doth me feed, while he is mine and I am his, I shall not want or need. Now, the third line there, while he is mine and I am his, that's not in the Bible. I mean, it's not in the Psalm at all. Those of you who know the Psalm, I'm sure many readers will the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to. What is it? Lay down by green pastures and leadeth me by the still waters. Exactly. It doesn't say anything about he is mine and I am his. Doesn't have the God of love either. But while he is mine and I am his, is from the Bible. It's from chapter two, the Song Of Songs. It's a very beautiful little tag in Hebrew. Dodi li vanil in Hebrew, something you learn very early on. If you're learning Hebrew, as Herbert certainly would have done, what's it doing there? Why have we got the Song of Songs there? Well, because everyone, everyone at just this moment was combining the Psalms with the Song of Songs. This is actually super, super fashionable. And Theodore De Bers, the huge Latin psalm paraphrase person from Geneva, hardcore Protestant, used the same metre for this Psalm and for the Song of Songs. So this is the kind of thing that's there in Herbert's poetry and is super exciting from a kind of scholarly perspective, once you spot it. But the real magic of Herbert, of course, is that once he'd done it, it just seems like how it should be. And Isaac Watts, when He does Psalm 23, nearly 100 years later, he does it almost identically. And he uses the same line when he is mine and I am his.
- [39:02]
Melvin Bragg
Helen, you were to come in.
- [39:03]
Helen Wilcox
Yes. Just wanted to add that this. He is mine and I am his is an example of what Simon was talking about. In the reciprocal relationship between God and man, God and human beings, Herbert talks about thine and mine, or mine and thine, but in the end, let there be no mine and thine. He wants them to overlap and to intersperse, and I think that's a lovely instance of it. It's like, I would say, Herbert is writing love poetry to God, and that's what appeals to people, because we've all been in love. You don't have to be in love with God to understand the poems. It's about the experience of the joy and despair of a loving relationship.
- [39:40]
Simon Jackson
And I'd just like to add, as well, as well as quoting the Song of Songs, he's also quoting other English translations of the metrical Psalms. So he's quoting from Thomas Sternhold's translation, he's quoting from William Whittingham's translation, which would have been very well known to his contemporaries. And there's this sense of his poem joining in consort with all of these other poems and singing together with them. So there's a kind of sociability about this as well.
- [40:05]
Melvin Bragg
Who reads his poems or sings them today?
- [40:08]
Simon Jackson
Well, a lot of people. I first encountered Herbert's poems singing them as a child, singing them as hymns in church. Still, four or five of them are regularly sung in the Church of England today. I Vividly remember being a chorister and learning the Vaughan Williams Five Mystical Songs when I was growing up and being fascinated by the words. And I think music is such a wonderful way into this poetry because it reflects so much of what this poetry was for Herbert. It's so much part of how he wrote poetry. Sir Philip Sidney has this wonderful line in the Defence of Poetry about the poet coming to you with words set in delightful proportion, ready for the, well, enchanting skill of music. And I think that's so true about what Herbert is doing here.
- [40:55]
Melvin Bragg
Finally, we're coming to the end now, unfortunately. Helen, what do you think of him today?
- [41:01]
Helen Wilcox
I mean, I think I've already said that I think he is the greatest devotional writer in the English language. And I think it's that combination of the communal which we've been talking about in terms of singing hymns and so on, making music with the poems which began in the 17th century. There's a selection of hymns from Herbert in 1697. They've already been turned into hymns, and then Wesley includes them in his volumes and so on. So I think one of the continuing appeals of Herbert is the sense of community, but with. That might sound paradoxical, but the intimacy of the poetry. And I do have people who write to me because they know I've worked with Herbert's poetry, and they write and say, I read a poem by George Herbert every day.
- [41:47]
Melvin Bragg
And we know that he died at 40 and he was. At his death, he sang.
- [41:52]
Simon Jackson
He did. He sang.
- [41:54]
Melvin Bragg
He's got good evidence.
- [41:55]
Simon Jackson
Well, it's from Isaac Walton's biography, which is from several decades afterwards. So there is a certain element of hagiography about this. But there's a wonderful deathbed tableau of Herbert lying on his bed quoting lines from the Thanksgiving. My music shall find thee and every string shall have his attribute to sing that all together may accord in thee and prove One God, one harmony. And after that, he calls for one of his instruments and sings a stanza of his poem. Sunday. It's a rather beautiful deathbed scene.
- [42:30]
Melvin Bragg
Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Helen Wilcox, Victoria Mole, Simon Jackson. Next week, it's the Antikythera mechanism, an extraordinary astronomical device salvaged from a ship wrecked in the first century bc, unrivaled in complexity in Europe until the Middle Ages. Thank you very much for listening.
- [42:48]
Helen Wilcox
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [42:55]
Melvin Bragg
What would you like to have said that you didn't have time to say?
- [42:58]
Helen Wilcox
I Think I'd like to say that the evidence of Herbert's reception in the 17th century, in other words, the people who read him, who quoted him, who were shaped by him as poets, as preachers, that evidence suggests to me there is a function for devotional poetry in a time of division like that which is to lift the soul into a realm where possibly the tensions and the controversies of the polemics of the time can be left a little bit behind. That's not to say that Herbert himself didn't have a position on things we've been talking about that. And clearly to be in the middle is a position as much as to be at either extreme. So that's his own view. He's very much a sort of prayer book, Church of England believer. But I do think the evidence suggests that because Charles I read him, because Cromwell's chaplain read him, because Baxter quoted him from the Presbyterian side, nonconformists, Catholics, the whole range, even the more extreme Protestants, that suggests to me that Herbert found a kind of ground through his poetry which enabled people to experience God without the kind of rancor of the polemic of the time. And I think that's an important statement from Herbert and from the experience of people reading him about the role of devotional poetry.
- [44:28]
Victoria Mole
Victoria I didn't get a chance to talk briefly about one quite fun poem, which is an anagram poem called Roma, about Rome. And so these were very fashionable at the time. You get as many different anagrams out of a word as you can, and you try and work them more or less painfully into your poem. And a lot of these poems are pretty painful. This is a really good one, Herbert's Roma, which gets many words out of the Latin word. Roma, which means Rome, obviously, as well as, you know, for instance, amor, love, and various others, Maro, which means Virgil. So it's quite a good example of a very fashionable type of poem. But it actually received a response from the Pope from Maffio Barberini, who went on to be Pope urban VIII in 1623. He wrote a response to this poem to which Herbert then also wrote some responses. And Herbert publishes them together in his. In one of his Latin verse collections. We know that it really is the Pope because the Pope included his little poem in his own verse collection. He was an established poet in 1623. So we really get some sense there of the international reach, obviously, of Latin poetry at this period. But also the way that Herbert dealt with that. The fact that he printed the Pope's riposte to him and then his Own replies to the Pope together, not printed. Sorry, that's a mistake. But put them together in his manuscript collections does suggest something, I think, about that kind of moderation and that interest in holding different voices together, as does his collection to Melville, which, although it is a polemical collection, is really quite respectful as 17th century polemical collections go, Concedes a lot of areas of agreement with Melville concedes that he's old and Herbert is young. So there's something. There's something respectful. There's something respectful about the way that Herbert dealt always with even the most difficult and potentially dangerous at this period, conflicts. So that picks up, I think, on some of the things Helen was saying.
- [46:18]
Melvin Bragg
And Simon.
- [46:19]
Simon Jackson
Simon, having spoken a lot about music and sound, I think one thing that we haven't picked up on is the visual quality of Herbert's poetry as well. And he's very famous for that as much as for his hymns. I'm thinking of a poem like Easter Wings, which on the page looks like a pair of wings flying across the page. That might seem very far from the musical world that I've been describing, though, in fact, the poem itself imagines these wings as larks. Wings and larks singing harmoniously as they fly through the air. So there is this kind of interplay of the visual and the sonic. And I don't think Herbert is exclusively one or other when we talk about the Temple, that overriding conceit. I know it's not necessarily his term for the volume. There's certainly a kind of architectural sense in which we're entering a church building. It's a place of architecture and it's a place of sound and it's a place of vision and scent as well. Scent and smell. So he's using all of his senses, not just one or other.
- [47:25]
Helen Wilcox
Yes, I'd add there that I think he wants to make language work in, excuse me, in all its dimensions and in all the senses, the sound, the vision and of course, of course the cognitive, the meaning. But he draws and this is his skill as an orator. I mean, he knows the richness of language and he uses it in these fashioned ways, both to hear and to see and to respond, to think about. One other thing I'd like to add is we've talked about the publication of the Latin poems and the circulation of Latin poems in Herbert's lifetime, and the fact that his English poems, his devotional poems, the Temple volume, was not printed until after he died. But there is some evidence that his English poems did circulate in manuscript, which was quite common at the time, undoubtedly among his family, pretty clearly in the Little Gidding community led by Nicholas Ferrar, and the women of that community copied out the poems in manuscript. But also we know that Francis Bacon was an admirer of Herbert's English poems and Bacon died seven years before the Temple was published. So clearly there's some kind of limited circulation and knowledge of his English poems in their early stages during his lifetime. And I should mention also the Wilton community just down the road from where he was the vicar in Bremerton. That's the Wilton, the home of William Herbert, his aristocratic cousin that Simon was talking about. And that was traditionally, I mean, from the days of Sidney and Mary Sidney, who was the Countess of Pembroke there. That was a center, they called it, a little academy, where they circulated poems and sang them and read them to one another. So I don't think we should think that Herbert was only known as an English poet in print after he died.
- [49:13]
Victoria Mole
Yes, I could pick up on that. I think it's important, isn't it, for listeners to understand that this is a period in which quite a lot of really major poets actually only circulated their poetry in manuscript, or almost only so didn't print in. Didn't publish in print at all. And we have good evidence for the circulation of Herbert's verse during the 1620s. And there were three Latin poems, really, that we find most often in that period, which are very clearly dateable to sort of between 1618 and his death. So we know these stuff is going around before his death. One is the Bacon poem, one is Roma, the anagram epigram, the anti Catholic anagram epigram. And one is the very enigmatic poem called Etio Pisa, which is a poem about an Ethiopian, a black girl's love for a white boy, which was written for Bacon and which circulates with a little English poem which introduces it as a gift to Bacon. A very enigmatic, strange, hard to place poem. Certainly has something to do with the Song of Songs. I'm Black but Comely comes from that verse and may also have been picking up on Bacon's own interest, sort of scientific interest in skin colour, which he mentions in some of his works. But it's a quite a mysterious poem. There's also an extremely widely circulating translation of that poem, probably by Henry Reynolds, for which there is some music actually at the time. So if you counted the translation, it's probably Herbert's most widely circulated poem of all, which is interesting, but the translation slightly flattens it so the translation kind of makes it fit with that more general category of poems about a beautiful woman of dark complexion, rather than it being clearly a kind of racial category, which in the Latin it very obviously is.
- [50:55]
Simon Jackson
And in addition to that idea of publication, manuscript and print are only the physical ways in which things can be published. And of course, the performance of poetry in song is a kind of publication. John Donne describes musicians publishing poetry in song in his poem the Triple Fool. So there is also this sense of publishing it, making it public in terms of musical coterie or the private music meetings that Herbert attended in Salisbury after attending Evensong or at Wilton House. So there's this musical livelihood that just doesn't have a record because it's an oral culture, but is still publishing his poetry in some sense.
- [51:35]
Helen Wilcox
I'd like to pick up on the interaction between the Latin and the English, because very interestingly, some of Herbert's English poems are translated into Latin as early as 1634. So a year after they've been printed.
- [51:47]
Victoria Mole
Yeah, I've seen those. And there are lots. By the late. By 1700, there were a lot of Latin translations of Herbert. It may even have become a sort of school exercise in some contexts.
- [51:56]
Melvin Bragg
Well, thank you all very much. Thank you very much indeed. And I think the producer, Mr. Tillerson, is about to enter.
- [52:03]
Helen Wilcox
Does anyone want to your coffee? Coffee would be lovely, thank you.
- [52:10]
Victoria Mole
Tea would be lovely.
- [52:11]
Melvin Bragg
I have some tea, please.
- [52:13]
Helen Wilcox
That was terrific time, isn't it?
- [52:15]
Melvin Bragg
That was absolutely terrific.
- [52:17]
Helen Wilcox
In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.
- [52:25]
Victoria Mole
Hi, I'm Christy Young and I'm happy.
- [52:28]
Helen Wilcox
To tell you that Young Again.
- [52:29]
Victoria Mole
My podcast for BBC Radio 4 is.
- [52:32]
Helen Wilcox
Back with more conversations with people who fascinate me.
- [52:35]
Simon Jackson
In the new series, we'll hear from.
- [52:37]
Helen Wilcox
The comedian Miranda Hart.
- [52:39]
Simon Jackson
Part of being human is that we are vulnerable. The writer Erwin Welsh.
- [52:45]
Melvin Bragg
It's quite a thing to be eight years old and then suddenly to have a criminal record.
- [52:49]
Helen Wilcox
And we'll begin with a conversation with the actor Minnie Driver.
- [52:53]
Victoria Mole
What do you wish you'd understood about the movie business? It's all ephemera.
- [52:57]
Helen Wilcox
None of it is real. Subscribe to Young Again on BBC Science.