John Drury - Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert

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Music at Midnight

The Life and Poetry of

GEORGE HERBERT

JOHN DRURY

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO

John Drury is chaplain and fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University. He is the author of many books, including Painting the Word: ChristianPictures and Their Meanings and Creating Poetry.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
Copyright John Drury 2013
All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13444-4 (cloth)
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13458-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226134581.001.0001

First published in the United Kingdom by Penguin Books Ltd., 2013.

Lines from Lost are from The Rivered Earth by Vikram Seth (New York: Penguin, 2011). Copyright Vikram Seth, 2011. Reproduced by permission of Penguin.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Drury, John, 1936 author.

Music at midnight : the life and poetry of George Herbert / John Drury.

pages : illustrations ; cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-13444-4 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-226-13458-1 (e-book)

1. Herbert, George, 15931633. 2. Poets, English17th centuryBiography. 3. Herbert, George, 15931633Criticism and interpretation. 4. English poetry17th centuryHistory and criticism. I. Title.

PR3508.D76 2014

821'.3dc23

2013042250

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Caroline

In another walk to Salisbury he saw a poor man with a poorer horse that was fallen under his load; they were both in distress, and needed present help, which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor man to unload, and after to load his horse. The poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man; and so was like the good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself and his horse, and told him, that if he loved himself, he would be merciful to his beast. Thus he left the poor man, and at his coming to his musical friends at Salisbury, they began to wonder that Mr. George Herbert, who used to be so trim and clean, came into that company so soiled and discomposed; but he told them the occasion; and when one of the company told him he had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment, his answer was, that the thought of what he had done would prove music to him at midnight, and that the omission of it would have upbraided and made discourse in his conscience, whensoever he would pass by that place. For if I be bound to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am bound, so far as it is in my power, to practise what I pray for. And though I do not wish for the like occasion every day, yet let me tell you, I would not willingly pass one day of my life without comforting a sad soul, or showing mercy; and I praise God for the occasion. And now lets tune our instruments.

Izaak Walton,

The Life of Mr. George Herbert, 1670

Contents

List of Illustrations

COLOUR PLATES

INTEGRATED ILLUSTRATIONS

Preface and Acknowledgements

From the start, Herberts life story has served as an introduction to his poetry. When his friend Nicholas Ferrar of Little Gidding first published his collected verse in 1633, the year of Herberts death, under the title of The Temple (Ferrars choice rather than Herberts), he prefaced it with three pages under the heading of The Printers to the Reader. In ten lines he traced the outline of Herberts forty-year life: his academic success, culminating in the Oratorship of the University of Cambridge; his abandonment of the hopes of a career at court which that office promised; and his final three years as a country parson. That was it in a nutshell: a quiet life with a crisis in the middle of it. Nineteen years later in 1652, a Fellow of Clare Hall in Cambridge called Barnabas Oley published Herberts prose work, The Country Parson, under the title of A Priest to the Templea deliberate capitalizing on the success of The Temple. As a Cambridge don, Oley was particularly interested in Herberts midlife crisis and career change, still a matter of speculation and gossip in the colleges.

By his early death Herbert escaped the distress of civil war, the execution of Charles I and the suppression of his kind of moderate Anglicanism during the Commonwealth. In 1670, ten years after monarchy and the Church of England were restored, Izaak Walton published The Life of Mr. George Herbert, to whose painstaking researches the present book owes a great deal.

But Amy Charles, though she established the facts of Herberts life with scrupulous care, only occasionally and incidentally referred them to his poetry. That is the main concern of Joseph Summerss George Herbert: His Religion and Art.

In this book I have tried to bring together life and poetry, history and literary criticism as closely as possible. The reason for doing this is commanding enough. The circumstances of a poets life and times are the soil in which the work is rootednot just the outward and material circumstances but also, and still more, the inward patterns of thought and feeling prevailing in the poets world. Understanding ). Palmers work has withered on the vine. But it leaves behind it an all-important warning: namely that while Herberts poems obviously and confessedly arise from his life-experiences, only in a very few instances can we even guess responsibly exactly when they were written. A poem can recollect. It can take its cue from other literature or from pondering on things in the world which are by no means special or unique to the poet and, far from occurring just at one particular moment, are around all the time. In Herberts case, things he learned and felt as a child were often a source of his adult meditations, and influences from the public church liturgy which ordered his years and accompanied him throughout his life could come to the point of his pen at any moment in any year. Above all, occasions of sorrow and happiness, regret, sensual pleasure, hope and resignation arise in the ordinary course of day-to-day life, often and over and over again. Most of us let them pass, but the poet seizes upon them and with truthfulness and imaginative craftan interesting and demanding combinationmakes them into works of art. These are the points, common to humanity at large, at which Herberts readers feel closest to him: points at which his accuracy and sympathy make him, they may feel, a friend.

The point of knowing about Herberts life and embedding his poems in it, as I have done, is not to imitate Palmers flawed method. Rather, the biographical structure of this book maps out the ground which produced the poetry. Poetry comes from life: from the contemplative

But times differ: occasions of shame, fear or pleasure can vary from one generation to another. So my introduction, Herberts World, describes important features of his historical context: the Church, the Bible, God, spirituality and poetry. After that, the course of his life takes over until the final chapters about his afterlife.

The spelling is modernized in this book, but not the punctuation. Herberts differs only slightly from our own, so the question of whether to keep it or not is nicely balanced. Since the whole purpose of this book is to make Herbert familiar to the modern reader, I believe that modernized spelling enhances accessibility and fluent reading, while removing slight difficulties andthe last thing one wantsthe possibility of an inappropriate air of quaintness.