GESIMAS · 31 MARCH & LENT · 27 FEBRUARY Priests & Poets · The Caroline Poet-Divines
John Donne & George Herbert
Priests & Poets · The Caroline Poet-Divines · d. 1631 & 1633
Donne — DUN · Bemerton — BEM-er-ton · Herbert — HER-bert · Walton — WAWL-ton · Metaphysical — met-ah-FIZ-ih-kul · Vaughan — VAWN · Crashaw — KRASH-aw · Ferrar — FER-ar
O God, who didst give to thy servants John and George the double gift of poetry and priesthood, that they might praise thee in the language the heart speaks when the mind has done its work; Grant that we may hear in their verses the same voice that speaks in the psalms, and find in their priestly lives the pattern of that calling which is both sacrifice and song; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
They are the two greatest poets of the Anglican tradition, and both of them were priests. John Donne (DUN) was Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral from 1621 until his death in 1631, and his sermons — one hundred and sixty of them survive — are the supreme achievement of the Anglican pulpit, combining theological precision, psychological penetration, and a prose style of such elaborated richness that they remain unmatched in the history of English preaching. George Herbert (HER-bert) was rector of the tiny parish of Bemerton (BEM-er-ton) in Wiltshire from 1630 until his death in 1633, and his collected poems — the Temple, published posthumously by Nicholas Ferrar (FER-ar) of Little Gidding — are the supreme achievement of Anglican devotional poetry, a complete account of the soul’s conversation with God rendered in verse of such compressed perfection that T. S. Eliot called Herbert one of the two or three most important poets in the English language. Their feast days fall in the gravest season of the year — Donne on 31 March in Gesimas or early Lent, Herbert on 27 February in Lent — which is precisely right, for both men knew the interior dark as well as they knew the light, and their greatest works are exercises in the soul’s honest struggle rather than the saint’s untroubled praise.
Donne spent the first half of his life as a man of the world — secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, secret husband of Ann More, author of the erotic Songs and Sonnets — and the second half as a priest and preacher of extraordinary power. The transition was not clean; the man who preached at St Paul’s still bore the entire weight of his secular life, and his religious poetry — the Holy Sonnets, the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, the great sermons — draws its force precisely from the tension between the sensualist and the priest, the man who knew the world and had not been able to give it up easily, and the man who knew God and could not give him up at all. Death, be not proud; No man is an island; Ask not for whom the bell tolls; Batter my heart, three-personed God — these are not the words of a man who came easily to faith or who found it comfortable when he arrived. They are the words of a man who knows that faith costs everything, costs the whole of the self, costs precisely what he found hardest to give, and who offers it anyway, in the full awareness of what it costs. He preached his own funeral sermon, Death’s Duel, six weeks before he died, rising from his sickbed to preach in his own winding-sheet, a monument to the last performance of the body that had always been both his glory and his mortification.
George Herbert came to the priesthood late, after years of seeking preferment at court, and the Temple is in part the record of that journey — the poems titled The Collar, Affliction, Denial, Love (III) are among the most honest accounts of the soul’s resistance to God in the English language. Love (III) — Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back — is the poem that Simone Weil said she would repeat whenever headaches made it impossible to pray, and which came to her in an experience she described as the presence of Christ himself. Herbert’s poems are deceptively simple in their forms — many of them follow the shape of the BCP services they meditate on, many of them work in the plain syllabic metres of the English hymn — but their simplicity is the simplicity that lies on the other side of great complexity, not the absence of difficulty but its resolution. He was at Bemerton for only three years before he died of consumption at the age of thirty-nine, and he spent those three years doing what the Temple describes: reading the Office twice daily, catechising the poor, visiting the sick, keeping the church clean and the services ordered, playing his music in the evenings. Izaak Walton (WAWL-ton), who wrote his life, records that he sent the manuscript of the Temple to Ferrar with the message that if he thought it might turn to the advantage of any dejected soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burn it.
Donne and Herbert are the supreme expression of what the Anglican tradition has always known and the Puritan tradition has always found difficult: that the arts belong to God, that beauty is a theological category, that the poem and the sermon and the liturgy and the music are not decorations added to the faith but forms through which the faith knows itself most fully. The Metaphysical (met-ah-FIZ-ih-kul) poets — Donne, Herbert, Henry Vaughan (VAWN), Richard Crashaw (KRASH-aw) — are the poets of the Anglican golden age, and all of them are in some degree priests or priest-adjacent, all of them writing from within the liturgical tradition of the BCP, all of them using the imagery of Cranmer’s prayers and Tyndale’s Bible as the raw material of their poetry. The Lauds service we prayed this morning and the collects we speak throughout the year are in this tradition — the tradition that says that how we speak to God matters, that the rhythm and the image and the word are not incidental to the prayer but constitutive of it, that the God who made language can be spoken to in language at its most exacting as well as in the simplest cry of the heart. George Herbert knew this when he wrote Love bade me welcome. John Donne knew it when he stood in his winding-sheet in St Paul’s and preached his own death.
O Almighty God, who by thy servants John and George didst show that the same soul can be both priest and poet, both preacher and singer, and that no gift of beauty is wasted when it is offered to thee; Grant that we may bring to thee in our prayers whatever art and language and imagination we possess, knowing that the God who was the Word delights in the words his creatures make; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.