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The Works of George Herbert
The Wordsworth Poetry Library comprises the works of the greatest English-speaking poets, as well as many lesser-known poets. Each collection has a specially commissioned introduction.
272 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1941
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About the author
George Herbert
502 books140 followersGeorge Herbert (1593-1633) was a Welsh-born English poet and orator. Herbert's poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognized as "a pivotal figure: enormously popular, deeply and broadly influential, and arguably the most skillful and important British devotional lyricist."
Born into an artistic and wealthy family, Herbert received a good education that led to his admission in 1609 as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Herbert excelled in languages, rhetoric and music. He went to university with the intention of becoming a priest, but when eventually he became the University's Public Orator he attracted the attention of King James I and may well have seen himself as a future Secretary of State. In 1624 and briefly in 1625 he served in Parliament. Never a healthy man, he died of consumption at the early age of 39.
Born into an artistic and wealthy family, Herbert received a good education that led to his admission in 1609 as a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, Herbert excelled in languages, rhetoric and music. He went to university with the intention of becoming a priest, but when eventually he became the University's Public Orator he attracted the attention of King James I and may well have seen himself as a future Secretary of State. In 1624 and briefly in 1625 he served in Parliament. Never a healthy man, he died of consumption at the early age of 39.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 20, 2020
I loved this collection. It had his main work "The Temple" (which every Christian ought to read) as well as some smaller works.
Herbert's poetry hits at the heart of the Christian. He's a masterful poet and the way he constructs his poetry is really interesting as well as having great, deeper theological content.
Herbert's poetry hits at the heart of the Christian. He's a masterful poet and the way he constructs his poetry is really interesting as well as having great, deeper theological content.
May 21, 2025
Roses and lillies speak Thee, and to make
A pair of cheeks of them, is Thy abuse.
Why should I women’s eyes chrystal take?
Such poor invention burns in their low mind,
Whose fire is wild, and doth not upward go
To praise, and on Thee, Lord, some ink bestow.
Open the bones, and you shall nothing find
In the best face but filth; when, Lord, in Thee
The beauty lies in the discovery.
A pair of cheeks of them, is Thy abuse.
Why should I women’s eyes chrystal take?
Such poor invention burns in their low mind,
Whose fire is wild, and doth not upward go
To praise, and on Thee, Lord, some ink bestow.
Open the bones, and you shall nothing find
In the best face but filth; when, Lord, in Thee
The beauty lies in the discovery.
August 9, 2019
5 stars for his marvelous poems on the Psalms, and for his magnificent poem "Redemption," which has always been a favorite of mine.
April 9, 2013
Some very striking religious poetry including acknowledgement and respect of some non-Christian religions.
In some ways, more powerful than John Donne.
In some ways, more powerful than John Donne.
February 11, 2024
“Would thou both eat thy cake and have it?” Suddenly the old expression makes sense when I read it in George Herbert, and I wonder if the expression was wrongly reversed at some point in our development, rendering it baffling to modern ears.
Herbert was an early seventeenth-century poet. He was also an orator and priest. I am not sure how the Church of England had a priest, but I imagine religious structures were still a little uncertain in the early days of Anglicanism.
George Herbert is thought to have behaved decently towards his parishioners, bringing food and clothing to the needy. Of course we have to take such stories with a grain of salt, as sources are not always reliable.
We know from our own time that altruists often prove to have less worthy motives, especially religious ones. Mother Theresa revered poverty, rather than seeking to help people rise above it. The Salvation Army uses its help to force a good deal of Christianity down the throats of homeless people, and is notoriously homophobic.
Many Christian charities have opposed the use of condoms in Africa, even while AIDS ran riot. And what causes do those Muslim charities support, the ones who drop constant bags through my letterbox, asking for clothing? Does the money go exclusively to Muslim countries, and if so, is this not promoting one in-group at the expense of another?
Of course all altruistic causes come with an agenda, whether you are an organiser, manager, donor, member, employee or volunteer. The trick is to ensure that your agenda does not cause more harm than good.
That is a long aside. Let us be charitable, and assume that Herbert was a decent enough man. We can certainly speculate that the recipients of his help received it with a good deal of talk about God.
During his short life, Herbert had no time to be a prolific poet. The poems fill 214 pages in my copy, and that is including title pages and blank pages. Nonetheless all but six pages are dedicated to religious verse, and even the six pages of ‘secular’ poems are interlaced with allusions to Herbert’s god.
Admittedly Herbert is very varied in his approach to the subject. He covers numerous angles, and adopts a wide variety of forms of metre and rhythm in his verse. Nonetheless the collection does have a one-note feel about it, and I find something creepy about the way devout Christians obsess about the blood (or ‘bloude’ as Herbert would say) of their crucified deity.
I am surprised to note that Herbert married, and had affection for his wife, as his love poems are all dedicated to God, even the sonnets. Poor Mrs Herbert does not get any poetry made in her honour. It was an arranged marriage, so perhaps the relationship stopped at affection.
Herbert’s love of his god seems to have been more of a struggle than he might perhaps have admitted. The poet suffered from terrible health problems, and died of tuberculosis at the age of 39. In ‘The Temple’, the collection of poems that takes up most of his book, there are no less than five poems called ‘Affliction’.
Occasionally Herbert seems to be pleading with his god for succour and support, in much the same way that a lover might plead with a proud woman. ‘To his Coy Deity’, perhaps. As when Christ cries out on the cross asking why God has forsaken him, we may well guess that something has gone wrong here, and that Herbert’s god is not looking after him as well as can be expected.
None of this diminishes Herbert’s faith, of course, and he is always ready to make excuses for his god. Clearly the suffering is intended to remove his vices and bad thinking to make him more worthy of his god. Such is Herbert’s reasoning.
If the subject matter and the moralising in Herbert’s poetry is simplistic, he does at least benefit from living in a time when poetry was much more playful than it often is today. Herbert simply loves writing poems with a little verbal trickery in them.
The most famous of those poems is ‘Easter Wings’, where the two verses shrink in the middle to reflect mankind’s or Herbert’s shrinking world due to sin, and then widen again symmetrically at the end of the verse to show his expanding feelings due to God. Turn the poem sideways and it looks like two wings.
Look at the capitalised words in ‘Our Life is Hid with Christ in God’ and you get a hidden message beginning with ‘Our life is hid’. He has literally hidden something in a poem about hiding. Another poem plays with the fact that ‘Mary’ is an anagram of ‘Army’. In Paradise the poem talks about pruning. Here Herbert prunes a letter off the previous word that ended a line, thereby fitting the style to the content.
It is a pity there are not more fun verses like this. While George Herbert can certainly write some fetching verse, the constant preaching about his god eventually becomes tiresome. His verse is best appreciated by either Christians, or by people who dip into poetry, rather than trying to read an entire anthology.
Herbert was an early seventeenth-century poet. He was also an orator and priest. I am not sure how the Church of England had a priest, but I imagine religious structures were still a little uncertain in the early days of Anglicanism.
George Herbert is thought to have behaved decently towards his parishioners, bringing food and clothing to the needy. Of course we have to take such stories with a grain of salt, as sources are not always reliable.
We know from our own time that altruists often prove to have less worthy motives, especially religious ones. Mother Theresa revered poverty, rather than seeking to help people rise above it. The Salvation Army uses its help to force a good deal of Christianity down the throats of homeless people, and is notoriously homophobic.
Many Christian charities have opposed the use of condoms in Africa, even while AIDS ran riot. And what causes do those Muslim charities support, the ones who drop constant bags through my letterbox, asking for clothing? Does the money go exclusively to Muslim countries, and if so, is this not promoting one in-group at the expense of another?
Of course all altruistic causes come with an agenda, whether you are an organiser, manager, donor, member, employee or volunteer. The trick is to ensure that your agenda does not cause more harm than good.
That is a long aside. Let us be charitable, and assume that Herbert was a decent enough man. We can certainly speculate that the recipients of his help received it with a good deal of talk about God.
During his short life, Herbert had no time to be a prolific poet. The poems fill 214 pages in my copy, and that is including title pages and blank pages. Nonetheless all but six pages are dedicated to religious verse, and even the six pages of ‘secular’ poems are interlaced with allusions to Herbert’s god.
Admittedly Herbert is very varied in his approach to the subject. He covers numerous angles, and adopts a wide variety of forms of metre and rhythm in his verse. Nonetheless the collection does have a one-note feel about it, and I find something creepy about the way devout Christians obsess about the blood (or ‘bloude’ as Herbert would say) of their crucified deity.
I am surprised to note that Herbert married, and had affection for his wife, as his love poems are all dedicated to God, even the sonnets. Poor Mrs Herbert does not get any poetry made in her honour. It was an arranged marriage, so perhaps the relationship stopped at affection.
Herbert’s love of his god seems to have been more of a struggle than he might perhaps have admitted. The poet suffered from terrible health problems, and died of tuberculosis at the age of 39. In ‘The Temple’, the collection of poems that takes up most of his book, there are no less than five poems called ‘Affliction’.
Occasionally Herbert seems to be pleading with his god for succour and support, in much the same way that a lover might plead with a proud woman. ‘To his Coy Deity’, perhaps. As when Christ cries out on the cross asking why God has forsaken him, we may well guess that something has gone wrong here, and that Herbert’s god is not looking after him as well as can be expected.
None of this diminishes Herbert’s faith, of course, and he is always ready to make excuses for his god. Clearly the suffering is intended to remove his vices and bad thinking to make him more worthy of his god. Such is Herbert’s reasoning.
If the subject matter and the moralising in Herbert’s poetry is simplistic, he does at least benefit from living in a time when poetry was much more playful than it often is today. Herbert simply loves writing poems with a little verbal trickery in them.
The most famous of those poems is ‘Easter Wings’, where the two verses shrink in the middle to reflect mankind’s or Herbert’s shrinking world due to sin, and then widen again symmetrically at the end of the verse to show his expanding feelings due to God. Turn the poem sideways and it looks like two wings.
Look at the capitalised words in ‘Our Life is Hid with Christ in God’ and you get a hidden message beginning with ‘Our life is hid’. He has literally hidden something in a poem about hiding. Another poem plays with the fact that ‘Mary’ is an anagram of ‘Army’. In Paradise the poem talks about pruning. Here Herbert prunes a letter off the previous word that ended a line, thereby fitting the style to the content.
It is a pity there are not more fun verses like this. While George Herbert can certainly write some fetching verse, the constant preaching about his god eventually becomes tiresome. His verse is best appreciated by either Christians, or by people who dip into poetry, rather than trying to read an entire anthology.
November 28, 2023
"Betwixt two theeves I spend my utmost breath,
As he that for some robberie suffereth.
Alas! what have I stollen from you? Death.
Was ever grief like mine?"
Incredibly powerful and moving. I would like to study Christian poetry more!
As he that for some robberie suffereth.
Alas! what have I stollen from you? Death.
Was ever grief like mine?"
Incredibly powerful and moving. I would like to study Christian poetry more!
January 14, 2018
One of the most soul nourishing reads of my life. Highly recommended. Especially check out his poem "The Sacrifice". "The Windows" was my favorite. But there are many.
April 14, 2019
i read this purely to fill-in some gaps from my english literature programme but, let's be frank, secular poetry is not my thing
Read
November 6, 2021I don’t know how to rate this. I liked some of the devices he uses — kind of makes things like a puzzle or secret to find.
It was interesting in a historical literature way.
It was interesting in a historical literature way.
March 5, 2022
The most challenging book I think I’ve ever read.
August 12, 2016
I discovered the poetry of George Herbert in a university British literature class, and it was a delightful discovery. George Herbert (1593-1633) was an Anglican clergyman who wrote metaphysical poetry – poems that address the mind and stimulate the imagination. Herbert’s poems, often written in first person, focus on his devotion to and relationship with God and are very personal and reflective in nature. It is as if Herbert is baring his soul, revealing his spiritual thoughts and emotions, even struggles, about God and his relationship with Him. I found many of the poems I read to be moving, uplifting, and thought-provoking. (You can view several of George Herbert’s poems here.) Herbert explores the deep subjects of love, death, sin, grief, and worship artistically yet simply. Herbert’s poems could prove to be challenging to the non-religious reader, but to a Christian, they speak to the heart and draw the mind toward God and His attributes. Reading Herbert’s poems is almost like reading some of the Psalms; they generate thoughts of humble repentance and submission, praise, and worship toward God.
Herbert was a religious man who was also a talented poet, and it seems he took both roles seriously – why not merge the two? Herbert believed that his talent for poetry was a gift from God, and he wanted his work to give honor to God without bringing praise to himself. In “Providence,” he states that it is man’s duty to praise God and to tell of His deeds. He says that God’s other creatures would willingly speak or write of God’s greatness, if they could, but Man is the only one to whom God gave the ability to do so.
Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Only to Man thou has made known thy ways,
And put the pen alone into his hand,
And made him secretary of thy praise.
He goes on to explain that when anyone fails to praise God, it is a great sin because he is “robbing a thousand” who would willingly praise Him if they knew Him.
Although Herbert’s poetry deals with profound theological and philosophical topics, he addresses them with simple confidence rather than doubt, as a man who is fully convinced and comfortable with his beliefs. His poetry reflects a Calvinistic view of God’s sovereignty and man’s depravity, a relationship in which God is always the initiator and man is the recipient. This view of God is not troublesome to Herbert; he holds a high view of God and rightly understands man’s sinful condition and his weakness and dependence on God for everything. Some recurring themes in Herbert’s poems are: repentance and pleas for mercy; God’s work of love and grace in the heart of a sinner by which He grants them faith and salvation; willing worship of and service to God; and the ongoing struggle to mortify self and submit to God’s will. In a number of poems, Herbert speaks of the temporary nature of life, and the eternal state that the believer has to look forward to.
Herbert’s poetry uses a great deal of imagery and metaphor. He speaks of life as a journey; of man as a window, a flower in a garden, or a building; of a heart as an altar. One that I really like is the sonnet entitled “Prayer 1,” which is a list of metaphorical phrases that describe what prayer is and what it means. “Redemption” is also metaphorical, being an allegory that depicts Christ’s death for his people. I suggest that as you read Herbert’s poems, look for his use of symbols and metaphors. They are very effective in making an idea stick in your mind.
I highly recommend the poetry of George Herbert to the Christian reader for its beauty and its content. Outside of the Psalms and hymns, it is unusual to read theological themes expressed poetically. His poems are fairly easy to understand (for poetry, that is!), they are interesting, memorable and beautifully crafted, and they express both deep spiritual emotion and true Biblical concepts.
I also discovered a hymn written by Herbert in our church hymnal; here’s the first verse of it:
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in anything ,
To do it as for thee.
Herbert was a religious man who was also a talented poet, and it seems he took both roles seriously – why not merge the two? Herbert believed that his talent for poetry was a gift from God, and he wanted his work to give honor to God without bringing praise to himself. In “Providence,” he states that it is man’s duty to praise God and to tell of His deeds. He says that God’s other creatures would willingly speak or write of God’s greatness, if they could, but Man is the only one to whom God gave the ability to do so.
Of all the creatures both in sea and land
Only to Man thou has made known thy ways,
And put the pen alone into his hand,
And made him secretary of thy praise.
He goes on to explain that when anyone fails to praise God, it is a great sin because he is “robbing a thousand” who would willingly praise Him if they knew Him.
Although Herbert’s poetry deals with profound theological and philosophical topics, he addresses them with simple confidence rather than doubt, as a man who is fully convinced and comfortable with his beliefs. His poetry reflects a Calvinistic view of God’s sovereignty and man’s depravity, a relationship in which God is always the initiator and man is the recipient. This view of God is not troublesome to Herbert; he holds a high view of God and rightly understands man’s sinful condition and his weakness and dependence on God for everything. Some recurring themes in Herbert’s poems are: repentance and pleas for mercy; God’s work of love and grace in the heart of a sinner by which He grants them faith and salvation; willing worship of and service to God; and the ongoing struggle to mortify self and submit to God’s will. In a number of poems, Herbert speaks of the temporary nature of life, and the eternal state that the believer has to look forward to.
Herbert’s poetry uses a great deal of imagery and metaphor. He speaks of life as a journey; of man as a window, a flower in a garden, or a building; of a heart as an altar. One that I really like is the sonnet entitled “Prayer 1,” which is a list of metaphorical phrases that describe what prayer is and what it means. “Redemption” is also metaphorical, being an allegory that depicts Christ’s death for his people. I suggest that as you read Herbert’s poems, look for his use of symbols and metaphors. They are very effective in making an idea stick in your mind.
I highly recommend the poetry of George Herbert to the Christian reader for its beauty and its content. Outside of the Psalms and hymns, it is unusual to read theological themes expressed poetically. His poems are fairly easy to understand (for poetry, that is!), they are interesting, memorable and beautifully crafted, and they express both deep spiritual emotion and true Biblical concepts.
I also discovered a hymn written by Herbert in our church hymnal; here’s the first verse of it:
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things thee to see,
And what I do in anything ,
To do it as for thee.
May 14, 2012
Second full read through his works. Herbert continues to be one of my favorite poets. It has been said that he is another David, and I think it's true. Honest, hurting, beautiful, faithful, full of Scripture, true poetry.
January 14, 2016
selections
January 29, 2016
language is a beautiful thing.
January 5, 2018
WHEN devotions could not pierce
Thy silent eares;
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse
My breast was full of fears
And disorder:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
SWEET day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie:
The dew shall weep thy fall to night;
For thou must die.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
Thy silent eares;
Then was my heart broken, as was my verse
My breast was full of fears
And disorder:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
SWEET day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridall of the earth and skie:
The dew shall weep thy fall to night;
For thou must die.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
February 13, 2019
The common man's poet par excellence. Herbert has a compassionate and penetrating understanding of the soul that comes out in poetry simple on the surface but complex and carefully executed. He moves with a word or a twist, subtly placed just where it should be but still somehow shocking and original. The Pulley, The Rest, Discipline and Love III are among my favorites of his one-page wonders. Highly Recommended.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews