James Boyd White “This Book of Starres”: Learning to Read George Herbert.
University of Michigan Press, 292 pages, $37.50
reviewed by Paul Dean
“Thus he lived, and thus he died like a saint, unspotted of the world, full of alms-deeds, full of humility, and all the examples of a virtuous life.” So Izaak Walton concluded his biographical sketch of Herbert, published in 1670, thirty-seven years after the poet’s death. Professor White tells us that he first encountered Herbert’s work when a pupil at Groton School, a high-minded establishment which inculcated genteel culture along English lines. Walton’s hagiographical image of Herbert seemed entirely appropriate in such an atmosphere. But Professor White soon discovered that there is another Herbert, the one who sent the manuscript of his poems to Nicholas Ferrar with the words, “Tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master”; the Herbert brilliantly characterized by Seamus Heaney, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1989, as a poet whose “antithetical pairings can be felt as emotional dilemmas as well as doctrinal cruxes, and can be experienced as the hinges and reflexes of awakened language.” It is this second Herbert who forms the principal subject of Professor White’s book.
Herbert’s distinctive quality may be grasped by considering the following (incomplete) quotation:
No more, I cried, shall
