For the first time, John Drury convincingly integrates the life and
poetry of George Herbert, giving us in Music at Midnight the
definitive biography of the man behind some of the most famous
poems in the English Language. 'Love bade me welcome . . .' 'Teach
me my God and King . . .' George Herbert wrote, but never
published, some of the very greatest English poetry, recording in
an astonishing variety of forms his inner experiences of grief,
recovery, hope, despair, anger, fulfilment and - above all else -
love. He was born in 1593 and died at the age of 39 in 1633, before
the clouds of civil war gathered, his family aristocratic and his
upbringing privileged. He showed worldly ambition and seemed sure
of high public office and a career at court, but then for a time
'lost himself in a humble way', devoting himself to the restoration
of the church at Leighton Bromswold in Buckinghamshire and then to
his parish of Bemerton, three miles from Salisbury, whose cathedral
music he called 'my heaven on earth'. When in the year of his death
his friend Nicholas Ferrar, leader of the quasi-monastic community
at Little Gidding, published Herbert's poems under the title The
Temple, his fame was quickly established. Because he published no
English poems during his lifetime, and dating most of them exactly
is impossible, writing Herbert's biography is an unusual challenge.
In this book John Drury sets the poetry in the whole context of the
poet's life and times, so that the reader can understand the frame
of mind and kind of society which produced it, and depth can be
added to the narrative of Herbert's life. (T.S. Eliot: 'What we can
confidently believe is that every poem in the book [The Temple] is
in tune to the poet's experience.') His Herbert is not the saintly
figure who has come down to us from John Aubrey, but a man torn for
much of his life between worldly ambition and the spiritual life
shown to us so clearly through his writings. The result is the most
satisfying biography of this exceptional English poet yet written.
JOHN DRURY is Chaplain and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He
began as a biblical scholar, and while Dean of King's College,
Cambridge, worked with Frank Kermode on the Gospels for The
Literary Guide to the Bible, which sharpened his sense of the role
of imagination in the formation of the Gospel stories. He took this
interest further, and into the realm of Christian paintings and
their meaning, in Painting the Word, written while he was Dean of
Christ Church, Oxford. Music at Midnight is the culmination of a
lifetime's interest in Herbert, whose Complete Poetry he is now
editing for Penguin Classics.
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