—George Herbert
I had never read anything of his and asked Laurel who he was: “Love (III) is the most well known poem by George Herbert. He was a seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, a generation after John Donne. T. S. Eliot brought both Donne and Herbert back to prominence. In 1971, while I was visiting England (on $5.00 a day), I made a little pilgrimage from London down to Salisbury, and from there to Herbert’s little stone church in nearby Bemerton. Unlike Donne, Herbert wrote only religious poems, and arranged them beautifully in his book, The Temple. Ralph Vaughn Williams’s Five Mystical Songs is from The Temple. George Herbert has been my favorite poet since my teens.”
Laurel Hicks, you are making my day!
Martha Ullman West
Like Laurel, I am deeply fond of the poems of George Herbert, but I’d like to expand a bit on her statement about T.S. Eliot bringing him and John Donne, whose work I love even more, back to prominence. I’m quite sure the course I took at Barnard College in 1957 in Milton and Seventeenth Century poets had been offered since the founding of the college. Milton, I must admit, made me feel like Eliot’s “patient etherised upon a table,” but Herbert and Donne fed my soul.
Never mind, what matters is the wonderful pairing of the lovely photograph of the chairs and Herbert’s tribute to agape.
Philip Bowser
Powerful combination of ingredients, proving text and imagery can marry.