Book of a lifetime: Poems of George Herbert

From The Independent archive: Paul Bailey on the enduring humanity and curiosity in the verse of the great metaphysical poet

What I love in Herbert’s poetry is its sense of the luminosity of the ordinary (Getty)

There are two books I cannot contemplate living without. The first is Dickens’s Great Expectations and the second the Poems of George Herbert. I have taken my little Oxford World’s Classics edition of the latter, bought in 1957, everywhere I have ever been. It has sustained, delighted and moved me in the heat of Australia and the ferocious cold of the American northwest. Herbert is the most sweet-tempered of the great Metaphysical poets and perhaps the most subtle too. Consider these lines from “Giddinesse”:

“Surely if each one saw another’s heart /There would be no commerce /No sale or bargain passe; all would disperse /And live apart.”

That might be the plot, in miniature, of many a novel, good and bad, for the Reverend George Herbert is no intellectual slouch. He thinks – you can almost hear him thinking – about what he is saying so memorably, so beautifully. He argues with himself and, occasionally, with his God: