Book Review: Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert

Abstract

Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert. By John Drury. Chicago, 111.: University of Chicago Press, 2014. xix + 396 pp. $35.00 (cloth).Late in this splendid literary biography, John Drury writes that achievement of candour and simplicity invited imitation. He had made poetry look as if anyone could do it so long as they did not put on airs: the deceptive appearance of an which concealed art (p. 285). Like the poetparson of Bemerton, Drury, through his elegant prose style, mastery of a wide variety of scholarly sources, attunement to poetry, and passion for Herbert the artist in all his complexity, makes it look easy. However, there are a number of reasons why no one before him has managed to write this book. Drury delivers a learned but accessible biography that offers the reader rich readings of the poetry and an invitation into the shifting landscape of early seventeenth-century England, when religious and political storms were brewing that would eventually, after Herbert's death, break into Civil War.George Herbert (1593-1633) poses a number of challenges as the subject of biography. He had a reputation for saintliness immediately upon his death, capitalized on by one of his early biographers, Izaak Walton, who made him a model clergyman of a lost golden age of the English Church. Herbert did not have a dramatic life. He spent his childhood and youth in intense study. Early in his career, he held a prestigious position as University Orator for Cambridge, making florid Latin and Greek speeches to visiting dignitaries. He struggled between choosing a prestigious court career and the ministiy, delaying his priestly ordination for years. He was often ill, and recovered in various country houses. Finally, in his late thirties, he married, was at last ordained priest, and received a living at Fugglestone and Bemerton, serving his parishioners faithfully for three years before succumbing to tuberculosis just shy of his fortieth birthday.The facts of Herbert's life alone do not make for scintillating reading; fortunately, Drury focuses on Herbert's rich inner life, his fascinating aristocratic family, and his friends, some of the brightest luminaries of his age (including Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, and Francis Bacon). Throughout, he gives excellent readings of the poems.Drury is the best of anyone who has written on Herbert's vocational crises, making a solid case from surviving letters that from his student days he was torn between a strong desire to take holy orders, serving the church either through parish ministry or theological scholarship, and the equally strong desire for secular preferment and a prestigious career at court. …