The ‘music at midnight’ of John Drury's title is neither the sound of George Herbert's lute, which he played beautifully, nor that of his song, but the simple remembrance, late at night, of a kindly deed. For Herbert, who was a gifted classicist and brilliant orator, well-chosen words, however delightful, were evanescent if they did not combine with a holy life to produce deeds of love:

John Drury, an Anglican priest, is a New Testament scholar whose skills were honed by working with the celebrated literary critic Frank Kermode on The Literary Guide to the Bible. His approach to Izaak Walton's well-known, adulatory Life of Mr George Herbert is cautious: it was published in 1670, nearly forty years after Herbert's death, when he could be presented as a role model for all that was best about the Church of England before the bitter events that led up to the Civil War. An earlier, and more reliable, brief life, by Barnabas Oley, who had known Herbert in Cambridge, was published in 1652 as an introduction to A Priest to the Temple. Modern scholarship has to a great extent established the facts of Herbert's life and given us close readings of his poems, but not brought the two together. Though it is clear that Herbert writes from the immediacy of personal experience, there are only a few landmarks to help us guess which poems relate to which experiences in his relatively uneventful biography. As with the Gospels and the life of Jesus, a discerning critique of later ideological influences which have shaped the way the story is told is immensely illuminating, but there is also much to be gained from a close reading of the poetical text as it presents itself to us. John Drury gives us both.

Drury shows it is not necessary to share Herbert's Christian faith to delight in his poetry. His mention of Vikram Seth's admiration for Herbert reminded me of an anecdote told by Michael Mayne, late Dean of Westminster, who, on a visit to Seth's home in Bemerton Rectory, spoke of ‘Love’ (III) (‘Love bade me welcome’, which Drury uses as a leitmotif). Seth, who is not a believer, immediately quoted the whole poem from memory. Despite his sympathy for the non-believer, Drury's writing is constantly illuminated by his knowledge of the Bible and the Church of England, especially The Book of Common Prayer (Herbert would have used the 1604 edition). Drury returns again and again to Herbert's love of simplicity: ‘Give me simplicity that I may live’. It struck me that the word Herbert, with his classical training, would have had in mind was ‘simplex’. In the Vulgate, Job is called ‘vir… simplex, et rectus, ac timens Deum, et recedens a malo’ (1.1: ‘that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil’; cf. Mt. 10.16: ‘simplices sicut colombes’, ‘harmless as doves’). ‘Simplicity’ of this kind (‘singleness of heart’) is a quality of saints. This was the ‘simplicity’ sought by the Rector of Bemerton.

The opposite of simplex is duplex (the origin of our ‘duplicitous’). As the Epistle of James says, ‘Vir duplex animo inconstans est in omnibus viis suis’ (1.8: ‘A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways’). Drury brings out how, all through his life, Herbert struggled against such ‘double-mindedness’. Herbert knew well that with his privileged background and early promotion to be Orator for Cambridge University, he could expect to rise to high public office. He enjoyed his ability to grace the big occasion with dazzling rhetoric. But there was another side to his character at war with his public persona: the simple devotion that drew him towards ordination and a country living. Twenty years after Herbert left Cambridge, Oley still remembered how the dons tut-tutted that he ‘lost himself in an humble way’. Drury brings out the extent to which Herbert himself might – to the end of his life – have agreed.

Readers of this journal will be particularly interested in Herbert's Anglicanism. It was a surprise to me that, unlike his mentor Lancelot Andrews, Herbert showed little appetite for study of the Christian Fathers – with the possible exception of Augustine. One place we do not find the country parson is in his study. Drury has to be brutally selective to keep his discussion of the poetry within bounds, but readers who know the Temple well will find some omissions questionable. The fact that ‘Aaron’ doesn't appear means some key insights into Herbert's understanding of his own priesthood are missed. The omission of ‘To All Angels and Saints’ means Drury does not stop to reflect on Herbert's longing directly to address Mary in prayer (as Roman Catholics do):

In ‘the Altar’, Herbert uses the Roman Catholic term (The Book of Common Prayer speaks only of ‘the Holy Table’), applying it to his heart. Herbert clearly felt the attraction of the Roman Catholicism in which John Donne, a friend of the family, had been brought up.

What is perhaps the central conflict in Herbert's poetry comes about, as Drury rightly notes, because he was very clever. Drury shows how highly attuned Herbert was from his schooldays at Westminster and then at Cambridge University, to seek out brilliant, and sometimes convoluted, language. Self-conscious delight in dazzling rhetoric is evident in both his mentor Lancelot Andrews and his older contemporary John Donne. Herbert was a master of taut metre, ambiguity and surprise. Taking his poetry apart, as Drury has to do, to show how it works, can become wearisome. The best-loved poems are the ones in which Herbert breaks through to the clarity and simplicity he came to prize above all rhetorical pyrotechnics – and these need no minute construal. They are, as Drury reminds us in this fine study, ‘heart-deep’.