'Making Our Pillows Either Down, or Dust'

“Thus he lived and thus he died, like a Saint, unspotted of the world, full of alms-deeds, full of humility, and all the examples of a virtuous life . . .” 

Of how many poets could this be truly written? All the evidence suggests George Herbert was a genuinely good man, not a fire-breather but a humble soul. In The March of Literature (1939), Ford Madox Ford calls him “a gentle hymnalist” and praises his “wonderfully lucid simplicities.” In A Man Could Stand Up (1926), the third novel in Ford’s World War I tetralogy Parade’s End, his protagonist, Christopher Tietjens, meditates on Herbert. He describes another officer as a “fellow [who] spread seventeenth-century atmosphere across the landscape over which the sun’s rays were beginning to flood a yellow wash.” Ford continues: “What had become of the seventeenth century? And Herbert and Donne and Crashaw and Vaughan, the Silurist? . . . Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright, the bridal of the earth and sky!” That final sentence consists of the opening lines of Herbert’s "Virtue." 

The passage quoted at the top is from The Life of Mr. George Herbert (1670) by the poet’s friend Izaak Walton, best known for The Compleat Angler. Herbert died on this date, March 1, in 1633. On the Sunday before his death, Walton tells us Herbert called for his lyre, tuned it, and played and sang a verse from his own “Sunday”:

 

“The Sundaies of mans life,

Thredded together on times string,

Make bracelets to adorn the wife

Of the eternall glorious King.

On Sunday heavens gate stands ope:

Blessings are plentifull and rife,

More plentifull then hope.”

 

The next day, Herbert made his will. He left everything to his wife except for a Bible commentary bequeathed to one of his curates and his copy of St. Augustine to the other. In Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (2014), John Drury describes St. Augustine as “Herbert’s favourite and most congenial theologian, the philosopher of love and the author of the autobiographical Confessions which were a stimulus for Herbert’s autobiographical poetry.” Drury writes:

 

“He then said he was ready to die, and with the words ‘Lord, now receive my soul’ expired ‘without any apparent disturbance.’ He was a month short of his fortieth birthday.”

 

In his poem “Death,” Herbert speaks to death as though it were his sick neighbor, now recovering, or a friend long out of touch. The poem concludes with a typically homely image:

    

“Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust

                                                  Half that we have

                          Unto an honest faithfull grave;

Making our pillows either down, or dust.”