As we remarked this past Ash Wednesday, T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), in his 1946 Sewanee Review essay “What Is Minor Poetry,” takes up the “very interesting case” of George Herbert (1593–1633). What is it about Herbert that makes him so “very interesting”? Eliot’s theme in the essay is that of the “anthologized poet,” the poet whose work many people know in the typical anthology’s presentation of poems like bite-sized tapas at a Spanish bar.

Herbert, he says, might readily be dismissed as minor on the basis of the eccentric small-plate works with which people are likely to be familiar as anthology pieces: “Easter Wings,” for example, or “Love (III).” Given only that exposure to Herbert, the reader comes away with a sense of him as a mildly striking religious oddity, with none of the suavity of, for example, his contemporary Robert Herrick (whose “The Argument of His Book” appeared here only yesterday).

On reading Herbert’s life’s work, “The Temple,” however, Eliot writes, “ What has the appearance at first of a succession of beautiful but separate lyrics, comes to reveal itself as a continued religious meditation within an intellectual framework.” In other words, Herbert’s poetic vision is larger, more coherent, more ambitious, more important, than the sum of his small poems.

But suppose that, unlike Eliot, when we think of Herbert, we think not of the whole body of his work, greater than the sum of its parts, but of the parts themselves. Indisputably we do better always, as readers, to know as much of any one worthy poet as we can, but what if we do think of Herbert in terms of only a few poems, and small ones at that? Are those poems so negligible in their scope that they somehow shrink his status in our minds?

Herbert himself, in today’s Poem of the Day, makes an argument for his brief religious verses. “Who says,” he protests at the poem’s opening, what makes a poem and what does not? In pentameter quintains, rhymed ababa, each stanza resolving on a tetrameter line, he asserts that truth itself is beauty, and that the simplest believer, in concert with his own Good Shepherd, may be a singer. His “Jordan” of baptism is a truer, and therefore more beautiful, river than any fancifully “purling stream.” And his God is a subject to raise any verse, however “plainly” it speaks, to sublimity. 

Jordan (I)
by George Herbert

Who says that fictions only and false hair
Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?
Is all good structure in a winding stair?
May no lines pass, except they do their duty
Not to a true, but painted chair?

Is it no verse, except enchanted groves
And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines?
Must purling streams refresh a lover’s loves?
Must all be veil’d, while he that reads, divines,
Catching the sense at two removes?

Shepherds are honest people; let them sing;
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for prime;
I envy no man’s nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme,
Who plainly say, my God, my King.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.