Maybe you don’t read poetry. But then maybe you haven’t been exposed to poetry by someone captured and captivated by the gospel like George Herbert (1593–1633).
You may not have read yet George Herbert’s poems—but some of our heroes of the faith did.
For example, Charles Spurgeon said “I love George Herbert from my very soul.” He and his wife enjoyed and recommended “a page or two of good George Herbert,” and she would read Herbert poems to him after Sunday evening church. She describes this time of her reading and her husband adding commentary:
I read on and on for an hour or more, till the peace of Heaven flows into our souls, and the tired servant of the King of kings loses his sense of fatigue, and rejoices after his toil. . . . [Charles’s] enjoyment of the book is all the greater that he has thus to explain and open out to me the precious truths enwrapped in Herbert’s quaint verse.
Richard Baxter wrote, “I must confess, after all, that next the Scripture poems, there are none so savoury to me, as Mr. George Herbert’s. . . . Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth a God, and whose business in the world is most with God.”
C. S. Lewis said that Herbert was “a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had ever read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment.”
Jim Scott Orrick, Professor of Literature and Culture at Boyce College, has done us a real service in putting together A Year with George Herbert: A Guide to Fifty-Two of His Best Loved Poems.
The links above take you to Amazon, but if you go to wipfandstock.com and use the coupon code GH365 you can get the book for a special discount of 40% off the retail price.
You can also download for free this PDF which contains Professor Orrick’s introduction and the first two poems (“The Altar” and “The Sacrifice”).
