Why 17th-Century Poet George Herbert Is Making a Comeback

"I blame George Herbert for me be­coming a Christian," Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, an Anglican priest, wrote recently for The Guardian. Reading Herbert left Threlfall-Holmes

with the sense that I was standing on a cliff, staring out to sea, hearing marvelous tales of lands beyond the horizon and wondering if they were, after all, just fairy tales or whether the intensity with which the tales were told was evidence that the teller had indeed seen a barely imagined kingdom.

I know exactly what she means. I can't claim such a dramatic encounter, but I do blame the great 17th-century English priest and poet for deepening my journey in Christ and leading me into a liturgical church. Keep reading

Among my favorite works of 17th-century Anglican priest and poet George Herbert is A Priest to the Temple, or The Country Parson, published in 1652. It is full of practicable wisdom as useful today as it was in the 17th-century. A more readable version of this work for those unaccustomed to 17th-century spelling can be found here. Herbert also collected proverbial sayings. Two of my favorites are "every path has a puddle" and "I gave a mouse a hole and she became my heir." For the entire collection of proverbs, see English Poems of George Herbert Together with His Collection of Proverbs Entitled Jaculum Prudentium. A number of Herbert's poems have been set to music and used as hymns. Herbert himself played the viola.