Readers have found two very different sides of George Herbert. The first is George Herbert as saint. Starting with the posthumous publication of Herbert’s collected poems The Temple in 1633, he has been held up as a model of religious devotion and humility. The poet Henry Vaughan, for example, called Herbert "a most glorious saint and seer." Herbert gave up a potentially successful career at Cambridge and the king’s court in order to become the rector at a little parish in Salisbury, England. He restored the Bemerton church with his own funds. He wrote a book about his time as a priest known as The County Parson. This book has also been responsible for establishing Herbert’s reputation as a model of piety and goodness.
Herbert’s written work reveals a quite different figure. The speaker in “Affliction,” as in so many of Herbert’s poems, is consumed with self-doubt. He is religious, but he is constantly making mistakes and misunderstanding what God wants from him. Herbert’s speakers do not have all the answers. They don’t provide the reader with catechism, or correct doctrine. Instead, they reveal the emotional complexity of a life devoted to religion. Far from being saints, the speakers of Herbert’s poems are fully human. They make mistakes and they doubt. This is what gives Herbert’s poetry its power.
In line with the first image of Herbert as saint, some early critics of Herbert’s poetry tried to present his work as unchanging, sincere, and stable. They argued that his poems are straight-forward and lacking in irony. They provide resolution. Critics in the last few decades, by contrast, have emphasized the restlessness of Herbert’s poetry. Like “Affliction,” they say, Herbert’s poems are full of strange twists and turns. Rather than being perfect, the speakers of his poems are often stubborn and foolish. One might expect a devout poet like Herbert to provide a clear lesson at the end of his poems, but instead the reader is often left with more questions at the conclusion than at the beginning. The speakers of his poems are constantly revising and tweaking what they said earlier, just as the poems often circle back on themselves without clear resolution.
There is no single George Herbert, just as there are no cliches or easy answers in his poetry. This is one reason why his poetry is popular with religious and non-religious readers alike. These poems are both focused on religious topics and full of believable emotional complexity. In this way, the image of Herbert as saint and Herbert as human are not in conflict. His poems give a realistic portrait of the inward spiritual journey. The road does not lead straight upwards to enlightenment but is full of unexpected twists and turns.
