Herbert left it up to Ferrar to determine whether the poems were worth publishing at all if Ferrar didn’t like them, Herbert instructed, then he should consign them to the fire. Fearing that his days were numbered, Herbert had sent a manuscript containing his poems to a friend, the clergyman Nicholas Ferrar, who led the religious community at Little Gidding (which would later be written about by T. Well, that only appeared posthumously, following his death in 1633, aged just 39, from consumption. This much constitutes a brief but reasonably full summary of George Herbert’s biography in terms of his official work and his married life. In the same year he married Jane Danvers, after a courtship of just three days. Three years later he became an MP, but seems to have gone off the idea of a life in politics, for he later became a deacon, canon of Lincoln Cathedral, and then, in 1630, rector of Bemerton in Wiltshire. He became Public Orator at Cambridge in 1620.
George Herbert intended to go into the Church – he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge on a fellowship to train as a priest – but the secular life caught his attention. At age sixteen, Herbert sent his mother, who was named Magdalen (and who was friends with John Donne he would preach her funeral sermon in 1627), a letter announcing his calling as a poet enclosed were two devotional sonnets, his first known poetic efforts. Herbert also became an accomplished musician, learning to play the lute among other instruments. He studied at Westminster School, being taught by Lancelot Andrewes, influential bishop and one of the masterminds on the committee which translated the King James Version of the Bible. George Herbert was born in Powys, Wales, in 1593, into a wealthy and artistically gifted family.
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