Audiobook · read by volunteers
Selection from The Temple
George Herbert (1593–1633)
Read by David Barnes · 20 chapters · 35 min
About the book
George Herbert’s poems are small rooms in which a person speaks to God, sometimes with gratitude, sometimes with doubt, sometimes with something close to argument. This selection gathers twenty poems from The Temple, among them The Thanksgiving, The Agony and Good Friday, and gives a sense of the book’s range: devotion, struggle, humility and wit. Herbert was a priest, and his verses are remarkable for their clarity and precision, as well as for the ingenious ways he shapes images and sound. Short enough to be heard in well under an hour, the selection can be enjoyed as a sequence or one poem at a time. If you like poetry that is honest, musical and intimate, these poems from the seventeenth century still feel fresh. They reward slow, attentive listening, and many of them are short enough to be heard again at once.
Introduction
George Herbert (1593–1633) was a Welsh-born English poet, orator and priest. Throughout his life he wrote religious poems marked by precision of language, metrical variety and an inventive use of imagery. After a career at Cambridge, where he served as public orator, he turned to the Church and spent his final years as a country parson at Bemerton. His poems were gathered in The Temple, published shortly after his death in 1633.
The Temple is arranged as a kind of spiritual architecture, with poems on church practice, the life of the soul and the feelings of the believer. Herbert is one of the poets often grouped under the label metaphysical, though his style is plainer than many. The book also contains a few shaped poems that take a visual form on the page, which a listener cannot see. This brief recording offers twenty poems from it, read by a volunteer, and makes a good introduction to a poet admired by readers of every belief.
Many of the poems are very short, which makes the sequence ideal for repeated listening. Herbert’s ear for rhythm is excellent, and his plain words often hide unexpected depths. Even listeners who do not share his faith may be struck by the sincerity and intelligence with which he questions himself.
Twenty recordings, about 36 minutes in all, are the work of a LibriVox volunteer. It is a selection for a pause in the day: one or two poems at a time, with the rest saved for later. The selection opens with The Thanksgiving, The Agony and Good Friday, three poems that meditate on the Passion in Herbert’s characteristically plain words.
Public domain
George Herbert died in 1633: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive