George Herbert was born in Montgomery, Wales, in 1593, the fifth son of an aristocratic family with strong literary connections. His mother, Magdalen Herbert, was a noted patroness of learning and a close friend of John Donne. Educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, Herbert showed early brilliance and was appointed Public Orator of the university in 1620, a position that brought him to the attention of King James I and seemed to promise a distinguished career at court.
That worldly path did not hold. Through years of hesitation, illness, and what he understood as divine redirection, Herbert withdrew from courtly ambitions and was ordained a priest in the Church of England. In 1630 he accepted the small rural parish of Bemerton in Wiltshire, near Salisbury, where he served with quiet devotion until his death from tuberculosis in 1633 at the age of thirty-nine. His parishioners were mostly poor country people, and by all accounts he attended to them with genuine care, rising early for daily prayer and opening his house to those in need.
Shortly before he died, Herbert sent the manuscript of his English poems to his friend Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding with instructions to publish them or burn them as Ferrar saw fit. Ferrar published them that same year under the title *The Temple*. The collection maps the interior life of a soul in relationship with God — its resistances, consolations, arguments, and surrenders — through verse of extraordinary formal ingenuity and emotional honesty. Poems such as "Love (III)," "The Collar," and "Easter Wings" remain among the most searching devotional lyrics in the English language.
Herbert's influence on subsequent Christian poetry has been deep and lasting, shaping writers from Henry Vaughan in the seventeenth century to Simone Weil and Marilynne Robinson in the twentieth, all of whom found in his work a model of faith that neither flinches from difficulty nor mistakes eloquence for piety.