From the sublime to the ridiculous

Byron Rogers

SUNDRIE PIECES by George Herbert Gregynog Press, £375, pp. 99, ISBN 0954194217 Hah, that's had you fumbling with your bi-focals, but no, there is no printing error. It is £375. The if, Press, which in 1923 started its eventful history with a volume of poems by George Herbert, has now 80 years later published a selection chosen by his kinsman the Earl of Powis, with engravings by Sarah van Nierkerk. This appears on the eve of the UK Fine Press Book Fair in the Oxford Brookes University on 1 November and it would require a battalion of the British Army to prise its purple quarter leather and gold lettering from hands which have never held anything like this before. My hands.

And I have not done, for there is more. Beyond this edition there is another, of 15 copies in dark purple goatskin on dyed calf, with endbands of purple and grey silk. These are £2,000 each, and we are in a world of little locked shops in cathedral cities where the post is registered and few of us go.

There is an irony in all this, for on his deathbed Herbert left instructions to his friend Nicholas Ferrar as to the disposal of these poems, written towards the end of his life and never published. 'Desire him to read [them], and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any poor dejected soul. let 'them] be made public; if not, let him burn [them]...' I can hear the small, embarrassed chuckle at the beauty of this hook. They may not have been like us, these men of the 17th century, one foot in the world, the other God alone knows where, but someone able to write like Herbert could not but have known the value of his work.

My favourite single verse is this, from The Flower': And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;

I once more smell the dew and rain, And relish versing: 0 my only It cannot be

That I am he

On whom thy tempests fell all night.

Across five centuries this is as fresh and as simple as the morning it was written, for there was such a morning and such a night. And it doesn't much matter what form that agony took: we can respond to a poet's delight in his creative power and to the ecstasy of a new day.

This needs saying, for in secular times we are increasingly unable to respond to the experiences out of which the poetry came. How can we, who have never addressed or quarrelled with the God with whom the men of this time, not just priests but generals, were on such terms? There is a sentence by Christopher Hill in God's Englishman that sums up the gulf between us and them: 'God, who had been so close to Oliver Cromwell, withdrew into the infinite recesses of Newtonian space.' The result is that to respond to the poetry we have to take it out of context. Herbert thought he was leaving a spiritual manual, but what we can value is its drama and craft.

There is a quiet at the centre of Herbert's verse, in the dying monosyllables of the echo in Heaven: But are there cares and business with the pleasure?

Leisure.

Light, joy and leisure; but shall they persever? Ever.

And in 'The Collar', where the priest threatens to rebel against his discipline, huffing and puffing about what he will do (in Herbert's dialogues with God, his kinsman notes, Herbert does most of the talking), there is this gentle close: But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild At every word,

Me thought I heard one calling, Child! And I replied, My Lord,

Such poems suggest limewash and dark oak and flowers, the sort of beautifully severe church to which at the end of his life Herbert had come, and where in time all its familiar images were to go into the verse: the key, the porch, the monuments. Bemerton, wrote his biographer Izaak Walton, was a poor parish, but Lord Powis. who consulted a local estate agent's prospectus, found the vicarage had ten bedrooms, and breezily adds an exclamation mark. He adds another when he even more breezily describes his editorial methods: 'I have tried to keep in the good ones and to bin the bad ones!' But then Powis is family after all. Able to dedicate this book 'To all those past and present who work and pray for Jesus to make the entire nation of Wales His kingdom', he also does not share the distance some will feel existing between them and Herbert.

This allows him to add one bizarre touch: Herbert's collected sayings, which after his death were published as Outlandish Proverbs, and which his kinsman now prints, two to a page. The effect of this is extraordinary, for you read the high-minded verse only to collide on every single page with something like 'It is very hard to shave an egg' and 'A dead bee maketh no honey.' The only other time I saw this done was in the Rover comic. when tales of derring-do came with facts about volcanoes and high-jump records. 'He that will learn to pray, let him go to sea.' Yes, fair enough. The mysterious, the trite, the sardonic are all included, and, in the mouths of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, would have made a great comic interlude. 'The dog gnaws the bone because, Dud, he cannot swallow it.' So true, Pete. And one flower makes no garland.' Etc. etc, on a park bench. Herbert who wrote all these down comes over as an odd, very human man.

Whose book I am turning over and over in my hands, conscious that it is worth more than my car.