George Herbert - another victim of the Orange Brick

There was a moment of quiet fury this morning when I was required to sing this from the Orange Brick (undignified even by an alt.,but then the editors had probably not heard of the author before, seeing as how he didn't play the guitar or have pimples but, more to the point, is well out of copyright, having been dead since 1633, so he's easy meat) -

Thou hast granted my appeal,

Thou hast heard me:

Thou didst note my ardent zeal;

Thou hast spared me

instead of this:

Thou hast granted my request,

Thou hast heard me:

Thou didst note my working breast;

Thou hast spared me


What upset the editors so much?  'Breast'?  Oh titter titter.  What next - St Patrick's Zealplate?

If it hadn't been for this, I wouldn't have been moved to refresh my memory of the poetry of George Herbert: not perhaps one of the greatest luminaries in the firmament of metaphysical poetry, but a pretty competent weaver of words and conceits, and a chum of John Donne and Sir Francis Bacon to boot, and still a poet on Eng. Lit. reading lists in the more respectable universities.

Here, more or less taken at random, is one of Herbert's poems:

A TRUE HYMN             

Joy, my Life, my Crown !

My heart was meaning all the day,

                        Somewhat it fain would say,

And still it runneth muttering up and down

With only this, My Joy, my Life, my Crown !

          Yet slight not those few words ;

    If truly said, they may take part

          Among the best in art :

The fineness which a hymn or psalm affords

Is, when the soul unto the lines accord.

          He who craves all the mind,

    And all the soul, and strength, and time,

          If the words only rhyme,

Justly complains that somewhat is behind

To make His verse, or write a hymn in kind.

          Whereas if the heart be moved,

    Although the verse be somewhat scant,

          God doth supply the want ;

As when the heart says, sighing to be approved,

"O, could I love !" and stops, God writeth, "Loved."

Herbert, already suffering from tuberculosis, took Holy Orders in 1630, and became priest of a parish in Wiltshire, where he wrote A Priest to the Temple (also known as The Country Parson), the full text of which can be found here: 

 http://anglicanhistory.org/herbert/parson.html

He died in 1633.  That could have been the end of this literary meandering, but for one thing. Just before he died, he is said to have given the manuscript of The Temple to Nicholas Ferrar, founder of a semi-monastic Anglican religious community at Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire. Little Gidding is a name familiar to those of us who've read a book or two.

And there are further ramifications.  Ralph Vaughan Williams set the words of a hymn by George Herbert in his Five Mystical Songs - Come, My Way, my Truth, my Life.  A version of that setting ("adapted"!) also appears in the Orange Brick, wrecked by the elimination of the two bars of music that separates the verses.  Whether Lady Ursula gave her consent to this bit of vandalism I don't know, but what was once beautiful and true to its origins has become banal and rather ugly to anyone who knows the originals.

I really cannot put myself inside the minds of people who do this sort of thing.  They have an arrogance and a disdain for the past which is quite breathtaking.  Their missionary zeal threatens the record of, and the continuity of, a cultural tradition which they don't even begin to understand. And I find zealots a bit worrying.  They have a habit, once they've got power, of chopping the heads off people who don't agree with them.

I can only paraphrase Charles Wesley, who, when he saw that people were pinching his hymns and distributing them without his permission, said that they could do so provided they didn't change his words - for he could not be held accountable for another man's doggerel.