Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast. This week I'm going to talk about George Herbert.

George Herbert, who was born in Wales in 1593. I'll give you a quick biog, shall I? Yeah, born in Wales 1593 to quite a posh well-off family. His dad died when he was three.

His mother was quite an influential figure, a big friend of John Don, the other great poet of the time,

but more of that on another podcast. And John Don read the sermon at George Herbert's mother's funeral.

George became an important figure then at Cambridge.

He did incredibly well.

He got the job of public orator at Cambridge,

which was a high-profile post, which led him into politics.

He became an MP.

And then suddenly it all stops.

Suddenly, he decided he wanted to be an Anglican vicar.

We don't know whether things went wrong with his political career or if it was just a

religious conviction. So that's what he did. Now, he became a priest and ended up in the parish

of Bermerton in Wiltshire. When he was at Cambridge, he'd written quite a lot of poetry, a lot of it in Latin,

but happily for us, quite a bit in English.

And while he was at Bermerton as a vicar, he polished that poetry upwrote, several more,

and he put it all together into a collection called The Temple.

And he sent this to a mate to be published.

And then George died.

Sadly, why do people always say sadly when they talk about people dying?

You know, it's sadly, generally speaking, for everyone.

Anyway, especially for George.

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