When I was writing this, a friend came to visit with the news of a death.  It was shocking and unexpected and it stopped me in my tracks.  Coming back to my desk to think about books, I picked up John Drury’s beautiful and moving biography of the poet and Anglican priest, George Herbert.  I know – early seventeenth century poetry seems an odd thing to turn to at such a time, but bear with me.

Herbert, like anyone living in the seventeenth century was intimately acquainted with death. His father died when he was three, four of his nine brothers and sisters predeceased him. As a priest he tended the sick assiduously and he was himself dead from consumption shortly before his fortieth birthday; but not before he and his wife Jane had given a home to their three orphaned nieces.

Some modern attitudes to death, framed in the language of defiance, of wars waged, battles fought and victories won, recall the poetry of Herbert’s older contemporary, John Donne who wrote of death with hostility and contempt, ‘Death, be not proud…Death thou shalt die’.

Like Donne, Herbert believed, as a Christian, that the power of death to end all things had been destroyed by Christ on the Cross; but unlike Donne, Herbert speaks to death, as John Drury puts it, ‘on the level, addressing it with good-tempered familiarity.’, And in his poem Death, he recognises that it is not always unwelcome:

Whether or not we share his Christian faith, Herbert’s words are worth remembering.  Death will always be grievously sad, but it is not always unwelcome.  The Hospice Movement has done astonishing and wonderful work in helping people to meet death like this, with dignity and grace; and in enabling their families, who have often witnessed terrible suffering, to see death not always as an enemy but as an equal. 

The night-time Pause for Thought has less need for morning chirpiness than the Breakfast Show, so George Herbert is allowable. Here is Herbert’s Death in full. It was published in The Temple in 1633, the year he died, aged 39.

Death, thou wast once an uncouth hideous thing,
Nothing but bones,
The sad effect of sadder grones:
Thy mouth was open but thou couldst not sing.

For we consider’d thee as at some six
Or ten years hence,
After the loss of life and sense,,
Flesh being turn’d to dust, and bones to sticks.

We lookt on this side of thee, shooting short;
Where we did find
The shells of fledge souls left behind,
Dry dust, which sheds no tears, but may extort.

But since our Saviours death did put some blood
Into thy face;
Thou are grown fair and full of grace,
Much in request, much sought for, as a good.

For we do now behold thee gay and glad,
As at dooms-day:
When souls shall wear their new aray,
And all thy bones with beautie shall be clad.

Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust
Half that we have
Unto an honest faithfull grave;
Making our pillows either down, or dust.