What transforms a libertine into a divine, a courtier into a pastor? In the parallel yet divergent paths of English poets John Donne and George Herbert, we witness two souls wrestling with the same fundamental question: How does one love God with a human heart? In both cases, the question is demanding, embodied, and often unbearable. Donne’s and Herbert’s answers, encoded in verse, still tremble with urgency four centuries later, revealing two distinct ways of approaching the sacred: one through dramatic confrontation, the other through humble submission.
Donne, born into a Catholic family during the height of Protestant persecution, knew from childhood the dangerous weight of religious conviction. His early years were marked by reckless self-indulgence and brilliant ambition, chasing advancement at court while composing elegies that still make readers blush. Herbert, by contrast, moved through a world of privilege and expectation—Cambridge, court, Parliament—before turning his back on secular prestige to tend a small parish in Bemerton. Where Donne came to God through exhaustion and necessity, Herbert arrived through deliberate choice and aristocratic duty transformed into spiritual calling.
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