Dare To Be True

When Wendy Cope came across George Herbert's work as an adult, she took to it immediately. What especially appealed to her was Herbert's playful delight in poetic form, and the fact that these playful poems are, at the same time, utterly serious. In an affectionate introduction, Wendy writes, 'there is ample evidence in Herbert's poems of a struggle with worldly ambition'. Certainly, he was well connected: his mother was a friend of John Donne, who was later to preach at a memorial service in he