Dear All
You are invited to join a Zoom group linking America and Wales on Monday 13th October at 7.30pm when the distinguished American teacher of medieval literature Dr. Robert McMahon will lead a discussion of George Herbert’s Love III: Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back… This is the final poem in Herbert’s collection The Temple, the third of his poems on Love, and it contains the whole Gospel in three stanzas.
Herbert was born in 1589 at Black Hall, Montgomery Castle and, after being elected Public Orator at Trinity College, Cambridge, later became MP for Montgomery from 1624-5. His poor health lead to him then serving as an Anglican priest at the age of 36 in Bemerton, Wiltshire where he died three years later, probably of consumption. Herbert’s poems were published posthumously in 1633 and he is regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets of the 17th Century. He is commemorated on the Herbert Memorial in St Nicholas’ Church, Montgomery.
Dr. McMahon has taught English and Comparative Literature (Dante) for many years, and has published books on St. Augustine, The Medieval Mystical Ascent (Augustine, Anselm, and Boethius), and Milton’s Paradise Lost. George Herbert is among the poets he most admires and McMahon’s exploration of the medieval astronomy that informs Herbert’s poem Coloss.3.3 was published in the George Herbert Journal in the late 1990s.
Robert and his wife, the herbalist and therapist Kim Orr, have a shrine to the saint as well as a sanctuary for rabbits and hares, Melangell’s Garden, in their grounds in Colorado, USA where they form Melangell West, the unofficial long-distance extension of St Melangell’s! Kim is a regular correspondent on St Melangell’s website and wrote the text for the Diocesan prayer card circulated for St Melangell’s feast day in 2021. Four Americans and three Brits collaborated for that to happen and it is hoped that the same collaboration will underpin this Zoom. So, please plan to spend an hour or so with us reading and discussing the poem as we explore what it says, how it contains the Gospel, and what it implies through its echoes of the New Testament.
If you’d like to participate in this, please register with Karen, St Melangell’s Administrator, by contacting her at admin@stmelangell.org or on 01691 860408.