page_title: Nicholas Ferrar
section_title: Legacy and honours
hierarchical_section_title: Nicholas Ferrar / Legacy and honours
caption_attribution_description: English: Image of "Easter Wings", a "pattern poem" published in 1633 by George Herbert. As a pattern poem, the work is not only meant to be read, but its shape is meant to be appreciated: In this case, the poem was printed (original image here shownA) on two pages of a book, sideways, so that the lines suggest two birds flying upward, with wings spread out.
context_page_description: Nicholas Ferrar was an English scholar, courtier and businessman, who was ordained a deacon in the Church of England. He lost much of his fortune in the Virginia Company and retreated with his extended family in 1626 to the manor of Little Gidding, Huntingdonshire, for his remaining years, in an informal spiritual community following High Anglican practice. His friend the poet and Anglican priest George Herbert, on his deathbed, sent Ferrar the manuscript of The Temple, telling him to publish the poetry if it might "turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul." "If not, let him burn it; for I and it are less than the least of God's mercies." Ferrar published them in 1633; they remain in print.
context_section_description: Nicholas Ferrar is commemorated in the calendar of the Church of England on 4 December, the date of his death. In the calendar of the Episcopal Church in the United States, the Anglican Church of Southern Africa and the Church in Wales, he is commemorated on 1 December.
  T. S. Eliot honoured Nicholas Ferrar in the Four Quartets, naming one of the quartets Little Gidding. The Friends of Little Gidding was founded in 1946 by Alan Maycock with the patronage of Eliot, to maintain and adorn the church at Little Gidding, and honour the life of Ferrar and his family and their place in the village. The Friends organise an annual pilgrimage to Ferrar's tomb, formerly held each July, but in recent years in May (the month when Eliot visited Little Gidding) and celebrate Nicholas Ferrar Day on the Saturday nearest 4 December.
  A new religious community was founded at Little Gidding in the 1970s, inspired by the example of Ferrar. Called the Community of Christ the Sower, it disbanded in 1998. The Pilsdon Community in Dorset was also based on Ferrar's Little Gidding model.
  The former Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes was directly related to Nicholas Ferrar on his mother's side. Hughes and his wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, named their son Nicholas Farrar Hughes. The family evidently used both spellings of the surname.
  Nicholas Ferrar is regarded as the patron of the Oratory of the Good Shepherd, an international Anglican religious community.
caption: "Easter Wings", an example of the "pattern poems" in George Herbert's The Temple, a book which Ferrar edited and had published. The lines of the poem were arranged to be printed sideways, with each stanza forming an image meant to suggest a bird flying up with outstretched wings.[13]
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