The Work
The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations was published posthumously in 1633 by Cambridge University Press, six weeks after George Herbert's death, at his own direction: Herbert had entrusted the manuscript to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, founder of the Little Gidding community, with instructions to publish or burn it according to his judgment of whether it might 'do good to any dejected poor soul.' Ferrar published it, and it went through thirteen editions by 1709. The collection contains 177 poems and is the foundational text of English devotional lyric poetry.
The collection is structured as a journey through the architecture of a church. The opening section, 'The Church-Porch,' offers preparatory moral instruction in a 77-stanza poem of considerable wit. 'The Church' - the longest and most important section - presents the interior of the church from baptismal font through altar to the communion table, using the church's physical spaces and liturgical objects as occasions for meditation on the soul's relationship to God. 'The Church Militant' concludes with a survey of the church's history. The architectural metaphor draws on 1 Corinthians 3:16 ('Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?') - the temple Herbert builds is simultaneously stone, institution, and soul.
Biblical Engagement
Every poem in The Temple mediates Scripture. Herbert's method is not to quote the Bible but to inhabit it - to take a biblical image, doctrine, or narrative and explore it from the inside with a combination of intellectual precision and emotional vulnerability.
Psalm 23 ('The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want') is engaged in 'The God of Love my Shepherd is' - a poem that takes the psalm's pastoral imagery through the lens of Easter: the Good Shepherd of John 10 who lays down his life for his sheep becomes the shepherd of Psalm 23, and the 'valley of the shadow of death' becomes the crucifixion through which the shepherd leads. Herbert's method of combining Old Testament texts with their New Testament fulfillment is consistent throughout the collection.
John 15:1 ('I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman') provides the central image of 'The Bunch of Grapes,' one of the collection's most theologically sophisticated poems. Herbert reads the Israelites' experience in the wilderness (Numbers 13:23, the cluster of grapes from Canaan) as a prefiguration of the Eucharist: 'But can he want the grape, who hath the wine? / I have their fruit and more. / Blessed be God, who prospered Noah's vine, / And made it bring forth grapes good store.' The poem demonstrates Herbert's typological method: the Old Testament event ('their story') is the figure; the Christian sacrament ('my story') is the fulfillment, but the Christian always has 'more' - not as supersessionist dismissal but as grateful recognition of being placed in a larger story.
1 Corinthians 3:16 - the temple of the body - is the organizing metaphor of the entire collection, but it appears most explicitly in 'Church-Music,' 'The Windows,' and 'The Altar.' 'The Altar' presents a poem physically shaped like an altar on the page, using the concept of the heart as an altar offered to God: 'A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears, / Made of a heart, and cemented with tears: / Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; / No workman's tool hath touched the same.' This draws on Exodus 20:25 ('And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it') - the altar that God builds is the heart that He shapes, not the work of human hands.
The Passion narrative runs through the entire 'Church' section. 'The Sacrifice' is a dramatic monologue spoken by Christ on the cross, with a refrain - 'Was ever grief like mine?' - that engages Lamentations 1:12 ('Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow'). 'The Agony' presents the twin sources of Christian knowledge - sin and love - through the Gethsemane prayer (Matthew 26:36-46) and the Last Supper (Luke 22:14-20), concluding with a eucharistic meditation: 'Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, / Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.'
'Virtue' draws on the Song of Songs' imagery of the rose ('Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave, / Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye') and the Gospel of Matthew's teaching on the transience of earthly beauty (Matthew 6:28-30, 'Consider the lilies of the field'), before turning to the immortality of the virtuous soul: 'Only a sweet and virtuous soul, / Like seasoned timber, never gives; / But though the whole world turn to coal, / Then chiefly lives.'
Author and Context
George Herbert (1593-1633) was born in Montgomery, Wales, the fifth son of a prominent gentry family. His mother Magdalen Herbert was a close friend of John Donne, who preached her funeral sermon. Herbert was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow and served as Public Orator (1620-1627). His early ambition was a career at court - he was a member of Parliament in 1624 - but he was repeatedly disappointed, partly through the deaths of his two principal patrons.
In 1630, Herbert was ordained an Anglican priest and installed as rector of Fulgouldfield with Bemerton, near Salisbury. The remaining three years of his life were spent in extreme simplicity, daily prayer, the care of his parishioners, and the composition and revision of the poems that became The Temple. He died of tuberculosis at the age of forty, having been rector for only three years. This transition from courtly ambition to rural priesthood is reflected throughout The Temple in the poems about vocation, humility, and the difficulty of surrender.
Herbert's theological position was broadly Calvinist in its soteriology (emphasis on grace and divine initiative) but Anglican in its liturgical and ecclesiological sensibility. He was deeply committed to the Book of Common Prayer, to the rhythms of the daily office, and to the physical spaces of the church as aids to devotion. His prose work A Priest to the Temple (or The Country Parson) provides an invaluable companion to the poems, showing how his theology and practice were integrated.
Structure and Key Poems
The architectural structure of The Temple gives the collection a sense of pilgrimage: the reader moves through the church with Herbert as guide and fellow worshiper. The longest poems in 'The Church' - 'The Sacrifice,' 'The Agony,' 'Easter,' 'Easter Wings,' 'Affliction (I),' 'The Windows,' 'Virtue,' 'The Collar,' 'The Pulley,' 'The Flower,' and 'Love (III)' - form a sequence that traces the soul's journey through struggle, doubt, affliction, and provisional peace.
'The Collar' is perhaps the most dramatic enactment of spiritual rebellion in English poetry. The speaker rails against the constraints of the priestly life - 'I will abroad' - in increasingly violent rhetoric, only to have the entire protest dissolved by a quiet divine address: 'Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child! / And I replied, My Lord.' The allusion to the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) is transparent, but Herbert makes the return both psychologically convincing and spiritually immediate.
'The Pulley' offers a brilliant theological account of divine restraint in creation. God pours all blessings into humanity - strength, beauty, wisdom, honour, pleasure - but withholds 'Rest': 'For if I should (said he) / Bestow this jewel also on my creature, / He would adore my gifts instead of me, / And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature: / So both should losers be.' The restlessness that drives human beings to seek God draws on Augustine's famous formulation ('our heart is restless until it repose in Thee') and on Ecclesiastes 3:11 ('he hath set the world in their heart').
Critical Reception
Herbert's collection was immediately recognized as extraordinary. Richard Baxter, the Puritan divine, wrote that 'Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth a God, and whose business in the world is most with God.' His influence on subsequent devotional poetry has been continuous: Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, and Christopher Harvey in the seventeenth century; Gerard Manley Hopkins (who kept a copy of Herbert throughout his Jesuit training) and T.S. Eliot in the twentieth.
Theological Significance
Herbert's theological contribution is to demonstrate that the entire range of human experience - spiritual joy, intellectual pride, despairing rebellion, simple contentment, erotic longing, bodily affliction - can be brought into the presence of God and transfigured rather than suppressed. His God is not a deity who demands cheerful piety; He is a God who receives every honest cry, even the cry of rebellion, and answers it with love. This is the deepest lesson of The Temple: prayer is the bringing of the whole self before God, not the presentation of a sanitized version.
Legacy
Herbert's influence on subsequent English-language devotional poetry is incalculable. Henry Vaughan directly imitated him. Gerard Manley Hopkins read him intensively. T.S. Eliot cited him as a primary influence on his own devotional verse. Emily Dickinson absorbed his manner of compressed paradox and direct address to God. Simone Weil's encounter with 'Love (III)' - which she credited with her conversion - ensured that Herbert became known beyond purely anglophone literary culture. Contemporary religious poets including R.S. Thomas, Denise Levertov, and Christian Wiman all write in Herbert's long shadow.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Psalm 23 (the shepherd), 1 Corinthians 3:16 and 6:19 (the temple of the body), John 15:1-17 (the true vine), Matthew 26:36-46 (Gethsemane), Luke 15:11-32 (the prodigal son), Lamentations 1:12 (grief like mine), Ecclesiastes 3:11 (the world set in the heart), and Song of Songs 2:1-4 (the rose and banner of love). The Book of Common Prayer (Morning and Evening Prayer offices) provides the liturgical context within which Herbert's poems were designed to be read.
Further Reading
- Amy Charles, A Life of George Herbert (1977) - the standard scholarly biography. - Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (1983) - the best study of Herbert's Calvinist theology and its expression in the poems. - Helen Wilcox, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (2007) - the definitive modern scholarly edition with comprehensive notes.