Part Iand II

INTRODUCTION:
Originally rooted in the tradition of metaphysical poetry, George
Herbert is the poet who creates an “artistic” peculiar relationship between
Man and God. Herbert’s religious verse transcends the traditional view
upon the relation Man-God and goes further to build a poetic world that
asserts him in an original style. Many critics unfold the relationship
between the speaker and his God as simply a kind of reconciliation at the
end of the tension. However, and from a different reading, Herbert’s verse
can be seen as a poetic text that resists closure then the release of
tension ( at the surface level) can be considered as a beginning of a “new”
type of conflict; actually a conflict between Language and meaning or
between the world of reality and the poetic world.
The artistic style of Herbert and his longing for creativity makes the
reader ignore the issue of sinfulness, which is purely human.
Correspondingly, there is an innate transmission from the worldly stage to
a higher stage of artistic pleasure thus everything is constructed within
the text. Throughout his poetry, George Herbert is not only a poet but also
a theoretician of a new verse, which is the harmony between the form and
the meaning and this reconciliation allows for a unity between the speaker
and his Creator; accordingly, the poet remains faithful to his art and to his
protestant values as well. At this level, the poet can be regarded as a
creator of this unique style so he reflects the power of God then he yearns
for constructing a powerful poetic world. So the poetic text can be said, to
be interplay of power between the protestant poet and his creator.
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Fully aware of his sinfulness, Herbert’s artistic work is the way to
transcend the unworthiness of human beings and to go further to a world
of forgiveness. This can lead to an important issue seriously raised in
Herbert’s verse; the question of human identity or the problem of human
existence, here we can say that the poet is dependent to God linguistically
(i.e. within the text) and “metaphysically”. On the same way, God is
delineated by the poet; He is therefore “recreated” and personified (he
talks and participated in the poetic text). The rhetorical construction of
God makes Him more sacred than He is in “reality”.
The image of God is definitely questionable in George Herbert’s
poetry since the relationship between the speaker and His God is in itself
problematic. This can be shown in the dramatic dialogue; this double voice
foreshadows a tormented, restless self that seeks determination in the
Other (God). Ceasing the dilemma and leading it to a resolution is the
power of the verse as well as the “greatness” of the poet’s philosophical
view towards religious issues.
Although it seems to be a childish end, the speaker’s resolution of
the tension that governs his relation with his Creator raises in the reader’s
mind plethoric questions. Throughout the wavering of the struggle then
submission, the poet imitates God in his creation in order to achieve
perfectness, but the raised questions in the poem remain unanswered,
hence the reader is involved to make a “supplement” or to construct
another text to fulfill the “unsaid” in the poetic text. Correspondingly,
Herbert’s divine verse resists closure; it is open to various readings. This

text has moved from the orally stage to the written stage (the text), but,
since the poet is the victim of “the metaphysics of presence”, he
constructs an ideal image of God through a perfect verse.
In “Easter wings”, for instance, there is a crisis of presentation or an
inability to express reinforced through the loss of words but the “wings”
which are a pure creation of the poet hold the speaker and symbolically
raise him from his sins. Equally represented, the poem contains actually
two birds: the poet and Christ.
Accordingly, two identities lie in the self of the poet. Apart from
being a Christian preacher, the poet is also the artist philosopher who
speaks for his community (Easter day represents, symbolically, the
Christian community). The stylistic features of Hebert’s divine verse
(repetition, oxymora, similie…) show a tortured, self-accusing protestant.
He reflects in his verse, the Fall which affected all human beings. The poet
mirrors the sinful aspect of Man; he admits the situation ,in which he is not
responsible. In his poem entitled “Sighs and Groans”, the poet reinforces
Man’s sinfulness, he writes
“I have deserv’d my condition as an eternal Adam because my lust
Hath still sow’d fig-leaves to exclude thy light:
But I am frailtie, and already dust;
O do not grinde me!”
Throughout this research paper, I want to scrutinize George
Herbert’s poetry from a different prospective. His divine poetry can be
closely read from a modernist view, here the problematic relationship
between the speaker and His “Lord” can be perceived from another level;

that of the Self as contrasted to the Other, this binary opposition is in itself
interchangeable because they are dependent upon each other
linguistically which may to other different forms of dependence.
At this level, we can evince the revolutionary aspects of Herbert’s
religious verse in the form as well as in the content. These aspects are
new at its age that’s why his Poetry of the seventeenth century was
“despised” at its age and then renewed at the twentieth century with T.S
Eliot for instance who focuses deeply in the criticism of Metaphysical
poetry in general and notably in George Herbert’s divine verse. He finds in
it real modern aspects; Herbert’s fragmented self and his extreme
obsession with tackling human universal issues make his poetry an open
text to “read”. It is similar in a way to the verse of T.S Eliot and E.E
Cummings. As it is known, Herbert is said to be “the father of Deism” and
here lies the striking paradox in his poetry: how to reconcile between
Reason and Metaphysics, which is originally unreasonable? An issue
continues simultaneously with human’s existence.
The second part of the research will be devoted to the exploration of
the interplay of rhetoric and philosophy. The relationship between form,
meaning and feeling governs the poetic world of Herbert’s verse. Notably,
Herbert relies on the shape of the poem to reinforce certain poetic images.
Consequently, a mimetic art is established in parallel with the delineation
of God’s power. Then,“the construction of God” (textually) in a poetic
world where the speaker and the “Lord” are dependent upon each other
especially at the level of Creation. To illustrate this idea we can refer to

the poem “A True Hymn” in which Herbert deals with the nature of
Christian poetry, furthermore he foregrounds the honorable belief and
disregards the eloquence of insincere belief. To borrow Shakespeare
words: “Words without thoughts never to heaven go”. Then the human
being is adequate to prove a true belief with a true verse. Consequently,
the poetic language allows for the unfolding of Christian beliefs. Yet, what
makes it more creative is “the poetic metalanguage”. The divine verse
deals with the religious verse itself. The repetition of the first line of the
last line of a stanza in the first line of the second stanza echoes the
cyclical nature of human sins. Thus, we can say that Herbert’s verse is
self-reflexive. The raised tension in the Temple, for instance, makes the
poetic text the only form adequate for constructing patterns of paradoxical
images and peculiar conceits that would not be available in the non-poetic
writings.
The poetic language allows the speaker to highlight the position of
the individual or more precisely the eccentric individual. At the age of
Herbert, innovation was quietly absent and; it was a time of reason and
science. Then, it appears the power of the verse to delineate the
existential significance of Man and God. Individually, Herbert’s verse is
embodied with the mission of prayer and devotion. Moreover, when the
poet deals with his his relation towards God, he borrows from his own
experience that is to say that his verse testifies his life or it narrates his
biography.

The concept of the ‘Sacred’ in ‘The temple’ is problematic since the poem , as a text,
is made up of a chain of signification. Furthermore, ‘The Lord’ is always highlighted and
constructed as ‘superior’ to the sinful speaker. Yet, reversely this sacredness owes to the
sinfulness of the speaker and to his existence as inferior
In the third part of the research, a focus will be made upon the aporetic spaces in
Herbert’s poetic tradition; Herbert’s poetic text has originally moved from the orally stage to
the written stage, so we can find aporetic moments in this poetic text. In the poems where
there is a monologue, the single voice that urges for the presence of God. The voice of the
speaker is always haunted by the presence of ‘The Lord’, the poet cannot depart from the
power of His God. Thus, he is admitted to be a victim of ‘the metaphysics of presence’. He is
obsessed with proving the existence of God; however, an ironical situation lies within the
secret of the existence of the protestant poet: he is free and enslaved at the same time.
Herbert’s divine poetry imitates what exists in the gospel to the extent that his poetry
becomes a parody of ‘The Sacred Book’. It builds a utopian world where the power of his
verse foreshadows reconciliation between paradoxical complex images: The sinful protestant
versus the Sacred God. Here lies Herbert’s wit to create a private world within his dependence
upon God. Therefore, the divine verse can be utopian; it proves the harmony between Man
and his universe.
To conclude, doing a research on George Herbert’s divine verse allows for knowing
the peculiarities of his writing as different from the other Metaphysical poets’ writings on the
one hand. On the other hand, Herbert’s verse is universal as well as questionable; Christianity
is not only a religious matter but a philosophical existential issue.
Herbert’s verse is well linked to the modern man who questions his existence and his
relation towards the world. Thus, Herbert’s verse immortalizes itself since human being’s
existence coexists with sins. In the utopian world there are no tensions, and Herbert

constructs a unity between the different components of his poetic text; in most of his poems
he employs one rhetorical figure to ascribe a coherent structure to his poetry then to attribute a
harmony between the text and the world delineated. So we can consider his verse as utopian,
it is wittily constructed to reinforce a unity between Art and reason.
Part I: The revolutionary aspects of George
Herbert’s divine poetry:

1/ The Modernist aspects:
Herbert was intellectually influenced John Donne, his mother’s
admired friend and encomiast. Yet, he is distinguished by adding a sense
of music to religious poetry, as he was an assured musician. His verse is
like a musical composition and the tackled themes are lyrical, they are
expanded on the stanzas spontaneously. A Herbertian stanza is like sonata
form, a way of developing a theme through various shapes or forms. This
amounts to the claim that Herbert is always interested in finding a way to
put his eloquence on. The form is as important as the content. At this
point, it is worthy to refer to “Easter Wings” (I) which is an imitative verse
of the shape of the bird’s wings. This poem can exclusively be read in a
continuous way.
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.”
“Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poor:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks , harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
It is a unified poem interrelated with the theme of of the story of the
Fall and redemption of Man. The music is not directly shown; it is deduced
through the movement and the sound of the wings. Therefore, the impact

of the poem is not only visual but also musical. However, “Easter wings”
does not stop, it is continued in “Easter wings” (II) since the bird has two
wings so one poem does not fit for the theme of redemption which is
expanded in the second poem.
“My tender age in sorrow did begin:
And still with sickness and shame
Thou didst so punish sin,
That I became
Most thin.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel this day thy victory:
for, if imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.”
One interpretation is that in The Temple as a whole, and for the aesthetic
purpose, Herbert composed two “Easter wings”. The first one begins with
“Lord” however the second one starts with “My tender” so a more
emphasis in the Self is emphasized then to create a kind of balance
between the two wings as well as to construct a kind of unity between the
speaker and Christ so that they become inseparable. It is notable to say
that the repetition of some phrases differently with the emphasis on the
Lord in the first poem (“Till he became”). And then in the second poem,
he is interested in Man ( “That I became”) ,this parallelism foreshadows
the poet’s aim to highlight the true protestant’s longing for redemption
and that to “ rise” is to “combine” and importantly to “sing” is to “feel”.
The last line in both poems is almost repeated in order to emphasize that

the major aim for the flight is to escape the sins and to maintain
redemption.
The shaping of these two poems in bird’s wings is fundamental in
shaping the full sense of the poem as a whole. We cannot also separate
the two “Easter wings” for the meaning of each one depends on the other,
a feature that characterizes “The Temple” as a unity. The ornaments of
the church are echoed on the aesthetic characteristics of the poems thus,
there is interdependence between the form and the meaning, hence for
Herbert between the musicality of the poem and its impact in shaping the
central meaning of the verse.
Despite its simplicity, the poem is complicated at a certain level that
its simplicity evokes a deep analysis. Accordingly, Herbert is original in his
style as well as in the way of constructing his verse so that he does not
differentiate between art and religion. Herbert is aware of the impact of
music in the Christian’s individual because it allows for a sense of
communication, which is achieved at a time when orthodox Christianity is
at its lowest ebb. Herbert’s longing for highlighting Christian faith is
trained artistically since the Bible cannot be read for its prose; accordingly,
the power of Herbert’s eloquence is a reconciliation of faith and art at the
same time. The accommodation of musicality to meaning can be also seen
in “Prayer I”:
Prayer the church’s banquet, Angels’ age,
God’s breath in man returning to birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’nd and earth;

Engine against th’Almighty, sinners’ tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days-words transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted Manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
The elegance of the poem does not minimize its seriousness, since the
poetic fancies of Herbert illuminate more deep essentials of the Christian
belief. Notably, a strong relationship exists between truth and elegance of
the poem. A true poem should be embodied with a lyrical, musical form.
Here we can refer to Shakespeare’s “As you like it” when Touchstone’s
Credo was explaining poetry to Yokels: “the truest poetry is the most
feigning”.
Herbert’s verse is embodied by the singularity of the argument and its
bizarreness, and then the reader is convinced by the moral rightness of
this argument. Clearly influenced by John Donne, Herbert combines
paradoxical images in a religious context; he reflects the imagery of
Donne, notably in his poem “Obedience” where he employs legal terms.
The act of writing is an extended metaphor, and hence Herbert constructs
himself as a lord thanks to his verse:
My God, if writings may
Convey a Lordship any way

Whither the buyer and the seller please; (stanza 1)
Let it not thee displease,
If this poor paper do as much as they.
How happy were my part,
If some kind man would thrust this heart
Into these lines; till in heav’n’s court of rolls (stanza 9)
They were by winged souls
Entered for both, far above their desert!
Scrutinizing deeply the poem, one can notice the speaker’s yearning
God for accepting his verse (at a time when art was not religious), There
is a wit in telling his Lord that he is writing for him and not just meditating
the “ sacred will”, thus writing is no more a speech only but it is rather an
action. Herbert’s verse is an action with speech; it is a real performance so
that his language becomes as sacred as the prayer, so throughout his
verse our poet is highlighting the “mission of writing poetry itself.
Accordingly, poetry becomes a way of obedience and a right form of being
close to God.
It is worthy to question the difference between what the poet wants
to say and what he has to say since the religious values are stable.
However, the illumination of the divine issues is transmitted poetically.
Herbert constructs a way to address God directly and to make an
accessible dialogue between himself (as Christian) and God (as a
mysterious power), then his verse allows also for immortalizing his sacred
relationship with God. In Donne’s religious verse, the existence of God as a

sacred Self is questionable then the speaker is unable to make an end to
his torments so there is a clear separation between the poet and his God,
the tension is thus evident. Yet, one can admit that Herbert’s construction
of his “self” unites him with God’s voice, accordingly; the speaker’s aim is
usually to construct an image of the true protestant as united to Christ and
likely to eradicate the existent tension between Man and God. However
the resolution of the tension is not so simple, it is only simplified to a
child-father relation that characterizes Herbert’s poetic style. The
seriousness of the religious issues is undertaken with plain easy language
in order to reflect the restfulness that should govern the relation between
the speaker and his God. “Redemption” illustrates this “inner paradox” of
simple language with serious, complex issues. However; there is a logic
relation between the form and the content since the aim of the speaker is
to lessen the tension so we cannot admit that there is really a paradox.
Herbert’s divine verse cannot depart from the form of the secular
verse of Donne for instance. The speaker’s direct speech to his God and
his longing for forgiveness is simultaneous to a lover’s speech. The
established reconciliation between Man and God is like the moments of
restfulness between two lovers
This influence of the precursor Donne cannot deny Herbert’s passion
for perfection. He seems to be original in his inventions of new metrical
forms that serve for emphasizing the poet’s views towards his relation
with God and this is evident in “Easter wings” and in “The Altar”. I am
trying to heed at this point a semiotic reading of the two “Easter wings”, it

evinces that this poetic text is iconic since the poem looks like a picture of
a bird. Accordingly, there is a mixture of poetry (as a verbal art) and
painting. This mixture of arts can be considered as a modernist aspect.
Moreover, the major theme of the poem that is the decay of Man is
reinforced by the peak poverty of words, the decay of Man is attributed to
the Fall. The farther you are from God the more sinful you are. In addition,
the more the wings contracted the more the realization becomes.
Therefore, the loss of words reflects the loss of Man and the action of rise
and fall is paradoxical but at the same time, it foreshadows the
contradictory situation of Man: to be sinful then to long for forgiveness.
Herbert’s yearning for being close to God urges for employing an
image; the two birds may represent may represent both Christ and the
poet so words are not enough to be gifted to God ; they were marked by
an absence and Herbert “supplements” their lack with a pictorial form of
representation. Accordingly, we can assume that Herbert is a victim of
“the metaphysics of presence”, he tries to achieve the perfectness of
prayer in order to become closer to God. Evidently, Herbert is haunted by
the importance of the form to make sense to his poems. The alliteration
of the sound /f/ is evocative of the flapping of the birds’ wings;
furthermore, the two poems are also mimetic of the circularity of the
church’s structure. The poet’s focus on the aesthetic dimension points to
his passion by the ornaments of the church. The title of his poems “The
Temple” is a metaphor of the poems as a whole; the construction of the
poems is like the construction of a religious truth that lies in the church,
hence the poet makes a parallelism between himself and Christ. Herbert

does not differentiate between form and meaning and believes that both
of them construct the whole poem, in “The Temple” he seeks to
foreshadow that Man’s soul is God’s Temple. This is illustrated in the
manuscript sent by Herbert to his friend Nicholas Ferrar (related by Isaac
Walton), he explains to his friend that his poems seek are similar to the
temple to the extent that he seeks to make a temple in his readers’ minds:
“…tell him he should find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that
have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of
Jesus my Master; in whose service I have now found perfect freedom; desire him to
read it; and then, if he can think it may turn to the advantage of any dejected pour
soul, let it be made public; if not, let him burnt…”
The use of art to catechize religious verity is in itself a modern
aspect. Herbert’s status as a parish priest does not prevent him from
constructing a poetry that deals with the ordinary human concerns, men’s
torments towards religious existential issues. It is also a worthy issue for
metaphysical style: his fancy conceits continue to be far-fetched through
his didactic performance. As an original critique of poetry, Coleridge
regards Herbert’s playfulness as “profound and not quaint”. Therefore, as
a modern reader, one can see Herbert’s religious verse as a
contemporary; it is in a sense a modernist verse. When we consider that
modernism, as a literary trend is a revolution against the ordinary styles of
writings, we can point to Herbert as a metaphysical poet who protests
against some poetic forms for instance the carpe diem and the love verse.
Moreover, Herbert tackles the issue of the position of Man in the universe
as well as the power of God over the human being. In his introduction to
T.S Eliot’s critique “George Herbert”, Peter Porter declares:

“Herbert is one of us, if “us” betaken to represent the temperament of the
late twentieth century. Poets and readers of alike feel at home with
Herbert. I cannot think of another poet in the long march of English verse
who speaks to us so clearly and with such authority as Herbert does.”
In this way, one can notice a tormented self in Herbert’s verse.
A paradoxical image of the parish poet for he is supposed to be
completely sure about his relation with God; however, his verse
foreshadows an existential person who questions the position of Man
in the universe and how he can manage to gain a perfect
relationship with the sacred God despite his sinfulness. These
problematic issues are reinforced in the tormented self of the poet
yet, in the tormented verse, this torment urges for the dramatic. The
theatrical form of some poems, “The Collar” for instance, shows a
modernist poet in two ways: the poem points out the blurring line
between the genres: there is a tragic monologue, which is unfolded
in a poetic style, once again, the poet proves that the verse is the
adequate style to show the mysterious relation with God. Then Christ
is given a voice to make his presence real, he makes him speaks for
Himself even though we know that it is not Christ ‘speech. “The
Collar” is another poem that expresses its meaning through its form.
Most of the poems in The Temple draw the reader’s attention
to the process of their signification and then to their “referential
function”. The two “Jordan” poems question the complex patterning
of the poetic discourse. So, poetry is the adequate linguistic means
of evoking such experiences of faith and worship. “Jordan I” can be
read as in different ways, ostensibly it is an oblique criticism of

secular lyric verse thus, it represents a defense as well as a
revolution against the ubiquitous sonnet.
The title contains two basic ideas: the first one is that Jordan is
a reference to a particular movement of introversion before making
a future step. It is a moment of contemplation that may lead to
inspiration then to an act of writing. This is reminding of Jacob when
he left his father and crossed the Jordan then after many years he
prospered. In another level, Jordan is the land where John the Baptist
baptized Christ and then his mission started. In the Book of Common
Prayer (cf.also 2 Kings 5:9-10), it was said: “Thou didist safely lead…
thy people though the Red Sea, figuring thereby the Holy Baptism
of…Christ did sanctify the flood Jordan, and all other waters to the
mystical washing away of sin”. Once again, the poet is obsessed by
the sacred act of writing and considers it as the right way to gain
redemption. “Jordan I” comes at a moment when Herbert seeks to
show his theory towards Writing, it is one of the first poems in “The
Temple” so that to show that his verse is different from the
Petrarchan love poetry, as the mission of Christ is unusual and
unique. Here the poet compares himself implicitly to Christ; “Jordan”
is the land where the poet can fulfill his sacred mission of praying
God. Accordingly, the title plays a great role of constructing a far-
fetched metaphor. Hebert’s religious verse is not divine because it
deals with religious issues; it is divine for its construction of a unique
distinct verse that brings its divinity from a projection of the sacred

mission of Christ to the poet himself. Thus, the importance of
writing is to make the sacred even more sacred.
The poet’s major concern is to how to transform the religious
experience to a linguistic experience so that his mission seems to
be a re-creation of a divine reality. This is clearly shown in the
closing lines of the second stanza: Must all be veiled, while he that
reads divine/ Catching the sense at two remorses.
Eventually, this poem speaks for all the other poems in The
Temple and theorizes the poet’s view towards art. According to him,
poetry as an art is not an imitation of the religious truth; it is rather a
way of veiling the truth. For Herbert, truth must be beautiful that is
why it is veiled in the verse, he declares: “Is there no truth in
beauty” this rhetorical question points out the link between truth
and beauty.
The poem is full of rhetorical questions, which give the poem a
fitful quality there is a fluency of movement that rests in the final
stanza. At the end the poet reflects, calmly the outcome of the
questions previously raised. The outburst is easily appeased to the
poet’s subservience to God. The final stanza epitomizes the poet’s
clear view towards poetry; one feels that this poem is a declaration
of independence against the secular verse. It is a rebellious verse
against the other verse because it does not contains truth. Herbert
insists on the notion of “a true verse” he ironically, describes the

secular verse as untrue since the poet praises a feminine beauty,
which is a mortal thing.
Furthermore, Herbert satirizes the carpe diem poetry: the
short- lived beauty is revolutionized to the “beautiful truth” of the
sacred Christ and his mission, the title suggests both the crossing
from the futility and the hollowness of the rest of the world into the
truth and holiness of the land of promise as the Jordan was crossed.
Then the purification is “truth” and renunciation of “fictions”. The
notion of “time is fleeting” is altered to the immortal presence of
God and Christ as well. Herbert’s verse is also immortal since it
describes an immortal truth so he asserts his identity as a distinct
poet. Conclusively, time is no more a destructive agent and the
action is fulfilled by the act of writing such a verse. The pastoral
verse is no longer “the only” one, Herbert challenges the style of this
verse: “Is all good structure in a winding stair?” He calls for another
type of verse; he valorised the shepherds and does not accuse them
for “riddle” writing nor for “pull for a prime” since they are “truthful
people” who live in “the real world”.
It is worthy to note that Herbert criticizes the convention of the
Petrarchan love poetry in “Jordan I”: “Is it no verse, except
enchanted groves/ And sudden arbours shadow coarse-spun lines? /
Must purling streams refresh a lover’s loves? At this point we don’t
only speak about the literary influence of his precursors such as John
Donne and Sir Philip Sydney but also about “Intertextuality”, which is

a term coined by Julia Kristeva; she defines the literary texts as “The
text is therefore a productivity, and this means that it is a
permutation of texts, an “intertextuality” in the space of a given
text, several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and
neutralize one another”. Then Herbert’s religious verse is the
transposition of several sign system of the secular verse; the lover in
the lover verse is replaced by God. Remarkably, the lover does not
often respond to the speaker, yet God is present as part of the divine
discourse of the poem with the sacred verse of Herbert. The poet
refers to the originality of the religious discourse; but he insists that
the human language is not so pure but the divine poetry is unique
because the subject is sacred.
“A Parodie” is considered by Anthony Martin as a parody of
Donne’s love verse; he writes:
“The poetic strategy of ‘A Parodie’ may thus be seen to establish a

viability for the critical term ‘sacred parody’: that is, religious poetry
which utilizes the resources of profane love-poetry while at the same
time acknowledging that all poetry is necessarily a trivial pursuit
unless and only insofar as it is accepted by God. Secular poetry is
not redirected, through parody and repetition, to its true originator
and rightful object”.
In this way, Herbert refers to the tradition to love poetry to highlight
the sacred tradition and then transcends his precursors, the true
protestant poet should write wittily only to praise God therefore this
is the true sense of sacrifice.
Herbert’s “meditative verse” as described by Louis Martz is
featured by a great immediacy. In addition to the startling conceits,

this immediacy is the reflection of the whole culture that
characterised metaphysical poetry in general. However, the
farfetched metaphors foreshadow the deep agony of the protestant
poet. The melancholic tone reinforces the uneasiness of the
speaker’s experience; yet it makes the resolution equivocal and
critical. In this way the wittiness of the verse lies in the ability of the
speaker to delineate a peaceful image despite the sense of conflict
that spreads the poem.
In his poem “The Agony”, the speaker condemns the
“philosophers” or more precisely the Renaissance scientists and
their intellectual vanity; it is an oblique criticism of the ignorance
and also the rejection of God’s power. This poem extends the
suffering of Christ to refer to the strong passion shared between
Christ and Man. Its conceit is typological; the full sense is required
through the exegesis of the binary form of the images in the poem.
The speaker begins with the contrasting the philosophers to the
parsons who can see Man’s sin and then rectifies it with the calling
for Christ’s Love. The image of “the wine press” is typological of
passion since Christ describes Himself as “the true vine”; and then
grapes and wine reflect sacred images. In this way, “The Agony” is a
parody of Christ’s struggle with Himself in the Garden of
Gethsemane just before his arrest which led to his trial and
crucifixion. In the second stanza, there is a reference to the tale of
men from Canaan bearing a cluster of grape; it is very typological of
the crucifixion. “Vice” suggests that Christ suffers in the grip of

men’s vices. Accordingly, the speaker reinforces the deep relation
with the Sacred in terms of love and acknowledgment of His strong
Sacrifice; in this way, the poem rewrites the divine experience as a
private moment of closure to God so that he makes the real
experience of Christ truthful for him since he witnesses its sweetness
when he says in the final lines: “Love is that liquor sweet and most
divine/ which my God feels as blood but I, as wine.”
This emblematic poem should be read according to its context
of the Renaissance and early Baroque conventions. As far as its form
is concerned, the poem is in three stanzas of six lines of iambic
tetrameters and pentameters, rhyming ‘ababcc’; thus, it is well
“measured” to reinforce the idea that scholars can fully ascertain
the height of mountains however his poem’s conceit is far-fetched.
The poet is able to make concise poems in terms of form but the
metaphors are so ambiguous, in the same way the mountains are
well created yet beyond this creation lies the power of God which is
too strong to realise.
From a deeper perspective, we can say that the divine verse is
so powerful for it unfolds philosophical meditations upon the
existence of Man in an ordered universe. “The Agony” represents a
critical moment in Herbert’s verse since it shows the omnipresence
of writing poetry and Man’s love. The poem’s three stanzas are
expanded in a reasonable way to come to a final conclusion at the
end; and then this form echoes the trinity shape so that it reinforces

the existence of truth in art; his poetic wit does not deny the
transmission of religious facts. Hence, the coexistence of art and
religious: God is only praised artistically; what makes the
dependence relation between the divine subject and the poetic
delineation.
2/ An inquiry bounded by certainty:
Herbert’s poetic style is regarded as plain and simple but the
thematic nature of his poems belies this claim for dealing with the human
being’s relationship with God requires the presence of a voice in conflict
with the Divine and with the Self as well. There is a dramatic moments
behind the quiet image. Accordingly, the major paradox in The Temple is
that Herbert’s urge for making a clear relation with God entails a deep

complex conflict between the human self and the sacred power.
Astonishingly, the poet contemplates God, the self-sufficient power.
Herbert’s religious meditations question the dilemma of Man’s
position towards God. The play of paradoxes and the juxtapositions of
metaphors reflect the compression of the metaphysical subject. The inner
conflicts are present from one poem to another in different ways, despite
the fact that they end in resolution the recurrence of the conflict makes
the uneasiness of the rest and the failure to find a definite fixed truth.
Therefore, the poetic space is convenient for reflecting the paradoxes of
the religious experience. In this way, The Temple becomes the story of a
Christian man searching for the sweetness of the divine love.
The poems are often overlapped with epigrammatic lines that
reflect the beauty of the sacred truth as in his poem “Easter” when he
calls for admiring the sacred spirit: “O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part, /
and make up our defects with his sweet art.” We can read “Sweet art” as a
“sweet heart” a pun that suggests the speaker’s tendency to construct a
perfect image of the divine soul; contrastingly, with the “real” image that
the sacred represents religious constraints, a point raised by his precursor
John Donne who constructs a tormented self unable to find a resolution to
the dramatic conflicts. Herbert seems to be a less startling poet than
Donne is yet, his searching for rest shows an intellectual power that makes
the reader himself an investigator for the validity of the truth. The way to
reach ease becomes more valuable than the truth itself. The truth is fixed

and simple; Man is existed within God, but the way to fulfill this way is
complex and ambiguous at the same time.
Herbert finds his self in his expression of spiritual humility for God
this is clearly shown in his poem “Humility” in the last emblematic stanza:
“Humility , who held the plume, at this

Did weep so fast, that the tears trickling down
Spoil’d all the train: then saying, Here it is
For which ye wrangle, made them turn their frown
Against the beasts: so joyntly bandying,
They drive them soon away;
Therefore, as he writes about his divine experience he makes an
intersection between poetry and religion and so he finds his existence as a
creative priest. Hence, there is an imitation of the dramatic presence of
Man. Herbert does not make a passive voice; the speakers’ voices are
evocative of different ways to express themselves. Ironically, the
fragmentation of the self makes its unity and then the delineation of a
unique end of rest is an imitation of God wholeness.
Herbert’s source of inspiration as a metaphysical poet, is not only
his religious faith but also his reflection upon the divine subject and then
to make his position vis-à-vis the sacred. In “Judgement”, the speaker’s
voice is embodied by a sense of fear in the first stanza: “Almighty Judge,
how shall poore wretches brook/ Thy dreadfull look”. However, in the final
stanza, he adopts a colloquial way to address God, these lines are
attributed with sense of ease and familiarity though in the presence of the
Lord:

“But I resolve, when thou shalt call for mine,
That to decline,
And thrust a testament into thy hand:
Let that be scann’d.
There thou shalt finde my faults are thine.”
The religious faith is analyzed in a way that the speaker is discussing
it with the Lord. He unfolds his protestant identity; he is fully haunted by
the doctrine that Christ has taken upon himself all the sins of the world.
“Judgement” is at the end of The Temple, a moment that reminds us of the
beginning of the book when the poet asserts himself as a protestant
Christian and that all his verse is the outcome of a strong religious faith.
This is clearly manifested in the introductory part of The Temple in the
ninth stanza of “The Church-porch”
“Yet , if thou sinne in wine or wantonnesse,

Boast thereof; nor make thy shame thy glorie.
Frailtie gets pardon by submissivenesse;
But he that boasts, shuts that out of his storie.
He makes flat warre with God, and doth defie
With his poore clod of earth the spacious sky.”
The circularity of the theme reflects the hollowness of the poet’s
search. Yet, the verse resists closure in terms of reaching the wholeness of
the divine subject therefore despite the stability of the religious discourse;
the poet is able to manipulate it. He is conscious about the vulnerability of
the religious issue so he employs aesthetic means to fulfill his inquires
about the divine power. Louis Martz describes Herbert’s artfulness as
following:

“…this sense of ease and familiarity in the presence of the lord allows
Herbert to display in many of his finest poems, a playful tone arising from
confidence that his divine ‘friend’ will not condemn the wit and art with which this
poet has been endowed, will not object to what Herbert frequently calls ‘mirth’- in
the old sense of that word, ‘joy’ ‘happiness’, along with the modern sense of
joking, smiling, even laughter.
Herbert divine verse in not a religious search it is rather a
quest for an existential position of Man in the universe and so his
role to determine his position. The relationship between Man as a
subject and God the power is present before the poet would identify
it so the beginning of each poem announces its end despite the
rebellious tone of the speaker. At this level, a close examination of
the voices in The Temple and their stream of consciousness may
lead to the denial of the presence of one voice; it is rather a clash of
voices and so the poet urges for settling the rebellious Christian self.
Accordingly, Herbert plays upon the metamorphose of voices,
the sinner voice becomes the redeemed as he assumes in “Sinne I”:
“Yet all these fences and their whole aray/ one cunning bosome-
sinne quite away.” One may also consider the well-known “The
Collar” and its reversal movement from rebellion to rest this
movement reinforces the identity of the intellectual Christian who is
able to end his torments and accept the divine will. Thus, there is a
paradoxical image of paradoxical image of questioning God while
praising Him. We can here refer to T.S Eliot critical book George
Herbert; he depicts Herbert’s work as following:
“Herbert is not a poet whose work is significant only for Christian readers;
that The Temple is not to be taken as simply a devotional handbook of meditation

for the faithful, but as the personal record of a man very conscious of weakness
and failure, a man of intellect and sensibility who hungered and thirsted after
righteousness. And that by its content, as well as because of its technical
accomplishment, it is a work of importance for every lover of poetry.”
T.S Eliot views Herbert as a poet who seeks to put limits to
his torments. He is weak because of his humanity yet this weakness
is transformed into a poetic power. Herbert’s search becomes poetic
rather than religious, and then he displays the complexity and the
absurdity of the futile quest. Here lies the beauty of the poetic
search it is not necessarily to find biblical truths because these
truths are already present then the sweetness of the search lies in
its quality of being a search. Thus, “The Search” is an evidence of a
tormented self, which it will never reach an end: “My searches are
my daily bread/ yet never prove.” In this poem, the speaker is
wavering between his spiritual convictions and his intellectual quest,
this dilemma leads to a search for settlement in a world of accepting
the religious reality perfectly yet paradoxically. The divine truth is
imposed yet it is chosen at the same time, what makes the
peculiarity of the religious experience.
In “The Search”, the speaker denies any sense of centrality;
the poem is constructed upon the notion of “absence». An analysis
of the sign system leads to the assumption that the search requires
the absence of knowledge, the neutrality of the researcher and the
sense of questioning without revealing any centered truth:
“My knees pierce th’earth, mine eies the skie;
And yet the sphere

And centre both to me denie
That thou art there.”
The recurrence of the questions continues until the end of the poem.
Despite the stability of the divine subject, the speaker is searching for
being close to God despite His absence. The divine exists at the very
moment of admiring the nature and since man is part of the created world
he does not have to search for the Almighty existence, yet he has to make
himself present with God. After the long search, the speaker concludes
that he is close to God and so gives answers to the previous raised
questions: “Where is my God? What hidden place/ conceals thee still?” He
reinforces implicitly that God is present in him and then the search is not
outside, it is within his self.
When he assumes at the sixth stanza that “the search was dumbe
before:/ But all was one.” He makes the search now “speaking” in order to
unfold his closeness to God; for at the end he reinforces the result of his
quest:
“For as thy absence doth excel

All distance known :
So doth thy nearness bear the bell,
Making two one”.
The poem is wavering between hope and despair until the final stanza
when he employs the bell as an emblem of the church for the unity that
would make reconciliation. Implicitly he finds redemption to his sins since
he knows that he is near to God and that he dwells in the church. In this

way, the poem is not a search for God as it is a way to praise Him and
then to find grace.
Eventually, the circularity of the poem does not reflect the futility of
the search; it is rather a reflection upon the unity between the speaker
and his God and the absence of the distance. Furthermore, the poem can
be considered a self-reflexive in the sense that the ambiguous questions
reflect the complexity of the theme despite its final simple resolution.
A modern reading of the Herbertian text acquires considering the
cultural and the historical background of the verse. The Temple is written
at a time when the Church of England is searching for annihilating the
existing tensions within the different branches. For instance, there are
references to Anglo-Catholicism:
“Yet I hear tell,
That some leaves therein
So void of sinne,
That they in merit shall excel. (“Judgement”

stanza 2)
Yet, some critics, like Joseph Summers, argue in favor of the poet’s
Protestantism and suggest the poet’s affinities with a contemporary
Calvinist theological position. Consequently, these tensions are presented
in “The Temple” to reinforce the existence of conflicts within the Christian
belief. However, at the very moment of this conflict comes an insistence
on the importance of reconciliation and the resort to God love.
As an individual Christian, a scholar of classical letters and divinity,
Herbert is haunted by this intricate mission; moreover, as a poet he tends

to reconcile between knowledge, faith and aesthetics. “Divinity” is an
evidence of the poet’s attempt to make reconciliation between theological
conflicts: how to adjust faith with reason. The speaker presents from the
beginning an absurd image of astrology: “As men, fear the stares should
sleep and nod, / And trip at night, have suppli’d;” then he constructs a
relation of independence between faith and reason: “Divinities
transcendent skie:/ which with the edge of wit they cut and carve./ Reason
triumphs, and faith lies by.”Strikingly, the speaker does not end the quest
easily. He raised the implication of such relation:
?” “Could not that Wisdome, which first broach the wine,
Have thicken’d it with definitions?
And jagg’d his seamless, coat , had that been fine,
With curious questions and divisions
Accordingly, this poem can be divided into two parts. The first one
presents the question of the relationship between faith and reason. In the
second part, there is a recurrence of the word “But” which reinforces the
speaker’s torments. At the end, the speaker is in favor of the religious
faith as a resolution to his dilemma for he believes that faith does not
require any quest. The reciprocal love between the Creator and the
redeemed creature subverts all the raised questions. Faith is analyzed
with reason, since the true way to reach heaven is to believe in God:
“Faith needs no staff of flesh,/ To heav’n alone both go, and leade.”
The recurrence of the issue of love to God in three followed poems:
“The Method”, “Divinity” and “Ephes 4.30 Grieve not the Holy Spirit”. The

internal movement of the poems is the delay of achieving certain truths
outside the divine realm. The religious verity is put into question in a
recurrent way; the truth is no sooner given than questioned from another
perspective. Furthermore, many poems’ titles are repeated with different
focuses. For instance, “Affliction” is recurrent for five times, “Praise”
occurs three times and there is two “Jordan” poems. At this point, one he
may heed Barbara Leah Harman’s criticism of the literary experience of
George Herbert; she points out to the recurrence of the theme as
following:
“…this notion seems especially important in the work of the poet George Herbert,
for the poems in “The Temple” are often self-conscious and critical to a fault about
the process of their own production. The moment when a poem’s speaker doubles
back upon his text provides the occasion for significant exploration.”
The internal movement of The Temple is characterized by a sense of
delay. Each poem offers a kind of tension. The continuation of the inquiry
dismisses any sense of closure to the divine experience and to the text
itself. Therefore, the quest becomes a search for new questions.
Artistically speaking, The Temple is an imitation of the church as a place of
ornamentation and so poetry as a form of art resists closure. The divine
verse is ambivalent not because of its subject but also for its poetic
originality.
Herbert’s search for a truthful relation with the Sacred roots him in
the concerns of the ordinary Christian concerns. Herbert, the priest, is also
an individual Christian so that he represents different religious
experiences. The church is not only a place of liturgical practices but it is
also a world of reflections upon the divine and then the verbal art

becomes the true way to be close to God. The spiritual conversation
between God and Man does never end; it is a continuing process of search.
Thus, the poet strongly believes in the adequacy of Rhetoric to fill the gap
between the human and the sacred. In “Quidditie”, he defines poetry as:
“But it is that which while I use./ I am with thee, and Most take all.”
Accordingly, the search becomes a poetic quest for adequate way to
transmit the divine experience. This search is aimed to fill the gap
between the divine search and the ability of the verbal art to make this
search true.
“The Pearl” is an evidence of the power of the divine verse to unify
between Man and God. Notably, the recurrence of the line: “Yet I love
thee” reinforces the deep relation between the verse and the divine
subject, the speaker finds God’s love in his lines and so he constructs the
“Silk twist”. The pearl is thus present despite its absence. It owes its
worthiness to the long silk twist, which stands metaphorically for the
divine life journey of the poet. Therefore, it is significant to display the
equivocal relationship between “to love” and “to climb” for there is a
question that imposes itself: God’s love is already present or it is an aim
that the speaker wants to reach. Then, love lies in climbing the silk twist
because at the end, he transfigured “Yet I Love thee” by “to climb to
thee”. The precious pearl is unreachable since the end of climbing the silk
twist can never be known.
The internal logic of the poem shows that the precious worldly
temptations: “Learning”, “Honour” and “Pleasure” are certainly precious

for the speaker and essential for being close to the sacred Who originally
offers them; so that he writes a whole stanza for each one. They are
precious to the point that the speaker neglects them for the sake of God’s
love but they are transformed into precious expressions of divine love. In
the last stanza, there is no worthy thing yet it represents the most
important stanza because the reader becomes acquainted with the true
way to reach the pearl of great price. Eventually, the speaker is fully
aware of the assertion of significant words of love in the last stanza yet it
owes its worthiness from the bulky stanzas to which it is attached.
In The Temple, there is another level of conflict between life and
death. His poems are regarded as semi-autobiographical; his work is
published in 1633 in Cambridge after his death. As a man of religion, he
displays a powerful satisfaction towards the divine so that he cannot
escape from his torments in the church, the space of reflections. In her
biographical account about George Herbert, Pamela M. King writes,
“None of George Herbert’s poems was published until after his death. Then, at the
poet’s request, his friend Nicholas Ferrar published them in a volume called The
Temple. They are all religious verses, but Herbert, like John Donne, whom he
knew, did not find his religious vocation until relatively late in life. The posthumous
publication of his poems, and subsequent biographies, turned Herbert into an
Anglican proto-saint, and until comparatively recently his poems were studied as
examples of perfect piety, compared with the Psalms of David in the Bible, rather
than in literary terms at all. The real story of Herbert’s life and probable religious
views is both more complicated than this suggests and ultimately more
unknowable.”
In this way, The Temple reflects some hidden conflicts in his life then after
his death, these tensions are exposed to the public.
The voice of the divine “friend” there is a down-to-earth voice that
uses colloquial, concrete image from the daily life as a way to reach higher

reality. His feelings towards the divine are controlled by his thoughts, he is
self-questioning to the extent that his rebellion is appeased by itself;
furthermore his torments are alleviated by his certainty of death since he
was sick. One may refer here to Izaak Walton’s biographical writing about
George Herbert, he narrates: “About the year 1629, and the thirty-fourth
of his age, Mr. Herbert was seized with a sharp quotidian ague.” Then he
adds
“And it is to be noted that in the sharpest of his extreme fits he would often say,
‘Lord, abate my great affliction, or increase my patience; but, Lord, I repine not; I
am dumb, Lord before thee, because thou dost it.’ By which, and a sanctified
submission to the will of God, he showed he was inclinable to bear the sweet yoke
of Christian discipline, both then and in the latter part of his life, of which there will
be many true testimonies.”
The fact of illness is very significant in Herbert’s life because it was
his “family disease” and this fact foreshadows a sense of absurdity to
some of his poems. Thus, his verse becomes a shelter to improve his artful
power; it is a way to escape physical weakness. Moreover, he urges for the
immortality of his verse because he is aware of the mortality of the human
life. From the beginning of The Temple, in “The Sinner” for instance,
Herbert unfolds that ague, which is his illness, and its implicated meanings
will be part of the discourse between him and the Sacred. There are three
main puns in the poem; “When I seek” can be read as pun of “sick”, “the
week” as a pun of “weak” and then “since” is a pun of “sins”. Therefore,
the diction of the poem turns around the physical suffering and so one can
assume the deep relation between illness and the speaker’s urge for
redemption. Thus, he subverted his disease to a sense of ease. It is worthy
to note that “The Sinner” is preceded by “The Agonie”: “Sinne is that

presse and vice, which forceth pain/ to hunt his cruell food through ev’ry
vein.” And also followed by “Good Friday” in which the speaker is certain
that:
“Sinne being gone, oh fill the place,
And keep possession with thy grace;
Lest sinne take courage and return,
And all the writings blot or burn.”
The reader is faced by the speaker’s proclamation that his suffering
can only engender sweetness. The poet makes from the religious facts his
own verity so that the poetic work guarantees his redemption then he
feels at ease when he addresses God. Moreover, one may deduce the
parallel construction between Christ and the poet; the fact of salvation is
fulfilled at the very act of suffering. Yet, this image is reminding of the
lover’s seek at the end of his suffering. Eventually, The Temple begins with
the fact of redemption and ends with God’s love so this circularity
reinforces the poetic success in fulfilling his aim.
It is very significant to take into consideration the peculiarity of the
poet’s experience not only as a priest but also as an ordinary individual
Christian who is fully certain about the validity of death due to his illness.
Thus, he is different from the other divine poets in terms of employing his
personal experience to deal with his reflection upon the religious
experience. The physical sufferings are transfigured into poetic writing
that reflects the deep yet complex relation with the divine. At this point, a
close examination of the three related poems about the personal
experience of the poet is consequential to highlight the importance of the

physical weakness in shaping the relationship between Man and God; the
poems to be taken into consideration are “The Sinner”, “Affliction I” and
“The Cross”.
The three poems turn around the same idea that illness redeems the
sins this is a common Christian idea so that the speakers are certain about
the fact of redemption. “The Sinner” and “Affliction” are situated in the
opening of the Temple, and then the mentioning of his illness at an early
moment makes it a source of inspiration and a way of creation. The
speaker is at ease when confronting God so his physical weakness is
subverted to be a kind of power and most strikingly asserts him in a
position of greatness. The speaker plays upon “the ague” and makes its
dependent on his religious use of the term. In 1609, Herbert wrote to his
mother
“…But I fear the heat of my ague hath dried up those springs by which scholars
say the Muses use to take up their habitations. However, I need not their help to
reprove the vanity of those many love poems that are daily writ and consecrated
to Venus, nor to bewail that so few are writ that towards God and heaven”
According to Herbert ague is here an enemy that may prevent his
literary struggle to show the power of the divine verse and its opposition
to the triviality of the secular verse. In the same letter to his mother,
Herbert ends it with two devotional sonnets. He describes his literary
mission as praising God and then he draws upon the complexity of this
mission
“Sure, Lord, there is enough in thee to dry
Oceans of ink; for, as the Deluge did
Cover the earth, so doth thy majesty;

Each cloud distils thy praise, and doth forbid
Poets to turn it to another use.
He comments on his verse at the end of the sonnet: “open the bones, and
you shall nothing find/ In the best face but filth; when Lord in thee/ the
beauty lies in the discovery.” Furthermore, he relies on the reader’s
sharing of his own spiritual experience; his feeling of bitterness is
transfigured into sweetness in order to make his peculiar experience
reciprocal among all men. In this way, the particular for Herbert becomes
general simply to insist on the existence of God as One for all humanity.
Moreover, ague is considered as the way of salvation for the sins.
Herbert makes the religious discourse pliable to his own experience and
goes further to make it evident for all Christians. Here, one may heed
Michael C. Schoenfeld viewing of Herbert as: “a writer whose spirituality is
frequently articulated in terms of unexpected but stunning corporeality.”
Obviously, the poet’s assurance of redemption is individually released and
cannot be easily felt by the reader that is why he insists upon it and makes
the dilemma in a movement of delay. When we move from one poem to
another, the quest for grace is deeply related with a feeling of hope
overwhelming the poet’s soul.
“Affliction I” is another instance of the poet’s experience of
suffering; after nine poems from “The Sinner”, Herbert insists again on the
fact of salvation thanks to his peculiar illness:
“My flesh began unto my soul in pain
Sicknesses cleave my bones.
Consuming agues dwell in every vein

And tune my breath to groans.
Sorrow was all my soul: I scarce believed
Till grief did tell me roundly that I lived.
“Affliction I” is an essential narrative moment in The Temple for the poet
shows a serious spiritual crisis when the poet is questioning God. The title
foreshadows a sense of bitterness and so prepares the reader to discover
the tragic situation of the speaker. He is physically suffering but eloquently
turns each moment of pain into a moment of happiness:
“Yet lest perchance I should too happy be
In my happiness,
Turning my purge to food, thou throwest me
Into more sicknesses.
Thus doth thy power cross-bias me, not making
Thine own gift good, yet me from my ways taking.”
The speaker delineates himself as a victim and then intensifies his
tragic situation so that he reflects the classical image of the biblical
affliction; it is the suffering cry of Job: “My bones cleaveth to my skin and
to my flesh, and I am escaped by the skin of my teeth” (Job 19:20).
Paralleled to Herbert’s words: “My flesh began unto my soul in pain
sicknesses cleave my bones.” Therefore, he resists the physical suffering
because he is certain of redemption. We may refer here to Michael Marx
consideration of the relation of the poem to the book of Job and the
Psalms: “To intensify the imagery of physical suffering borrowed from Job,
the speaker recasts his own affliction as a dialogue between his suffering
flesh and his anguished soul.”

Despite the plainness of the poem, there is an ambiguous level,
which affects its whole meaning. in the last two stanzas, there is a direct
confrontation with God that entails another resolution yet, it leads to
another dilemma:
“Well I will change the service, an go seek
Some other master out.
Ah my dear God! Though I am clean forgot,
Let me not love thee, if I love not.”
At the end, the speaker becomes conscious about his betrayal. The poem
proceeds towards disillusion instead of delight and then recreates the
speaker’s movement from despair to joy but the last line is too complex
that it reinforces the uneasiness to release the tension. Accordingly, the
poem subverts itself when it ends with an equivocal line. Barbara Leah
Harman insists on the incoherence of “Affliction I” when she writes:
“The first fifty-four lines of “Affliction I” recount the process of diminishment

suffered by a man who, convinced that he lives in a world of possibilities, must
learn that he lives in a world of none. But the speaker who tells the story is a man
who already knows that he is utterly without means, and knowledge of that end is
implicit from the beginning of his retrospective account. So that while in one sense
the progress of the poem is towards diminishment, in another sense there is no
progress. The retrospective speaker knows that there were either means or
possibilities- only the illusion of them.
The interconnection between salvation and illness recurs in his poem
“The Cross”, the speaker insists on his physical disabilities, which lead to
his spiritual despair as if he is continuing the tragic instance of “Affliction
I”
“One ague dwelleth in my bones,
Another in my soul (the memory
What I would do for thee, if once my groans
Could be allow’d for harmony)

I am in all a weak disabled thing:
Save in the sight thereof, where strength doth sting.”
The personal divine experience guarantees redemption to the speaker
because he shows the weakness of the human being and then the power
of God lies in His forgetfulness. The overconfidence in God makes the
logic of justice in the poem therefore; when the speaker is certain about
God’s love, he assures the restfulness of the tension. He also proclaims
that he is not responsible for his illness so he is consciously convinced that
God would fulfill His promise.
In “The Cross”, the speaker is more appeased than in “Affliction I” he
is now more aware of the vanity of his challenge. He proves the Christian
doctrine of submissiveness and then he reaches the sense of humility that
“he seeks before” so that the human deficiency plays as a sign of the
inextricable position of God constructed by the poem. Along the three
poems “The Sinner”, “Affliction I” and “The Cross” there is the delineation
of the human physical and spiritual suffering in order to reflect a new
image of the Sacred. God causes illness but at the same time, he assures
forgiveness to the weak creation thus the complex relation between God
and Man.
The divine experience of Herbert is different from the other poets; he
proves the truthfulness of his relation to the Sacred when he makes the
religious discourse real. The complexity of the divine experience is
transfigured into sweet relation with The Sacred. Yet, an inner paradox lies
in the affiliation of language and religion. Herbert urges for resolution to

his dilemma however, art resists closure and owes its existence to the
multiplicity of interpretation.
Part II: the interplay of desire and faith:

1/ The play of the “Self” with “the Other”:
It is deceitful to consider Herbert’s The Temple as simply a book of a
Christian priest who is praising God. However, there is a paradoxical
situation between the true praise to God and the pitiful struggle within the
Self. Evidently, Herbert describes his work as: “...a picture of the many
spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I
could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master: in whose service I have
found perfect freedom”.
Herbert’s poetic text is not as plain as it is described for his use of poetic
language, as a complex system of signification, makes the task even more
problematic. Therefore, it is fundamental to scrutinize the intricate image
of God since He is the subject of the verse. In this way, to examine
Herbert’s verse is to focus on the representation of God in His poetic
image and this what makes the religious verse peculiar from the other
metaphysical verses.
Herbert is haunted by the presence of God as an entity then he
seeks to make the concept of God unified with “God-the-word” for the idea

of God is already present conceptually as the sacred power thus its
representation becomes strenuous to delineate. At some moments the
reader feels that the speaker is unable to fulfil this sense of wholeness; the
fact of achieving a whole image of the sacred God through language. In
the two “Jordans” the speaker unfolds that his verse is adequate to tell all
what desires: “Must all be veiled, while he that reads, divines/ catching the
sense at two removes?” then the poet is conscious that his verse is
ambiguous and so veiling all what he wants is equivocal. He even
describes the verbal art as easy as to “Copy out only that, and save
expense” yet, the representation of the Sacred is as complex as the
religious matters. Our poet raises more questions about God to the extent
that we do not have a single image and then the relationship with God
becomes complex though the speakers tend to simplify the existing
tension. Unfolding his spiritual conflicts with God, his verse becomes the
space of freedom where the lines narrate the different dimensions of an
equivocal relationship.
A deep scrutiny of the relationship between the poet, as an Anglican
priest, and God may lead to read this relation in the light of its cultural
context. God is the religious ideology that the poet “speaks”, he speaks
the language of his Divine and he cannot depart from from it. The
“Sacred” is projected in the poems as a human being who listens, speaks
and he is even engaged in serious issues. Accordingly, God becomes
subject to the poetic text where He is delineated, in this way, Herbert
procures a sense of freedom and more importantly asserts his Self within
the foundation of his presence. Herbert seeks existence in the realm of the

divine for God is already an existing Self before His existence in language
God is “The Big Other” to employ Jacques Lacan concept. Herbert uses the
verbal art to re-make the divine and to represent his struggle with Him as
an “Other”. Lacan views language as the system by which Man can speak
the Other and then it is irretrievably Other; he defines “The Other” (or
“The Symbolic”) through language as “the pact which links… subjects
together in one action. The human action par excellence is originally
founded on the existence of the world of the symbol, namely on laws and
contracts”. In this way, Herbert’s language is to speak God who is the “Big
Other” eventually, he is unconsciously unable to get separated from the
divine power. Alienating from the presence of God; the poet searches for
his existence as a “whole” yet, the superego (the religious constraints)
overwhelms his voice and influences his id. Strikingly, Herbert is conscious
that he cannot fall in his unconsciousness; he wants to control his desire of
asserting his self by making his ego subject to his contests.
Referring back to his literary background, Herbert wined the
university oratorship after being taught the mastery of scholarly debate.
His mother’s sophistication influenced his way of presenting the religious
matters then the Renaissance academy was based on learning how to
make oral presentation in which one should be well skilled in how to attack
or defence a religious existential matter. Consequently, the sense of
combat is already present in Herbert’s verbal contests, his academic skills
display an intellectual who seeks to gain a distinct identity; for him Man is
in conflict with with nature. However able to control his destiny and to
perform an essential role, a paradoxical image we can find in his

autobiographical poem “Affliction I”: “I was entangled in a world of strife,/
Before I had the power to change my life.”(Emphasis added). Here the
speaker insists on his existence as a separate independent self.
The assertion of the Self requires an understanding of the world yet,
the poet lives in a cultural environment of religious constraints; he is
brought in the church to be Anglican; so he is the subject of his culture. At
this point, the question that imposes itself is: the religious experience is a
way to ease the understanding of the existence of Man or a constraint
towards his freedom. In Herbert’s verse, the speakers endeavour a
separate self, different from the Other (God), in this way the
representation of God becomes more complex for the speaker cannot
escape the Sacred presence within his self. Religiously speaking, because
of “the Fall” Man’s existence becomes a continuation of Christ’s presence
in the world. Therefore, the poet is spiritually tormented by the presence
of the Sacred hence he has a fragmented self and then unable to be
unified.
His “play” with the Other (the sacred) presents simultaneously a
search for the presence of the Self ; ending the contest with a sense of
rest shows the longing for freedom thus it is a search for an authentic self.
The essential dilemma of the poet is to transmit a true image of God and
to fill the gap between God as a concept and his presence within the
religious experience. Yet, Herbert’s search for his self is paradoxical since
he is united with the Other (God) so the psychological separation in
language is fundamental especially when we deal with the presence of

God within the “poetic play”. Considerably, the relationship with the
Sacred is too complex to the extent that the poetic text becomes
equivocal and then summons for different views.
From “The Altar” to “Easter Wings” Herbert announces the
“dangerous” presence of God in his speech, but he also refers to his
fundamental role in delineating the “play” between the speaker and his
God. In the ending lines of “The Altar”, he says: “O let thy blessed sacrifice
be mine/ and sanctify this altar to be mine”. The speaker insists on the
separation between his self and God’s Self: the sacrifice is human but the
altar, which is purely divine, exists “wordily” in The Temple and then the
poet has his “own” altar. Accordingly, he projects Christ’s sacrifice to his
self, which is the subject of the next poem immediately after “the Altar”,
“The Sacrifice”.
The continuing structure and the recurrence of the same themes,
titles and tensions foreshadow the failure of the poet to satisfy his lost self.
We can notice the feeling of desire to fulfil this loss as if the poetic text (as
a complex system of signifiers) is able to catch what is lost or to borrow
Lacan’s concept “The real”. Herbert is conscious that achieving wholeness
is almost impossible. “The Temple” in this way represents the Christian
self aware that he cannot betray God with language. He wants to be loyal
to God as well as to the logic of his text. Furthermore, we find a
multiplicity of selves on the poetic text of Herbert so he longs for
constructing a separate identity, as he cannot depart from God.

All the religious realities are re-created in language and then re-
discovered to satisfy a tormented Anglican Self. For example, in
“Thanksgiving” the speaker suddenly reaches moral satisfaction when he
says: “Thy art of love, which I will turn back to thee/ Oh my dear saviour
victory” but this victory is too early in the beginning of The Temple for;
later on, he will discover that his complete satisfaction cannot be fully
achieved. From one poem to another, the reader discovers with the
multiplicity of different speakers that there are many selves: a sinner self
in “Sin I”, a confessing self in “Repentence” and a rebellious self in “The
Collar”. These selves are either opposite to the God will or in harmony with
Him, accordingly, these divisions make paradoxically the wholeness of the
poet’s Christian self; he is self-contained and can only exist within God
“the other” hence we can find this idea in his confessing voice in
“Reprisal”:
“Yet by confession will I come
Into thy conquest: though I can do nought
Against thee, In thee will I overcome
The man, who once against thee fought.”
At this moment, we feel that the speaker is united with God and
even he points himself as part of God and then fights against his sinner
self in order to gain God’s repentance. “Easter Wings” is a witnessed
moment of the presence of the speaker as a sinful self within his
Christianity. It is a poem of a visual enactment of the bird’s flight, a
symbolic moment in The Temple which emphasizes the disappearance of
sins and then a sign of redemption. When he retells the Easter story, he

recreates a new relationship between Man and God thus this typological
verse becomes a frame, which declares the unity between Man as a
creature and God as the creator so the speaker can be considered as a
contributor to the delineation of a truer relation with the Sacred.
Therefore, “The Temple” does not question the old religious story; it is
rather an inquiry of an authentic relation with God.
It is notable to point out the importance of the sin in the play
between God and the poet for the sinful self is that “enemy” who should
be fought by the redeemed self already existing within the sacred. So we
can confirm that God’s voice exists as an internal self within the speaker,
he speaks for God and with Him at the same time. In “The Pulley” for
instance, the speaker presents the image of God (the creator) as opposed
to the image of Man (the creature); here the poet tells the story of a
“business” relationship between Man and God as if there is a game
between the two. Remarkably, the poet makes God speaks and He even
uses the “I” pronoun: “for if I should (said he)” so he is fully aware and
even certain about the true voice of God. Actually, there is a game in the
internal logic of the poem: God’s aim is to draw Man towards Him in order
to reach “rest”, the central pun which points also to the end of the
dilemma. Here God “is planning” to make the end of the game as the
pleasure so that both will become “winners” he writes: “Yet let him keep
the rest/ But keep them with repining restlessness.” (Emphasis added).
Consequently, both Man and God have to gain each other in order to “pull
for a prime”. “The Pulley” is a game, which aims at gaining pleasure
through the journey of love shred between the two “players”. The image

of a “poetic game” allows for guaranteeing Presence; as usually the poet
insists on his important role in framing an ideal spiritual relationship with
the sacred.
When we examine the deep relationship between the poet and God
we cannot separate between the two for this interdependence is not only
complex but also ambiguous. The speaker is always present as a Christian
man however, God is delineated conceptually then he seeks to illuminate
his presence and to make it clear so he asserts a “sweet” image. Yet,
when God is attributed with His religious constraints the dilemma becomes
an urgent fact, the question that imposes itself is how to present an
authentic and balanced image about God.
Accordingly, to make from the religious contests a poetic world is a
great challenge for Herbert. To constitute a harmony between his
alienated self and God seems to be the tension that governs his verse so if
we formulate the problematic situation we can say: the poet wants to gain
“wholeness” so that he becomes tormented between being a distinct self,
opposed to God or being part of God’s wholeness and loosing oneself. The
poet’s verse is the space of freedom but at the same time to make this
space enslaved by certain constraints.
The resolution of the tension at the end of the poems ends before it
even starts and Herbert is very conscious about this ironical situation.
However, what matters is to show the journey towards this end and then
to transform the dramatic experience of Man into a “true wordily world”.
The poetic experience allows for the discovering of oneself and also the

“Other” so that the speaker makes his text even more worthy than the
spiritual experience as if his existence can be achieved only through his
writing. In the final poem, “Love III” the speaker asserts the fact of rest.
Yet, there is a sense of fragmentation of the self, reinforced in the
presence of a multiplicity of “Iies” the speaker seems to be “tired” from
the previous tensions and then yearns for a sense of rest. Nevertheless, he
remembers that his soul “drew back, guilty of dust and sin”; therefore, the
sinful self will be obliterated since it finds love. Also, tired from being
fragmented the poet finally chooses to terminate the contests within his
self and to be reunited as one “I” as if the resolution of the whole dilemma
is to be in love with God. He declares that he is not One:
“I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?” (Emphasis

added)
Notably, “eyes” is a pun of the “Iies” which points to the presence of
a multiplicity if selves, and then a significant acknowledgment of reaching
a fragmented existence. Yet, the speaker rejects the complicated issue if
existence and refer to the love of God as a way to achieve a “true life”.
Love is an image of God Who calls Man to establish a “perfect
relationship” with Him and then the speaker seeks to prove that he finally
guarantees this sense of rest. However, this rest does not allows for
freedom for it is deeply connected with God’s power so that the speaker is
free but out of his love which is ironically constructed. The speaker is the
constructor of this love; he is the one who freed himself from the feeling of

“shame”. Love fills the gaps within his self but it also grows within the
same self. We can refer to his words:
“But quick-eyed love, observing me grew slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d any thing.”
Accordingly, the feeling of alienation from God is easily dismantled
and transformed into a feeling of love and ease. The move comes from the
Lord Who intervenes in the exchange of love after the recognition of the
speaker’s sinfulness: “Love said, you shall be he./I the unkinde,
ungratefull? Ah my deare, /I cannot look on thee.”
Significantly, the resolution does not come from a religious agenda,
the speaker is responsible for asserting his human existence and then he
reaches a sense of rest. He manipulates the religious discourse to fit the
resolution of his dilemma. At this point, we can notice the sense of
individualism; the speaker is self-confident when he proves that certainly
he gains redemption out of love. The reconciliation can be seen to be
within the self; love urges for the existence of a new relationship between
the speaker and his tormented self so that now he gains a sense of unity
within himself as soon as he is settled. This poem in not only the end of
torments, it presents the end of the book and then puts an end to the
religious contests by the sense of communal existence as well as by the
figure of Christ. He even neglects his search for truth and then forgets

about his shame of his sins so that he calls of an end to all these torments.
This is reinforced in the ending lines:
“Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
The image of settlement announces the beginning of a new life. The
speaker is not obedient to an alienated self (“you must”) but he is
compliant to his internal voice for love exists within himself; this power of
love can control his relation with God and asserts his existence as a
distinct individual. In her study of The Temple Helen Vendler examines the
resolution of the poems and reads the speakers’ selves as “yielding, finally
a picture of the self wholly itself, individual, unique and original”. It is
worthy to note that when the poet finally reaches love within his self he
succeeds to acquire the whole image of God as His redeemer. He finally
finds a unity within his self and his community.
In this way, Herbert’s verse addresses the speaker’s self more than
the Other (God). We can notice the existing gap between asserting the self
and speaking the Other. The Temple becomes this desire to fill the gap
within the poet’s self in order to gain a sense of wholeness at the expense
of praising God. Ironically constructed, the more the poet asserts his
independence, the more he proves his dependence to God. Then the
enigmatic affiliation between God and the speaker becomes more

ambiguous than it is, so as far as the poet succeeds to separate between
his secular life and his divine world he finds that this separation is in no
way an illusion. Tremendously, his powerful existence depends on the
presence of the sacred as “the centre” of the relation. However, this
centrality of God is only transmitted to show the distinctive identity of the
poet and then the powerful existence of God depends upon the poet
interconnection to Him. At this point, I am trying to take consideration of
the significant narrative poem “The Collar” which can be regarded as the
climax of The Temple. It is as a soliloquy for the speaker unfolds his story
of suffering as a Christian man and refers strongly to the religious
constraints that heighten his torments. This poem is an interior speech
with the self to prove the hard submission to the divine will.
“The Collar” as a dramatic monologue displays at first a self-denial
speaker who is struggling to gain a sense of self-fulfilment but we notice
that the decision is already taken “I struck the board, and cried, No more. /
I will abroad.” It is a very significant moment for the speaker is a rebellious
person this time. Actually this poem in equivocal because of its
dependence on raising questions, here we have philosopher poet and not
a religious one. He is paying the costs of raising fundamental questions
about an “unquestionable” entity. Thus, it is a moment of enquiring about
the freedom of the self when surrounded by the constraints of the Other
and then how to act when this self is unable to rebel against these
boundaries. It is notable to remark that this monologue reminds us of
Shakespeare’s Hamlet famous soliloquy “to be or no to be” for the
speaker’s dilemma lies in the raised question: to be with God or to be with

Oneself. Furthermore, as far as the poem raises questions it dismantles
the answers and then the tension does not only lie in the speaker’s
relation with his Creator, but it is also a tension between him and verse.
The lines are full of contradictions from the beginning when he declares:
“My lines and life are free; free as the road,” however, this freedom is
cannot coexist with such religious constraints, his lines cannot resist the
presence of the sacred. Even in “The Collar”, the irregular pattern of both
its rhyme scheme and its metre (diameters, trimesters, tetrameters and
then pentameters) reinforces the angry, bitter tone of the poet.
The heightened crisis takes its way to the resolution for the speaker
is aware from the beginning that the only way to resolve the raised
tension is to resort to his Lord. He is certain about the validity of death:
“Call in thy death’s head there: tie up thy fears!” Again, this line reminds
us of Hamlet’s contemplating the skull, which raises in him the image of
the absurdity of death. Accordingly, the question that imposes itself is if
the speaker is aware of the end of his poem so what is the implication of
the remarkable question. Here we can note that the release of the tension
at the end seems to be artificial however, the questions remain valid
hence the existence of a two-layered consciousness. The speaker unfolds
his view through questions, and this calls up for Socrates way of reaching
truth by raising question and not giving full realities. Yet, the end of the
questions is here different when the dilemma reaches its end, the speaker
returns to his faith in Christ (“My Lord”). At this level, it is quite interesting
to note that “The Collar” is not to give new realities than to assert

“Oneself”; the speaker is interested in maintaining his presence, he
attempts to show that he has a real voice.
Only for a didactic purpose, the speaker makes the end as easily
swept away as to be in Christ’s faith. The clash is now between the
speaker and his self, he is not addressing God neither Christ. Yet, he
speaks to his internal Christian self therefore the speaker is living an
exceptional existential experience; an experience very different from the
religious life he has ever lived, now his “lines and life are free”. His
previous life remains repetitive so that an urgent change is expected and
that is why he “will abroad”; this new experience of rebellion may satisfy
the speaker’s desire; an absent satisfaction in his religious experience
which, can lead to a life of freedom and lessens the feelings of sufferings.
Accordingly, in “The Collar”, we have two different phases: the
unsaid past of the speaker that we can deduce from his actual new
experience and then his present search for the “free will”. The significant
implication of his previous life shows that he had a silent voice unable to
rebel against the imposed restrictions; now his voice changes to be a
rebellious speaking one and this revolution is twofold by both declaring the
wishes and acting through speech. As a result, the speaker becomes able
to reach a sense of difference and originality; the end of silence is
extremely important in the religious experience for the Christian Man has
defiance towards himself in the assertion of his existence with the
presence of the religious restrictions.

The poet proves that the Christian self is a thinker and that is a part
of the Christian identity; yet, he makes this self search for freedom and
privacy. Thereby he shows the costs of obedience to the divine will, the
Christian self obliterates its freedom and individuality in order to gain
religious release. Hence, the poem narrates the Christian story with his
self, and that what makes the truthfulness of the poem, it is invaded by
the sense of individuality. The speaker is aware of his important revolting
voice in the delineation of the religious discourse. Furthermore, he
changes his speech as he cries “No more!” then language becomes this
major aspect in the construction of the experience of revolution. The
speaker insists that the originality of his experience for in the second part
of the poem he intends to give answers to his previous questions; yet,
these answers heighten the rebellion within the self. The supplement of
the previous life of imprisonment becomes the new status of freedom. Yet
he recognizes that this freedom is only an illusion when he declares:
“Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not; forsake thy cage,
Thy rope of sands,"
Along the first part of real “choler”, the speaker insists on the use of
“I”; however, this “I” is not stable, it is not a self-constrained neither. The
poetic text then displays the voice of an “I” seeking separation from the
imposed self of God and this is part of the existential dilemma. Referring
to Jacques Lacan view of the other, the “I” of the speaker can only be a
signifier of other many “Ies” then a deep desire of processing a self-
contained self. It is a stage when normally he proves his existence as a

separated self from “the father” God. Yet, and at the end of the poem he
reminds himself before the reader that God is “He that forbears /To suit
and serve his need/Deserves his load”. He recognizes his separation from
God not as a self-disciplined entity but as a margin and then God is not an
imposed power; it is ‘the centre’ upon which his existence depends on.
Yet, even God’s power depends upon the weakness of Man therefore their
existence can be seen as interchangeable when it is analyzed from the
duality of “margin/centre”. Here we can refer to what Joan Starobinski
writes in his book “The Inside and the Outside”:
“A living organism exists only by virtue of the margin… through which it

determines, defines and opposes itself, becoming individual: limit, finiteness,
individuality, the struggle waged against the outside; all these are correlative. No
inside is conceivable, therefore, without the complicity of an outside on which it
relies… no outside would be conceivable without an inside fending it off…”
At the end of “The Collar”, we meet another image of the rebellious
speaker. The interior speech ends to make a different discourse
introduced by the word “but” and this movement proves that the previous
story is only a fiction and that the true revolution is untrue. The four
ending lines put a quick end to the torments and then make the previous
story a part from the past. From this unpredicted end, we can deduce that
the poem has not a single fixed meaning and so it should be read until the
end since this end deconstructs the first long part. Furthermore, this end
reflects the different aspects of the poem as an equivocal text. It urges for
a second reading and so we do not have a stable text. It does not resist
closure and stability only, but also determinacy since the end makes the
first story of revolution an illusion, a dream and not a truthful state.

The speaker transforms his desire of changing his life of silence into
an uncatchable dream; he feels that he does not even have the right to
think of this dramatic change. the sense of freedom, difference and
change gained from the first part of the poem are the fruits of his own
speech, his experience is new and creative for it foregrounds the recovery
of the self and its existence far from the boundaries it surrounds.
Accordingly, the end of the poem does not reflect the futility of the
experience of liberation for the speech declares itself.
The centrality of God does not construct the speaker as a margin; his
speech becomes the centre of the relationship for it shows the thoughts of
a Christian man who reflects upon the religious discourse; the speaker’s
speech can never be obliterated from the mind, the idea remains in the
mind and that what makes the originality of the discourse. The tension is
not artificial for the rebellious voice remains there in the unconscious and
the unfolding of the torments shows their extremely real existence. The
experience of rebellion does not loose its validity so that we can claim that
the end of the poem is really the end of the experience. “The Collar” as an
equivocal text resists closure; its movement is circular so when we turn
back to the first line we find “No more” which sums up for the past life,
thus the end of the poem announces the return to the previous status. The
poem ends with “My Lord” and begins with “I struck the board, and cried
no more. I will abroad” (emphasis added); therefore the poem is
continuing rhythmically and in a circular way it may come a day when the
speaker “will struck the board of the lord”.

Now the experience of speaking is true and valid, his rebellious
discourse reflects his existence as a thinking person and then destructs his
life of silence; then he becomes self-manifested. Compared to the other
poems, “The Collar” is a speech within the self and not with the sacred.
Therefore, he gives then a free space to speak with his self so he is aware
that the religious thought comes from within and not from outside. It is
fundamental to be in harmony with his self in order to make a “true”
relation with God; in this way, the poet makes a reflection upon the self as
previously he represents the image of God. He shows the difference
between himself and the divine in order to show the complexity of the
relation and then he feels that as long as he will depart from God he will
become more alienated.
Eventually he “heard one calling, child: And I replied, My Lord”. He
insists that he is not alone, he resorts to Christ as the redeemer, a safer
position yet, it is an ironical situation as far as his freedom is concerned.
His calling for the “Lord” means his returning to his religious life. His
returning to the “board” is a sign of anarchy of life: world is complex and
simple at the same time. His relation with the divine can be problematic
(the search for freedom) but at the same time plain (child/lord). The verse
delineates this journey of searching for truth and the play between the
complexity and the plainness of the human existence so what matters as a
discourse is the self-representation of the self even when it encounters
submission and lives in a chaotic world. Joseph Summers in his analysis of
“The Collar” makes this precious account:

“Until the final four lines, the poem dramatizes expertly and convincingly the
revolt of the heart and its imitation of colloquial speech almost convinces us of the
justice of the cause. But the disorder of the poem provides a constant implicit
criticism, and with the final lines we recognize that “The Collar” is a narrative in
past tense: the message for the present concerns the necessity of order.”
Thus, considerably the submission to the divine is a way to make a
sense of order to his life; Hence to re-construct his true self. When the
rebellious self can be the settlement of the chaotic world, where he
“struck the board” and leaves it order to establish a world of his own. Yet,
he returns in search for safety and then the interior logic of the poem
proves that the end is only an illusion hence the “illusion” of rebellion is
the end of a false order. The experience of revolution is out of true
sufferings clearly delineated when he refers to the “thorn” which “let (him)
blood”.
The speaker finally succeeds to find a safe territory only when he
starts to “speak” about his experience so that he is able to fulfil his
language with true meanings and this is the logic of his true experience
adequate to delineate a true image of the self. At this point, we can
assume that the poet plays on the centrality of his discourse in the
delineation of a true relationship; the reader becomes involved in
constructing the relation between the poet and his God. In this way “The
collar” as a “writterly” text, to borrow Roland Barthes concept resists
closure; it is a text of a multiplicity of interpretations. From the beginning,
the title is in itself ambiguous: the collar is read as “the choler” a pun of
the French word “colère” which means the extreme dissatisfaction and

anger. It refers also to the collar of the religious restrictions and then we
later understand from the poem that the speaker wants to break this collar
and reach freedom.
To conclude this part, and as far as The Temple is considered as an
entity, Herbert’s movement from the search of his Christian self to the
celebration of the Eucharist in the final poems shows the deep reflection of
the Christian poet. The journey of the poet is from and within the self; it is
a conflict with the other as well as with God. Then the reduction of
freedom is the cost of sacrifice so the poet attributes a sense of divinity to
himself (to be like Christ). In this way, Herbert’s verse becomes an
essential testimony in showing the real Christian and his fidelity to the
divine will.
2/ The Temple: the journey within the self towards the
divine will:
Herbert dramatizes in The Temple the interconnection between the
individual speaker and his omnipotent Protestant God to the extent that
this speaker becomes a feeble subject serving a potent king. Yet, this
struggle leads to a substantial profit so that The Temple becomes a
testimony of the power of the divine verse to allure Man and then shows
him the way to Heaven. In each poem, we are astonished by a new
struggle but the original procedure towards resolution also delights us.
When Herbert’s speaker experiences sickness and sorrow, he
becomes a rebellious self, he says in “Affliction I” for instance: “What

pleasures could I want, whose king I served/ well I will change the service
and go seek some other master out” (Lines 13/63/64). Nevertheless, this
status of restlessness does not continue, it leads to happiness at the end
thus the reach of heaven is not an easy journey. Herbert makes use of his
poetic power to encounter the divine’s power; in this way, he is able to
free his interior self from the omnipotence of the king God so in “The
Cross” he declares: “A my deare Father ease my smart!/ these
contrarieties crush me: these crosse actions/ doe windie a rope about and
cut my heart”. Accordingly, we can assume that The Temple exemplifies
the Renaissance belief in eloquence and illustrates the Anglican desire to
gain intimacy with God through language. The speakers in Herbert’s verse
seem to control the tension from the beginning of the poem. However,
revealing the tension is more important than the resolution itself, what
makes the originality of the experience.
The poem, even diatactic, is a journey within the self to display the
path towards the divine will; the speaker is the teacher and the learner at
the same time. The interior story of the poem moves to a dramatic end,
which proves the death of a secular experience and the validity of the
sacred truth. In this way, the poems become that implicit conceit: they are
the sins, once they are unfolded then they become part of the past and
then the poet achieves redemption. At this point, it lies a problematic
dimension of the verse: the truthfulness of the text and its ability to
transmit a real story especially when the reader discovers that the speaker
is conscious about the end of his hard experience and that this experience
ends before it even starts.

At this level, one should put into consideration the ontological
movement of the text from its oral to its written state. The speaker has a
great torment when he is telling his story then he makes the conclusion as
an end to his written text, yet the religious experience does continue. So
here there is something missed in his story of asserting his individuality;
for the speaker fails to fill the gap between the longing for free existence
and his achieved imprisonment. The question that imposes itself is what
the real is: his goal or the result he reaches at the end. Yet, the
seriousness of the experience urges for the necessity to unfold it whatever
the implications would be. Eventually, the existence of the dilemma is
more significant than the resolution itself. Yet, what is the aim of telling a
story whose end is already known, furthermore, does the poem contrasts
its logic or there is something hidden in Herbert’s discourse and that leads
to this troublesome end, then one should question the dubious reversal of
the existential experience.
At the beginning of the poems, the speaker seems to control his
discourse, but his exceptional experience leads to an end, which can be
described as an acceptance of the imposed divine. Therefore, the
individual speaker is not the master of the discourse and this is the great
paid cost in order to gain a harmonically relation with God. In this way, the
poems become moments of recognizing “the real self” and then returning
to existence under the divine will. We can refer here to some poems of
reversal such as “The Reprisal”, “Sinnie I”, “Misery” and “The pearl” which
are retrospective accounts and can be divided into two parts: the first one
accounts is a past experience narrated in the past tense and the final part

is a conclusive end of the torments; the return to the Divine submission.
So in the start, the speaker offers the illusion of a multiplicity of ways to
escape his sorrows. Barely, he can choose his way, for he is not a free self,
then the dismantling of all means makes from the submission to the divine
will the only path for existence hence this is the internal logic of the divine
verse. This is reinforced in “Affliction I” when he declares: “I was
entangled in the world of strife/ Before I had the power to change my life”.
The individual speaker is delineated in poem as a person devoid
from his right of choice. Yet, he cannot escape to choose between the free
will or the divine will so, he cannot be in a status of “in between”. The very
moment of thinking about the change is in itself the moment of the
inability to change therefore the collapse is made to show the way to
assert the existence within God. In this way, he proves that he is not lost
and that the end of discovery of the true will is found in God’s faith. He
finally recognizes that: “Yet, lest perchance I should too happy be/ in my
unhappiness”. This significant paradox in “Affliction I” foreshadows the
irony of the divine existence, the speaker always proves that his existence
lies in his “inexistence”, he sure that he has no means to make his
existence true; yet, he can achieve the divine will when he expunges
himself.
Representing a real truthful relationship with the Sacred may lead to
a significant implication: the illusion in the divine verse becomes a truth;
there is a moment when the speaker recognizes that he should discard his
past and make his own history so his present situation is only an illusion.

Yet, this illusion is later constructed to be more truthful than he seeks to
reach. God’s presence is a fact; he is the master and the true way to
happiness.
Furthermore, the speaker constructs his self as ignorant for at the
heart of ignorance lies the true knowledge. The futile search for coherence
makes his life cohesive so that it is better to construct an ignorant self
than to make an imaginary self. In this way, the poet prefers not to know
instead of knowing that he is a humiliated creature. In most poems, the
speaker makes God the absent-present voice; the sacred power, either
God or the Lord, is foregrounded in the very act of narrating one’s story.
This divine controls the speech even when the speaker makes an
autobiographical account. At this point, we can refer to Anna. K. Nardo
article “George Herbert’s pulling for a prime” when she maintains that
Herbert: “characterizes God as a disembodied voice that seems to enter
the poem from without actually comes from within.”
Accordingly, Herbert narrates not only his experience with the divine
but also reflects upon the relation of the divine to his creature. The voice
of God is implicitly projected when the end of the poem proceeds towards
the collapse. Yet, the relinquishment of the speaker makes a sense of
coherence absent in his “real life”; so the collapse is only a recovery and a
way to rise again within the divine. In order to survive, the poet
“obliterates” his narrative story, to exist means for him to deny his
autobiographical account and look for a way to re-write a “new”
autobiography that fits the divine discourse. We can clarify this point

through a close examination of Herbert’s startling poem “Artillerie”; we
encounter a very rebellious individual, who declares clearly:
“When suddenly I heard one say,
Do as thou usest, disobey,
Expell good motions from thy breast,
Which have the face of fire, but end in rest.”
The speaker claims clearly that he would surely find rest out of
disobedience so the ending seems to be over-controlled; yet, the journey
to this end is not that easy path for in the coming couple of stanzas, he
will analyse his dilemma in terms of lost- gain. Further meditation upon his
serious decision implies that the individual speaker is not very satisfied
with his present situation. The narrative story begins with a revolution, a
decision taken at a moment of reflection. Nevertheless, the story does not
cease at this point, again, when he reflects upon his “new” situation he
finds himself in a more tragic situation: “then I refuse not ev’n with
bloud/To wash away my stubborn thought/ For I will do or suffer what I
ought.”
Strikingly, the self-directed person we discover is reversed to a
“pitiful” person yet, this individual is a “thinker”, his thought makes his
tragedy and his longing for freedom constructs his torments. He is
conscious of the presence of an “other”. Notably, he employs the
construction of “if...” and the future tense therefore he analyses his
situation according to the logic of his religious belief. In search for a
coherent existence within “the self”, the speaker is longing for a balanced
situation between his “disobedient self” and his “faithful self”. Hence, with

both selves this individual thinks and then he does not want to take
“unreasonable” decision; significantly, he employs always the diction of
thought, “me thoughts”, “I muse”, “stubborn thought”, but he also
establishes a world of fight: “the Artillerie”, “combate”, “shooters” and
“contest” thus, this battle is taking place within his mind. The seriousness
of the conflict lies in the challenge within the poet himself to “win” a
constant position and to have a true way towards a real rest. Once he
claims that he “refuse” to be a disobedient person, he moves from the
invalid revolution and then reinforces another different position. Thus, the
speaker does not show himself as an incapable person of decision
especially when he declares, “I refuse”, he projects a self-contained
person, so his choice is free.
Yet, and before he ends the poem, he views the matter from another
perspective, he is a defiant to God, “But I have also starres and shooters
too/ Born where thy servants both artilleries use.” God is not the pivot of
the battle for the speaker is also a significant power; his power does not lie
in his ironical “victory” but in his deep belief in his overcoming of a
suffering will:
Not but I am (I must say still)
Much more oblig’d to do thy will,
Then thou to grant mine: but because
Thy promise now hath ev’n set thee thy laws
He feels responsible to explain to his “opponent” why he relinquishes, the
word “hath ev’n” is notably a pun of ‘heaven’, which is the real goal of the

poet. After the long contest with the divine power, the individual speaker
comes to conclude:
“Yet if thou shunnest, I am thine:
I must be so, if I am mine.
There is no articling with thee:
I am but finite, yet thine infinitely.”
This collapse is dismantled from the beginning; the speaker cannot
disobey in order to gain his immortal rest.
The retrospective is an urgent element in this narrative moment for
it proves the futility of searching for a world of freedom. The speaker does
not seem to be totally appeased about his past experience so the
revolution is urgent, he manifests a responsible individual able to
overcome the conflicts within himself in order to gain to reach the right
status. Therefore, the narrative is led to an end, which shapes the true
existence of the Christian self. This self is able to contest but
simultaneously conscious that its contest would make him suffer and more
importantly, it would impede his way to heaven. Nevertheless, the
experience of rebellion is very important in order to make the religious
faith complete. Disobedience is in a way the true path towards the divine
satisfaction.
Eventually, we cannot call the relinquishment of the revolution as a
collapse or a failure, the speaker proves the validity of being under the
divine will. The interior logic of the religious discourse makes from slavery
the true way to rest, from sacrifice the free way to happiness and then out
of the collapse comes the real recovery. Reversely, when the speaker

gains his true will, the experience of revolution becomes the futile one
thus the obligation becomes logically the only choice for gaining freedom
and instead of being a slave to his thought of disobedience, he becomes
free under the divine will.
As far as the truthfulness of the autobiography is concerned, the text
seems to deny itself at the expense of proving the validity of the narrative.
Instead of continuing his true story of disobey, which may, as he claims,
“end in rest” the poet retains and then supplements this story with a
“reversed story”. He shows what he learns, what he “has to do” in place of
what he really lived; indeed this is an implicit image of sacrifice.
Consequently, the story seems to be incomplete for taking a decision is
“the must” and not the real fact. The text survives not because the story
exists but for the protagonist proves that he survives. He wins the battle
“logically” since, he refuses from the beginning to lose it, and hence it is
the logic of the text, which proves the victory of the speaker.
The text in this way should be read until the “real end” for the story
has no sense without referring to the denouement so that the meaning
within the poem is always “deferred”. There is no revolution without
peace, no collapse without end, and no disobedience without obedience.
The speaker provides an end in the start, yet; the end of the poem does
not sign the end of the narrative. The returning to God’s faith ends the
dilemma, which exists already in the interior story of the narrative
however, the speaker returns at the end to be part of the divine, “yet

thine”. At this point, a question imposes itself: to what extent does the
poet succeed to ease his interior rebellious voice?
When we consider that, the divine verse is a form of confessing the
Christian sins so we can assume this verse becomes a word of
performance; when the poet unfolds his disobedience he shows a true
experience, yet within his discourse lies this conflict between the self-
representation and the self-relinquishment. If the Christian poet provides
the reader with his experience of revolution and does not end it in the
harmony with the divine, he may lose the sense of truthfulness; so, what
he gains is the delineation of the very moment of existence between
action and inaction. In this way, his writing becomes a way to cure his
sufferings but at the same time, it annihilates his experience as a self-
contained individual.
The ontological movement of the text from the oral stage to the
written one foreshadows the movement of the experience from an idea to
a narrative. This movement contaminates the truthfulness of the
experience so that the idea of “to re-write” the story becomes an illusion:
what is true is the text itself because the end reconstructs the whole story.
In order to make the coherence of the verse, the narrative is constructed
to be religiously logic.
Remarkably, the individual Man is present in Herbert’s verse; the
religious experience is narrated using the impressive “I”. This is the
impact of the humanist belief in the noble existence of Man besides,
regarding him as the crown of creation. Herbert also believes in the

individual self to create his own life so that his verse reflects Man’s ability
to constitute an original way to reach the divine will and to make self-
satisfaction. Yet, this final rest foreshadows a sense of perfectness in order
to construct a sort of parallel between the creative Christian individual and
God’s perfect creative. At this point, we can heed Joseph.H.Summers’ view
of The Temple:
“If poetry was an imitation of God’s creation and possessed the divine power of
moving the affections, the use of it for secular ends might come near to blasphemy
(....).The ultimate method of reflecting God’s glory was the creation of a work of decency
and order, a work of beauty, whether a church, an ordered poem, or an ordered life. This
was not confined to the artist, but was the privilege and duty of every Christian.”
In order to construct a united world out of the chaos, the poet finds
in the collapse towards God the true way to reach a sense to reach
coherence. Accordingly, to make a unified-self, the individual comes
across that when he belongs to God is the best and it is even the unique
way to attain a real satisfaction. As he says in the last line of “Artillerie”: “I
am but finite, yet thine infinitely”. Indeed, this poem presents a
metaphorical image of the existing fight not only with God but also it is a
battle within the self. Eventually, the collapse towards God comes to
remake the unity within a tormented self. In this way, truth does not come
from outside, it emerges from the text itself hence the logic erects the
whole unity and that what constructs the true sense of the divine verse.
When we consider The Temple as an imitation of God’s creation of
the church as a place of prayer, one should deeply analyse “the temple” in
terms of the major conceit in order to clarify the complex relation between
the divine and man. Notably, there is a hidden relationship between the

individual Christian and the religious space so that the church becomes
the connective line between God and this individual Christian.
Furthermore, “the temple”, being a metaphor, may also lead to an
inherent metaphor implicitly existing in Herbert’s divine verse: “Religion is
a journey” and not an imposed faith.
Entitling the collected poems “The Temple” does not only reflect the
religious aspect of the text but it also foreshadows the complex journey of
the individual Christian towards heaven. Normally, the temple is the place
where the Christian can make his prayer, yet he is also able to confess his
sins in order to gain God’s redemption. For example, he seriously unfolds
this in “The Reprisal”:
Into the conquest. Though I can do nought
Against thee, in thee I will overcome
A projection to Herbert’s The Temple” may lead to assume that the
poems are mapped to be an autobiographical representation of the
Christian man. Most of the poems delineate the journey of a Christian from
his revolutionary moment to his final settlement; examples of these poems
of resurrected ending are “Miserie”, “The Temper”, “The Collar” and “The
Pearl”. Yet, The Temple is not only a simple reflection of the Christian
religious experience; it is rather a reflection upon this experience.
Therefore, the temple, which is a stable place, is transfigured into an
equivocal text, a critical text that points to the uneasy journey of the
Christian self.

The Temple shows the Christian mind when it thinks, it tells the
interior story, the “unsaid” in terms of the “unconscious. What matters is
the aesthetic of the text, which lies not only in the figurative language but
also in the logical way of the poem’s end. The speaker presents the way to
reach the reversal and proves, at the same time that this relinquishment
naturally exists. This verse survives for its end constructs the wholeness of
the story; confessing his thoughts is away to prove his faithfulness to God
as the church is the place where the Christian proves his loyalty to God. In
this way, Herbert’s poems exist by the virtue of its artfulness; hence, it is
an art, which lives by performance. Eventually, the religious verse
becomes the way to cure oneself and to be close to God.
As far as the issue of creation is concerned, the temple is Christ’s
creation, in parallel; The Temple is the poet’s creation so there is an
implication of an imitation of the religious world. The poet constructs his
“own temple” where he projects the temple differently; he remakes it to
be the space of the true Christian life. In this way, the Christian self,
delineated in The Temple has in itself an interior temple; so that the
church is not that separated setting, it exists within the self; therefore, the
space is given a quality of life and then an immortal union between Man
and his creator.
The end of the poems towards reversal is natural for the settlement
exists already. The speaker is there in the temple so it is contrasting to
search for a way out of the church. How can he escape from a place, which
exists, within his self? Therefore, the church becomes a place of sacrifice,

yet it is a delightful sacrifice. At this point, we can refer to “Church Porch”
when Herbert writes, “Averse may finde him/And turn delight into a
sacrifice”. As Christ is sacrificed for all humanity, (the images of his
sacrifice can be found in the church) the poet asserts his sacrifice in his
own temple. This journey becomes exceptional for it witnesses a “truthful
sacrifice”, incarnate in the very act of writing.
Actually, in most of his poems, Herbert synthesizes a story of the
journey within the individual Christian; yet, the end of this spiritual journey
is the return to God’s faith. Then the starting point (the revolution) is
changed to be moderated and not, as to be expected, to be heightened so
the goal of the journey does not lie in proving the validity of the revolution
rather, the speaker confirms that the reversal is more valid than this
revolution for the aim is the rest.
The poet traveler searches for a true relationship with God while he
is in the temple so he is already sure that the goal is going to be achieved.
The space makes the construction of a unified world easier; furthermore,
he finds a sense of freedom in his writing; his verse frees him from the
temple as a limited space. He also imitates Christ’s sacrifice (who writes
the Bible), when he subverts his freedom in favour of God’s faith therefore,
he projects this sacrifice of Christ metaphorically to his self in order to
reinforce that he is faithful to his religious faith par-excellence; the true
Christian cannot exist without sacrifice. Accordingly, the representation of
the self is made through the projection of religious elements instrumental
for the construction of the Christian journey. The metaphorical depiction

allows for an easiness to make his “perfect self” and then to be close to
the divine.
On the same way, Herbert imitates the temple of God for it has a
real existence. His temple transcends the idea of the church as a building
to make it a space full of life and reflection. This trait attributes a sense of
revolution to Herbert’s verse for it contrasted Plato’s view of Art as an
imitation of a false copy; the poet imitates a creation of God, which is very
truthful. The Temple foreshadows a sense of individualism; the poet
constructs his own temple, which can be viewed as a continuation of God’s
temple and reflection upon the religious enigma. Notably, he does not only
reach harmony with God, he also succeeds to make a congruity between
himself and his verse; in his self-reflexive poem “Denial”, he assumes at
the end that:
“O cheer tune my heartless breast,
Defer no time;
That so thy favours granting my request,
They and mind may chime
And mend my rhyme.
Conflict is necessary in Herbert’s divine verse, for it shows that the
human being’s life is characterized by a chaotic existence and then the
Christian faith is essential in order to establish an ordered, harmonious
life. The contradictions of human existence, seriously tackled in this verse,
urge for a search towards a coherent stable life so that the church
eliminates the torments; it is no more an institution of tyranny and power,
Herbert (who is also an Anglican priest) views the church as the space of

reconciliation between the chaotic human world and the heavenly world.
In this way, the text projects a delineation of a whole kingdom existed only
within the self and in which, it lies a deep journey so that we do not find a
single way, yet a multiplicity of ways to reach the divine will.
At this point, we may consider Herbert’s “The Pilgrimage” which
delineates clearly the life journey of the individual Christian. Notably,
pilgrimage is the major conceit of the poem for the journey towards the
Divine is seen to be a pilgrimage travel. However, the pilgrimage journey
is attributed with a new sense more truthful than it is. Here, the journey is
more real because it comes within the self, and then the end is achieved
from within so that the pilgrimage is not that artificial journey; it is rather a
factual movement from “a wasted place” to “the gladsome hill”. The
narrative prospective foreshadows the truthfulness of the story; yet, what
matters is the movement of the traveller and not the story itself. Joseph
Summers says in his article Herbert’s form, “Within most of the individual
poems the emphasis is on construction rather than pilgrimage”. Herbert
focuses more on the way of achieving such end; the important experience
of pilgrimage lies in the metamorphoses; the poet traveller is not the same
person accordingly, we can assume that the poet admires his Self when it
is changing; he despises this self when it is stable even if it is a
revolutionary self. The travel is not a chaotic one; it is a purposed journey
so that even he thinks, he should be restrictive to God faith.
Eventually, in Herbert verse we notice the sense of travelling. The
spiritual journey is an argument proving that the true way of life is to

follow God’s faith. In this way, the poet dismantles all the other ways of
searching; he insists on the validity of his religious experience. At the very
moment of reaching the divine will, he demonstrates that rest lies in his
strong desire to attain his faith. Being in the church allows for the
construction of a unified world. Herbert uses the church’s elements in a
metaphorical way; a clear reflection is on the titles of some poems such as
“The Window”, “The Altar”, and “The Church floore”. Although, he is
imprisoned in the church, he proves that his verse allows for discovering
the way to the divine will. Then we can call this verse the space of
freedom, he foreshadows a world of reconciliation between the human
desires and the religious restrictions.
In her fine analysis of Herbert’s verse from a post-structuralist
perspective, Barbara Lewaski states: “I suggest that Herbert’s art is in
large measure founded upon the elements of Protestant poetics we have
been considering- biblical genre theory, biblical tropes, Protestant ways
with emblem, metaphor, and typology, and protestant theory regarding
the uses of art in religious subjects.”
Accordingly, Herbert’s verbal power consists in his eager ability to
cope with the dilemma he faces and then to prove that the religious art
renders truth. This sense of truthfulness yields the way for an immortal
rest in God thus the multiple functions of the divine verse.

PART III: The Utopian World and the limits of
representation:
1 /-The politics of writing “Utopia”:
The act of writing poetry raised theological problems since Herbert is
an Anglican poet, at his time poetry was forbidden as a form of art,
however; the state of interdisciplinary between his art and the religious
discourse he reinforces makes his verse not only legitimate but also
cogent. In his verse, Herbert urges for an imperative reconciliation
between Man and his existence in a world of religious restrictions.
Consequently, Herbert’s poems delineate a utopian world where these
restrictions are dismantled and then, transfigured metaphorically into “the
laws” which govern the precarious, critical relationship between God (the
King) and Man (the creature).

Different from the other metaphysical divine poets, Herbert
transforms the intricate dilemma of the Christian Man to settle it in a world
of Utopia, very different from the real life of torments. The poet proves
that the kingdom of God is the world of happiness; he makes God the
perfect leader above all the Stuart kings in the decades leading up the civil
war. The ideals of the Renaissance Era strongly exist in Herbert’s poems;
they reflect the yearning of an Anglican priest to reconcile between the
tyrannical “worldliness” Church as an obligatory instrument and the
religious faith, which is extremely rooted in the Christian self. In this way,
there is an urgent need for making a utopian world that reflects the
Christian faith as well as to settle the tormented self.
Herbert’s The Temple is a visionary world for a perfect relationship
with the sacred God. In a political perspective, David Loewenstein
delineates this relationship as following:
“Herbert, moreover, will sometimes characterize the restless
relationship between the individual speaker and his omnipotent Protestant God in
language reminding us of the close interconnections of between politics and
religion in earlier seventeenth-century England. For example, Herbert will
dramatize that relationship in terms of an unworthy subject serving a powerful
king, so that the inner self now becomes the principal site of political power and
struggle.”
Surely, God is the governor of this world, yet He is not that tyrannical king.
There is a sharing of rules between Man and The sacred, the poet writes at
the end of his poems “Man”:“That, as the world serves us, we may serve
thee/ And, both,thy servants be.” Accordingly, the poet establishes a

communicative system with The Sacred, and then it is the impact of the
secular love poetry, yet; the beloved is the sacred and there is a
relationship of reconciliation. It is an insistence upon Man’s ability to
communicate God and to construct a united world with Him. Thus, The
Temple becomes the response to the religious faith so that the poet
establishes a sort of theological covenant out of his spiritual experience. In
this way, the importance of the divine verse lies in its religious
dimensions; it is a significant way to preach God, to be near to his realm
and to confess the sins in order to reach sanctification.
The Utopian world maintained in Herbert’s verse embodies the
intersection of the political power of God (being the King) with religion and
this makes the theological covenant between Man and God. Out of his
daily experience and his plain style, Herbert delineates “the true
convictions” for a “sweet life”; he is haunted by the weakness and the
corruption of the humanity. He makes an art that purifies the human soul
and reminds the mortality of life; a point emphasized in “Vertue” when he
moves from the sweetness of a heavenly day to: “the dew shall weep thy
fall to-night”. This wavering movement between life and death reinforces
the poetic transition between life and death yet; the poem calls for its
immortality when he says at the end: “Then chiefly lives.” As far as the
“vertuous soul” is eternally, the verse is everlasting. Herbert points that
death is not that that tragic moment, it is rather a temporal moment
between mortality and immortality; a shift towards the spiritual eternal
existence with God. Consequently, the poet is certain that death is the end

of a corrupted life, yet he urges for constructing reconciliation between
profligate human world and a virtuous world.
As a self-reflexive poem, “Vertue” exemplifies the sweetness of the
virtual world for the poem itself is a sweet instant; its romantic tone of a
carpe–diem poem reinforces the sweetness of the theological covenant.
The virtuous soul is compared to a “timber” which “though the whole
world turn to coal” it “chiefly lives”. Here the aspect of virtuality is
reflected in the poem that can never perish as it immortalises a virtuous
soul. Though he employs earthly elements in the poem such as: “sky, day,
earth, rose, timber”, the poet goes behind the limited earthly experience
to attribute a sense of glory and then to strengthen the deep relation with
God for when death is the real end of the human “for thou must die”, the
virtuous soul resists death. Furthermore, the day is no longer that short-
lived experience it is rather an influential experience, which has a strong
impact to the spiritual experience. However, it has also a poetic influence
on the reconciliation between the earthly world and the spiritual world.
Similarly, the poem despite its shortness it reflects the importance of the
virtuous soul in constructing a deep relation with God. On a different level,
there is a differed meaning in the internal logic of the poem. The day of
the poem shadows the experience of the speaker, the rose reflects the
beauty of the poem and the spring presents the sweetness of the spiritual
experience. As a result, the sweetness of the poem lies in its ability to
eternalize its spiritual expression.

Eventually, the poet is in harmony with his world for he guarantees
happiness even after death. He also establishes a concordant relation with
God. “Vertue” is one of the many poems that support the urgent
reconciliation with the Sacred and then ease the dramatic internal anxiety.
Metaphorically speaking, The Temple is designed to be utopian where the
Christian self, even sinner, can feel delight.
As a Utopian world, the Christian in The Temple in harmony not only
with God but also with his self and with the world he lives in. The
troublesome tension is created only to prove the validity of the Christian
truth and to advocate that the divine will is the incentive for thriving a full
existence. Thus, the dramatic anxiety exists only to be subverted into a
self-fulfilling person who is able to overcome this apprehensive soul. When
all the poems end in triumph of the divine will, this reinforces the
truthfulness of the religious over the secular. Even the poems with carpe-
diem form point that Man should only admire the Lord. “Bitter-Sweet” for
instance reinforces the deep relation between the speaker and his Lord:
“Ah my dear angry Lord.
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament and love.”
At this point, we may scrutinize the political posturing of the utopian
world, as Herbert urges for coping with his Lord when he triumphs over his

dilemmas. The poet’s relation with the Sacred is governed by a covenant
system so that the poetic text ends in a way to fulfil this theological
covenant. The speaker is eager to show how he is faithful to the
agreement with God how he is faithful to the absolute agreement with God
so that the tensions prove the deep struggle to fulfil this agreement. In
“Flower”, the speaker advocates a strong, as he says, “Lord of power” at
the expense of his powerlessness; so, when he minimizes himself as a
weak creature, he delineates the Sacred as the powerful king. Yet, at the
very moment of performing the covenant, he changes his “Lord of power”
into the “Lord of love”. Accordingly, the poet manipulates the relation in
order to realize his wish and then to make a harmony with his Lord.
Significantly, “Assurance” reveals the theological covenant in which the
speaker finds the signs of grace. After the “spiteful bitter thought”, he
recognizes that his devil thought would lead him to “cold despairs, and
grawing pensivenesse”. In this way, the speaker makes his obedience to
the Lord the true and the logic way to achieve rest. He depicts clearly the
covenant when he says:
“But thou art my desert:
And in this league, which now my foes invade,
Thou art not only to perform thy part,
But also mine; as when the league was made
Thou didst at once thy self indite,
And hold my hand, while i did write.
The speaker is sure that the covenant will be fulfilled because it
depends upon the eternal God. His feeling of pain: “so high a torture: Is
such poison bought...” as a true Christian, he should pay in order to

guarantee the Lord’s grace. Notably, the fact of writing such verse is a
way to cure his poisoned devil thought and to confess his torment; as if he
will be cured when he unfolds it to God. It is precisely to such view that
Herbert alludes in his last stanza: “Now foolish thought go on/ Spin out thy
thread, and make thereof a coat.”
In fact most of the poems start with a tragic situation of anxiety then
with God’s support the speaker’s troublesome changes into a state of rest;
accordingly, the internal logic of the poems turn around dismantling the
religious constraints into the religious covenant. Hence, the poet
rediscovers that at the very moment of writing the poem it becomes a
meeting point of the religious faith with the realization of that faith; the
lines unfold the truthfulness of the religious experience, which starts in
pain but ends with happiness. Love that arises from God is transmitted to
Man; as the poem ends with precious resolution: “What for it self love once
began, Now love and truth will end in Man”. Thus, the poem reflects the
end of the experience of suffering and the beginning of another
experience of love. The speaker is assured by God’s love, what makes him
protected and insured about the validity of the covenant theology.
By referring to the secular verse, the covenant depends upon the
lover; in contrast, in this divine verse, the poet relies on the powerful God
so that the covenant is governed upon a divine process. Hence, Herbert’s
divine verse originates the English covenant theology not only as a system
of thoughts but also rather as a spiritual experience, in which love does
not emerge from the speaker, as in the secular verse, yet it stems from

God and continues within Man’s soul thus there is already a strong
connection between Man and God. At this point, we can admit that God is
no longer the addressee since he has already fulfilled His part, now that
Man becomes the addressee; he is the one who should accomplish the
covenant and achieve the sacred faith. Certainly, it is God Who sets the
covenant and then it is Him Who fulfils its conditions; therefore, Man is the
one who should complete the conditions. Herbert addresses Man to be
bound to his faith; the changes are to come from the human being for God
is a stable power. So he states in “Obedience”, in the fourth stanza: “O let
thy sacred will/ All thy delight in me fulfil” then he continues in the
following stanza:
“yet since thou canst not choose but see my actions;
So great are thy perfections,
Thou mayst as well my actions guide as see.”
Actually, the poet attributes a sense of sublime to his verse when he
assumes that God demonizes him to write. He succeeds to defeat his
internal torments only when he transmits his pains into words. Commonly,
he makes a unity between his lines and his pains so that he says in the
opening lines of “Obedience”:
“My God if my writings may
Convey a Lordship any way
Whither the buyer and the seller please
Let it not thee displease
If this poore paper do as much as they.
On it my heart doth bleed

As my lines, as there doth need
To passé itself and all it hath to thee.
To which I do agree,
And here present it as my special deed.
In this way, the religious constraints become the frontiers by which
the speaker would be able to achieve the divine will. The poet is not able
to disobey the “Lord of love” as he describes Him in “Flower”. The power
of the Sacred lies in sweetness and love so that the speaker establishes a
trinity relation manipulated with this power; God is the Father, nature is
the mother and Man is the son. The poet lives in harmony naturally for he
is part of the nature thus logically he cannot escape his harmonious
relation with the Sacred. Man’s existence is not futile since he is a servant
of God and to nature; this existence depends upon God’s love and support.
Consequently, the tension between the Divine and Man is ended to make
the return to the natural situation of love. The influence of God, “the
Father” is to re-make the speaker’s situation. This metamorphose consists
in blurring the lines between a faithful Christian and the powerful God. We
may here point to Helen Vendler view; she states that God’s power:
“assuaged his anxiety by deciding that power is not arbitrary but rather
solicitous and redemptive.”
Subtly, Herbert makes God an “active” part in the covenant. God
sanctifies the speaker’s sins as soon as Man promises his faithfulness to
the divine will; a kind of purchase is erected not only in “Obedience” but
also in other several poems such as “Vanitie” when the poet writes: “to
purchase heaven for repenting/ Is no hard rate.” Moreover, he describes
his Lord in “Faith” as:

“I did beleeve that I did nothing awe,
and liv’d accordingly; my creditor
Beleeves so too, and lets me go.
The relationship with the Lord is frequently depicted as a purchase
transaction. Words such as “to sell”, “to buy” and “debt” shadow a
business imagery to the sacred verse. Yet it is an original way to
communicate with the Sacred and then it announces a more implicit deep
part of the relation. At this point, I am trying to heed Bernard Knieger’s
reading of Herbert’s verse; he asserts,
“Clearly, Herbert is so intimate and confident in his intercourse with

God that he can employ even the language of business when talking to Him
and about Him. And Hebert’s concept of the “bargain” between God and
Man, centering around his understanding of the implication of the blood-
sacrifice of Christ, communicated itself readily through business
terminology.”
Accordingly, the purchase sale terminology is part of the covenant; it
foreshadows Christ’s sacrifice for all humanity. Thus, it alludes that the
poet becomes a “parody” of Christ’s sacrifice when he refers to the
suffering of Man; he states in the final lines of his poem “The Holdfast”:
“What Adam had, and forfeited for all, Christ keepth now, who cannot fail
or fall”. In this way, Herbert writes the continuation of Man’s sacrifice and
more specifically the suffering of a true intellectual Christian.
Paradoxically, the religious constraints make the torments but at the
same time, the Sacred is the source of happiness. Herbert’s speakers
seem to be convinced that their torments end at the very moment of
guarantying grace. The merciful God offers forgiveness to the faithful
Christian then the speaker announces the easiness of the relation despite

its complexity. The harmonious relation is reinforced when all the poems
end in rest. We can refer here to the final stanza of “Trinitie Sunday”
“Enrich my heart, mouth, hands in me,
With faith, with hope, with charitie;
That I may runne, rise, rest with.”
At this point lies Herbert‘s willingness to satisfy his spiritual desire and
then to fulfil his theological covenant. He insists that his obedience to God
is as natural as his religious faith. Artistically, he shows that his personal
experience with God is for all humanity. As a minister, he establishes a
balanced world between the human worlds of sin and the spiritual world
that embraces Man with grace and mercy. Moreover, this
interconnectedness between the two worlds makes the covenant as a
natural and a voluntary system.
The theological covenant is hard to fulfil despite its simplicity since
the problem does not concern the covenant itself; it is rather about the
difficulty to fulfil this covenant. Yet, this internal dilemma is instrumental
for accomplishing the covenant for Herbert reinforces the idea that his
faith is the true way to achieve rest. The human being is the sinner and
God is the forgiver and at the heart of this difference lies the internal logic
of the verse. Without sins, Man cannot experience this sense of
forgiveness so that he knows God’s power. Herbert writes in “A Parodie”
“Ah Lord! Do not withdraw,
Lest want of aw
Make sinne appeare;

And when thou dost but shine lesse cleare,
Say, that thou art not here.
Then, he concludes the poem:

“I half beleeve,
That Sinne says true: but while I grieve,
Thou com’st and dost relieve.
Strikingly, the sin has an ameliorative sense for it is part of man’s
nature and then it is a way to achieve God’s grace when it is followed by
regret. The speaker in “The World” affirms that he recognizes God’s grace
only when sin entered his house; without the sins, Man cannot be a
complete creature. Consequently, there is a relation of dependence
between God, the source of grace, and Man the sinner; the grace replaces
sin and so the sin ends with grace, each one completes the other as if Man
lives with God and so God exists by his mercy and grace; this makes the
discourse between the two parts. We can refer here to the conclusive
stanza of “The World”
“Then Sinne combin’d with Death in a firm band
To raze the building to the very floore:
Which they effected, none could them withstand.
But Love and Grace took Glorie by the hand,
And built a braver Palace then before.”
Herbert urges for the construction of a world that unifies Man’s soul
with God then the verse becomes a way to end the feeling of alienation
with the human world and to reach God’s realm. The recognition of the
sins leads to confession and then to the request of grace. This spiritual
journey foreshadows the importance of discovery of the true will. In a

critical context, Stanley Fish describes the speaker’s experience as
“catechizing the reader” and bringing “him to the self-discovery that is the
goal of the parson’s catechizing.” The transmission of the experience
reinforces the instrumental role of the poet to depict the merciful God.
The hopeful end shadows the sweetness of the spiritual experience so that
it would influence the reader for the poet addresses the Man’s soul.
In The Temple, Herbert proves the uneasiness of fulfilling the
covenant theology. The false starts are metamorphosed to end in a perfect
end. Hence, this end is only a beginning of a true life. The spiritual
experience does not only change the speaker’s life yet, it establishes a
converted person able to write about his torments and be closer to God. In
this way, the verse becomes a recovery of the crisis of faith and then it
establishes a new way of worship the graceful God.
In the Utopian world of The Temple, time is a significant element for
the speaker metamorphoses; Herbert often plays on time as part of the
Christian life. Generally, the poems consist of two parts and two persons
included in the same self. Often, the tense of the poem changes from the
simple past in the first part to the simple present or the future tense. So,
to enter the world of faith the individual speaker is aware that the change
is obligatory, actually, the spiritual experience necessities the movement
from the state of despair to the state of complete rest and this is the “real
time”. Here we can consider the poem “The Reprisall”, a poem that
depicts the covenant between God and the speaker who makes a sharp
deal. At the cost of his confession, he hopes to gain redemption. He comes

to an end that his verse is a defeat against his torments; so in the last
stanza he affirms:
Into the conquest. Though I can do nought
Against thee, in thee I will overcome
At this point, we may assume that Herbert writes the transitory
moment within the speaker’s self. The poet regrets his previous life but he
is paradoxically satisfied about the change. Accordingly, this interplay
between past and present engenders this originality for the present
situation depends strongly upon the past and the past becomes a past
because it has changed. Hence, the speaker plays upon this
metamorphose in order to make the wholeness of The Temple.
A deep focus on the structure of The Temple may lead to the
assumption that Herbert’s verse depends strongly on the spatial and
temporal dimensions. The Temple as a space opens with the church’s
elements such as: “The Church-porch”, “The Altar”, “and The Windows”;
this opening part is called by Louis Martz “a sacramental introduction”.
The middle of the collection is a reflection upon the deep relation with the
church as a place of religious contemplation. As examples, we can state
“Sacrifice”, “Grace”, “Praise” and “Affliction”. Notably the collected poems
end with “Love” which can be considered as a logical and natural end for
love comes from God and continues in the human soul hence to sign that
his poems do not end, as love is an immortal feeling. Yet, it is not that

easy end; it comes through several long poems depicting the uneasiness
way to reach God’s love. These moments are clear in poems such as “The
Collar”, “The Reprisall”, “A Parodie” and “Artillerie”.
The poet’s willingness to rest makes his verse the space where he
finds the comfortable existence within God consequently he settles in his
sacred relation the Divine. Life out the temple seems to be impossible and
then the divine discourse is characterized by the spacious and the
temporal intercourse. In her article “Temples in The Temple: George
Herbert’s Study of the Church” Sara William Hanley insists that Herbert
synthesizes his poems around the basic metaphor of the temple. She
assumes that the speakers in The Temple, at the end of the poems move
“from activity to passivity” and then “this movement will run through the
pages of The Temple, paralleling the basic movement of the speaker as he
“enters” the complex and multi-level temple, to rest in it –in God- at the
close”. Furthermore, she maintains at the end of her article
“Herbert has made his central temple metaphor structurally as well as

thematically essential. That he does this is hardly surprising not alone
because of Herbert’s artistic genius but also because of the richness and
stability of the doctrine from which he draws his major image. Because he
does not “create” his temple-image but uses material already at hand,
Herbert assured himself of continuity, complexity, and firm structure,
mirroring all these in his study of the Church.”
As far as time is considered, the journey within the self that starts
with revolution and ends in rest does not really a movement in time. The
notion of past and present stems from the spiritual struggle with the
human nature; the Anglican speaker seems to have a previous life
characterized by stability and sameness, yet when he makes an existential

revolution, he unfolds his torments to the Sacred. Now, this reconciliation
is conditioned by the reciprocal love between God and Man so the
experience has a continual sense.
In most of the poems, the narrative line can be divided into three
phases: the speaker begins with his life of stability then it comes the
moment of anxiety, which takes the most part of the poem. The restless
status ends with reconciliation; yet, this is not the end for the rest
continues in the future and it is guaranteed even after death. Accordingly,
the end of the poem becomes inherently the beginning of the “true life”.
Herbert makes the speaker conscious about the dependence of his
existence upon time, he is haunted by the idea of the mortality so he
declares the shortness of life and then the change is pivotal for eternity.
The poet examines his past life in relation to the future. Again, and for a
didactic purpose, Herbert makes a warning for the reader about time and
its reference to death. His poem “Death” is case in point, the speaker
addresses death as if he has experienced it. Astonishingly, the speaker
does not fear death despite the fact it is: “Nothing but bones,” and “After
the losse of life sense,/ Flesh being turn’t to dust, and bones to sticks.”
This is the first part of the poem where the diction of death “sadder
grones”, “dust”, and “bones” makes a tragic tone to the poem. Yet the
speaker changes the situation to be a joyful world. He subverted death to
be that transitional moment between the worldly life and the meeting with
God. He encounters death with these lines:
“Therefore we can go die as sleep, and trust
Half that we have

Unto an honest faithful grave;
Making our pillows either down, or dust”.
In this way, the divine verse makes death sweet. The sacrifice of the
Saviours protects the experience of death easy and willing. Paradoxically,
death is alive and makes the human being exist. Moreover, the speaker
hints implicitly, that God’s grace is what makes death, as a “sleep” and
Man will settle “Unto an honest faithful grave”. Accordingly, life ends with
death but out of death emerges another life.
Eventually, the speaker seems to control everything; even death
which is ironically a godly action. Moreover, we can assume that the poet
is conducting perfectly the religious experience from its beginning until
the end. He knows what may come after the end of his life for he is a true
Christian and he is faithful to the Sacred God. The poet is the governor of
the constructed Utopian world; he succeeds to defeat the weakness inside
his self and its sinfulness. At the very moment of confessing his sins, the
speaker guarantees grace so out of his feeble self emerges the change.
Thus, the verse immortalizes the fact of grace, we may refer here to
“Denial” when the poet writes at the end of the poem:
“O cheer and tune my heartless breast,
defer no time;
that so thy favours granting my request,
they and my mind may chime
and mend my rhyme.”
In this way, Herbert makes a verse which resists time; the insurance
of God’s mercy is not delayed the speaker is able to see his will. The
request is fulfilled in the verse (“rhyme”) with God’s blessing so that God

may find a true Christian in this versed prayer. This verse is a fetish
against the human sins. Furthermore, because of its spirituality the divine
verse resists Man’s existence in time. Although, the human life is mortal,
Herbert makes it alive for his writing eternalizes his Christian beliefs.
The religious experience is paradoxical yet logical at the same time. When
the poet is aware about the mortality of his life and so, he immortalizes his
actions in this futile life. The spiritual harmony with God makes lifetime
valuable; Man must live in a sacrificial way in order to make his life true.
This ironical existence is foreshadowed in the paradoxical image of life in
“Flower”;
“These are thy wonders, Lord of Love:

To make us see we are but flowers that glide,
Which when we once can find and prove
Thou hast a garden for us where to bide,
Who would be more,
swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.”
The speaker recognizes the presence of Man in time and urges for
profiting from it instead of despair so he depicts an image of an individual
Christian full of power that is stimulated from God. Furthermore, the sins
are related with the physical part of the human being so it will end with his
death however, the soul remains immortal and so the body is part of the
human world that is why it is despised. After announcing that “All things
are in decay”, Herbert describes Man in “Man” as following:
“For man is every thing
And more. He is a tree, yet bears mo’ fruit;

A beast, yet is or should be more.
Reason and speech we only bring.
Parrots may thank us if they are not mute:
They go upon the score.”
Man is a reasonable creature and he speaks out of his spirituality. The
voice of his spirit is everlasting and the when the poet addresses the
Almighty, there is a dialogue between the spirits and this, what makes the
reconciliation. Eventually, in “Man”, the speaker establishes a balance
between Man and God; he declares:
“Since then, my God, thou hast
So brave a place built, O dwell in it
That it may dwell with thee at last!
Till then, afford us so much wit
That, as the world serves us, we may serve thee
And, both, thy servants be.”
Agreeably, the decay of the human being towards death is elevated
to be the movement towards heaven. “Death” and “Life” shadow forth the
interplay of man with time. In “Death”, there is a call for life in grave, and
unsurprisingly, in “Life” there is a dismantling of death. This is evinced in
the last stanza of the poem:
“ Farewell deare flowers, sweetly your time ye spent,
Fit, while ye liv’d, for smell or ornament,
And after death for cures.
I follow straight without complaints or grief,
Since if my sent be good, I care not if
It be as short as yours”.

Eventually, in comparison with secular poetry in which time is an
enemy, Herbert associates time with the journey of the religious
experience and so it is no longer a barrier between man and his existence.
The sacred verse makes a real reconciliation with the world as well as with
the Creator; it also constructs a different world where the speaker and God
share the roles for their existence depends upon each other. Life becomes
worthy when man is faithful to God and so the sacred verse is a true way
to show this faithfulness, it is an eternal verse since he defeats time. At
this point, it is very urgent to heed the poem “Time” where the speaker is
deeply conscious about the danger of man’s existence in time. He
addresses time that despite being a “slack thing” it “ev’n eternity
excludes”, but man exists with the blessing of the Lord. Paradoxically,
time, which, was considered long in the beginning of the poem, becomes
at the end short. Purposely, to convey that man wants more time to
worship God and to purify his life; so the speaker ends the poem with this
paradoxical image of time:
“Of what strange length must that needs be,
Which ev’n eternitie excludes!
Thus farre Time heard me patiently:
Then chafing said, This man deludes:
What do I here before his doore?
He doth not crave lesse time, but more.”
Consequently, man is able to manipulate time in order to gain God’s
grace, Herbert calls for profiting from lifetime and to be close to God. He
declares in the same poem “Time” “And this is that makes life so long/
while it detains us from God.” Life is paradoxical for the short lifetime

makes the eternity of man; the poet imitates this paradox by writing a
verse that narrates man’s existence within the limits of time. In this way,
the sacred verse becomes the action of man to eternalize his perfect relation with
God.
2/ The “aporetic” spaces in the Utopian world:

Herbert’s advocating of the covenant theology in The Temple entails a critical
implication; it is the sense of voluntarism in the acceptance of the deed. The “imposed”
religious covenant is paradoxically depicted as unconstrained. Furthermore, the more the
covenant seems to be natural and willing, the more accepted it will be. In the same way,
fulfilling the covenant is a complex phenomenon for the enigmatic issue does not concern the
covenant rather than the nature of the human being. Thus, this divine verse shows the deep
struggle of making faith truthful. Herbert edifies the protestant thoughts; Man is faithful to his
doctrine and then he abides to God’s power. Yet, being faithful to the divine raises the
question of being faithful to oneself and more particularly to his writing.
Clearly, the individual speakers in The Temple encounter a serious perplexity. When
poetry obliterates the feeling of alienation between the Self and the world, it raises existential
question: Herbert stirs the conflict between art and its inadequacy to fulfill religious
satisfaction. It is precisely to such view that Herbert alludes in his poems about poetry itself:
“Denial”, “Quiddity”, “Jordan I”, “Jordan II” and the well known “The forerunners”. These
poems are plausibly worthwhile in the analysis of the way the theology is shaped into verse
hence the affiliation of poetry and religion. Accordingly, the internal conflict is not only with
God, yet there is a tripartite contention. The poet priest is conscious that his verse is
problematic in the way that it may not satisfy the Sacred. Thus, the poet urges for a response
to his religious obligation and simultaneously to his poetic desires. Eventually, the poet
questions the ability of poetry to fulfill his religious needs as an Anglican poet; hence the

complex mission of the poet as a Rhetorician who should make from the complexity of the
religious discourse a simple way to preach the Sacred.
Ironically speaking, the Sacred is the cause of the dilemma but He is also the solver of
the conflict. At another level, the verse moves its center from the sacred to poetry itself; as a
result, Herbert’s verse points to itself as self-critical. His poem “Grief” witnesses the rejection
of the verse at the expense of praising the sublime God; he assumes “Verses, ye are too fine a
thing, too wise/ For my rough sorrows: cease, be dumb and mute.” Herbert artfully directs the
poem to be self-denying because at the end he describes his “rhyme” as “For mine excludes
both measure, tune, and time.” Consequently, he feels grief for the loss of rhyme; it is a poem
about the failure to write a full rhyme verse for the final line breaks the rhyme “Alas my
God”. Strikingly, “Grief” is well measured, its tune is clearly depicted and time is axcluded
because it is an enemy to the human existence so the poem is well written contrastingly to
what the speaker affirms at the end.
This last line, which is separately injected, foreshadows the disturbance of measure
and then calls for a multiplicity of meanings. Moreover, it conveys the loss of rhyme in order
to show the deep dilemma of the speaker, he insists that his poem never ends. Eventually, this
last line summarizes the whole poem; it is a deep cry of sadness. The speaker vindicates his
self and makes God his final resort. As far as the circularity of the poem is considered, the
final line can be read as the first line because the opening rhetorical question “O who will give
me tears” is answered by this last line “Alas my God”. Therefore, the speaker maintains that
the poem in internally manipulated by God.
“Grief” is a self-consuming poem in the sense that it subverts itself in order to assume
the inability of language to convey the poet’s grief; it is a real grief that poetry does not
maintain its meaning. Richard Strier includes “Grief” in the flow literature of tears and

describes its end as following: “In this final cry, the speaker of ‘Grief’ turns away his own
compunction and tears to hunger and hunger and thirst after the divine mercy.”
The strong wit to write a verse in order to praise God is in itself a sign of grace
according to the poet. This is clearly assumed in “The Thanksgiving” “If you shall give me
wit, it shall appear;/ If thou hast giv’n it me, ‘tis here.” Yet, as in “Grief”, he ends the poem
with “Alas my God, I know not what.” Despite all what he has written he does not know what
to write to show his passion for God; this ambiguous claim is a powerful rhetorical strategy to
demonstrate the uneasiness to write about religious matters. The “What” at the end is
provocative; the speaker thanks God for the powerful wit. Furthermore, the rhetorical
questions beginning with “Shall I…” and the conditional sentences prove the speaker’s
inability to thank God yet, the poem can be a true way to praise Him for at the end he comes
to an absolute truth “That all together may accord in thee,/ And prove one God, one harmony”
Notably, this poem does not only address God as it represents a message to the reader.
At the end, the speaker cries “O my dear Saviour, Victory!” he succeeds to make his verse as
natural as God’s love. As far as the process of writing is concerned, the poet makes a
parallelism when he considers that as Man is gifted by Christ’s passion, the individual poet is
gifted by wit so that he is missioner to preach God; what makes the harmony between the
Christian poet and the Sacred.
Though he is conscious about the emptiness of language as a system of signification,
Herbert employs poetry to vindicate the uneasiness to depict the sacred wholeness. Thus, the
complexity of the religious matters is echoed in the ambivalence of the poetic language. For
instance, the emblematic poems could be understood within the divine image it delineates,
they prove the far-fetched meanings of the semiotic verse.
The reconciliation between the poet and God exists already before it even starts. He
inspires his religious reflections from God; yet the enigmatic issue of representation hampers

the flow of the poetic delineation. Thus, The Temple evokes the issue of the representation of
the deferred Utopian world from a religious perspective so that a poetic theory from the
harmony between religion and Art. At this point, one may consider “Misery” which starts
with referring to the Renaissance view of Man “Lord, let the Angels praise thy name./ Man is
a foolish thing, a foolish thing,” so that Man cannot praise the sacred Lord because “My God,
Man cannot praise thy name:/ thou art all brightness, perfect purity.” Man is not so pure to
write a sacred verse; this claim engenders that if the poet is able to write such a praising verse
he is not an angel, yet, he reaches grace. The fact of grace is already coexisted with the very
act of writing. This interplay between poetry religion is unique to Herbert’s divine verse.
The search in The Temple is not an enquiry for new truths; it is rather a search for ways to
represent these truths. He claims in “The Thanksgiving” “’Tis but to tell the tale is told”;
therefore his mission is to rewrite the religious experience; in this way the invention lies in the
aesthetic dimension of his verse.
Significantly, the subtitle of The Temple is “Sacred Poems And Private Ejaculations”
which shows the interaction of poetry with the religious discourse and then the audiences of
the verse consist only in his Self and his God. To address God the poet needs to purify his
poetic language so that his verse is self-critical to the extent that he comments on poetry as the
inappropriate way to depict the sublimity of the Divine. He asks his self in “Dullness”:
“Where are my lines then? My approaches? Views?
Where are my window-songs?
Lovers are still pretending, and ev’n wrongs
Sharpen their Muse:”
These rhetorical questions emphasize the poetic plight; it is an ironical view upon the secular
verse so that the sacred verse is full of views and approaches because it is inspired from God.
In the same poem he comes to conclude in the final lines:
Lord, cleare thy gift, that with a constant wit

I may but look towards thee:
Look onely; for to love thee, who can be,
What angel fit?
As a metaphysical poet, Herbert responds to the religious discourse artistically to make
his metaphysical views meet with his poetic aspirations. Accordingly, there is a presence of
two focuses; to satisfy his ambitions as a poet and to be faithful to his divine duty thus he
intentionally urges for conciliation between his private poetic experience and his serious
divine experience. Herbert is aware that Man exists in language and cannot depart from it and
then his poetry enables him to annihilate the blurring line of alienation between his aspirations
and his verse, for he sees poetry as the true way to attain a harmonious position. At this point,
one may heed the well-structured poem “The Forerunners” which is a poem about the
resistance of the poetry to the emptiness of language.
In poems of reconciliation, the speaker succeeds to find rest. Yet, the “Forerunners” is
a poem about writing; it resists closure for it is self-referential and foreshadows the unending
aspects of poetry. At the beginning, the speakers jot down several rhetorical questions, which
could be understood only when the reader finishes the entire poem. He shows that he is
different from those who come before him; he has a peculiar experience of writing for he
addresses language: “Farwell sweet phrases, lovely metaphors/ But will ye me thus?” then he
constructs a significant affinity between his harmonious relation with the Sacred and his
original poetic vigour. God is present in language and sacredly the speaker delineates a
convention that guarantees the truthfulness of his relation.
Moreover, the phrase “Thou art still my God” has an emphatic effect especially when
it is repeated thrice in a trinity image. Notably, when he deals about language he does not
repeat this phrase and one may interpret it as to separate God from the impurity of language
and then resorts to His name to purify his language thus, God is the source of the poetic

power. Yet, ironically, when he subverts language he keeps using it, “the sweet phrases” and
“the lovely metaphors” are at the heart of his divine verse.
In this poem “The Forerunners”, the poet gives his theory concerning poetry itself.
The series of rhetorical questions emphasize the enigma of using “enchanting language” and
then the speaker proclaims that language must dwell in the church, meaning that language
should be used for divine purposes in order to become “Lovely enchanting, sugar cane/ Honey
of roses, whither wilt thou fly?” yet, it loses its value when it “leave[s] the Church”, it even
becomes dangerous because it “ hurt thy self, and him that songs the note”. In this way, the
true lover is the one who employs pure and divine language; otherwise, he is a “foolish lover”
and so he should “speak in her native language” i.e. the language of his lover. In a
parallel way, the poet loves God so that he speaks His language.
Accordingly, we may allude that the title of the poem “The Forerunners”
foreshows that the speaker makes himself one of the forerunners as he
employs the divine language to speak about God.
He continues his theory when he answers the enigmatic raised
question in “Jordan I” “Is there in truth no beauty” when he writes
“True beauty dwells on high: ours is a flame
But borrow’d thence to light us thither.
Beauty and beauteous words should go together.”
Accordingly, the poet assumes that beautiful words that praise God make
the beauty itself. Moreover, there is a sense of truthfulness when showing
the sweetness of the divine love with an esthetic way. “thou art still my
God” becomes a beautiful emblematic expression of love because God
exists within it and so it is truthful.

The speaker ends his poem by a new enigmatic proclamation; his
verse makes the truth more beautiful than it is when he writes, “So all
within be livelier than before”. This line may express that the speaker’s
“beauteous” words never end for there are always beautiful truths to
estimate. To this view, we can consider Helen Vendler discussion of this
poem; she declares that the several explanations “which a more anxious
poet would be at pains to reconcile with each other. Herbert simply lets
them stand… there is no resolution to these successful metaphors of loss
no comprehensive view is taken at the end”.
Hence, the speaker makes himself one of the forerunners because
he discovers the originality of the divine verse. He seems to challenge
language and controlling it, it is not because of his arrogance as a poet yet
for his dwelling within the divine language, he is equipped with the divine
beauty.
Eventually, “The Forerunners” is a poem about the defeat of
language; in previous poems, the poet succeeds to challenge the limits of
time and space. Now, he becomes able to resist the impurity of human
language. The divine verse allows for a sense of beauty; it is not out of the
sweet phrases and the lovely metaphors but it is the sanctification of the
subject (God) Who makes the poetic truth more truthful. So the existed
line between representation and truth is blurred.
The interplay of poetry and religion is like the relation between body
and soul, and so as a way to imitate God’s power the poet writes a
powerful verse that resists closure. Poetry is a true way to praise God

because it reconciles paradoxes images and allows for constructing strong
metaphors thus it reflects the complex sense of the divine. As a self-
referential poem, “The Quidditiy” is a remarkable stance when God
represents the audience “My God, a verse is not a crown”. The speaker
seeks to make a definition to verse but he recognizes within the poem that
it is not an easy task to define poetry and the with the series of negative
constructions he dismisses the relation of his verse to the mundane life;
within this denying the poem proclaims the uneasiness of poetic
existence.
Despite its simple form, “The Quiddity” reflects deep complex
meanings at three levels: first, the verse cannot be a crown, an honor, or a
sword; therefore, it has not a political dimension because God is the king
of all. Moreover, it deals with serious matters and so it resists space “it
was never in France or Spain” as he writes; yet it stands firm time for he
employs “day” to refer to its shortness; he insists upon the lifelong of his
verse. Eventually, he concludes that poetic language can never be
institutionalized “It is no office, art, or news, / Nor the Exchange, or busy
Hall;” Art is not related to the human, it comes rather from God, it is an art
which makes God’s love more real than it is. This image is detailed in
“Thanksgiving” in which there is a fusion of divine love within the process
of writing.
Remarkably, when he finishes the series of denying images, there is
a hidden question: what is a poem? Unsurprisingly, the speaker makes
the divine experience his real inspiration to writing; he is able to find God

within the poem and then he can himself exist in his lines. Yet, God’s
presence does not lie in His existence as a subject; He is present within
and even participates in the writing of the poem. This image reflects the
deep belief in the complex paradox that God Is manifested in humanity.
We can also find this idea in “The Quip” its refrain is “But you shall
answer, Lord for me” yet at the final stanza we find that “Speak not at
large, say, I am thine:/ And then they have their answer home.”
Therefore, one can deduce that God is not an external power; He
dwells within the poet’s self. The Lord is present as part of the audience
when the speaker addresses Him directly “And, to be short make an
oration.” Then he demands “Speak not at large” so he feels at ease when
he speaks directly to the divine and more the conversation is very truthful
even though it is fictitious. In this way, the speaker eradicates the
complexity of the religious experience and then shows the transfiguration
of his dilemma from intricacy to easiness. This metamorphose comes from
within because God is not external, so it is a whole journey to make a
sweet relationship of love from the paradoxes of the human being life.
Eventually, God love makes the circularity of the poem; it is the starting
point, the motivation and the conclusion.
“A true Hymne” foreshadows a different image concerning “Love”
for God is involved in the process of writing. The speaker is aware that
human words lack sincerity when he makes a contrast with the divine
discourse:
“Yet slight not these few words:

If truly said, they may take part
Among the best in art.
The finensse which a hymne or psalme affords,
Is, when the soul unto the lines accords.
The affiliation between feelings and words is extremely instrumental in
the divine verse; yet at this level, “God doth supply the want” and this
makes the harmony between the speaker and God, the divine represents
the feelings, which become written by the poet. Accordingly, we can draw
a parallelism; God is the Maker of love and the poet is the maker of verse
and so the process of writing is the outcome of this harmonious relation.
The poet insists on the fact that the poetic discourse is emotional,
spiritual and made only by God. The speaker ends the poem with
reference to God’s words so he writes, “As when th’heart sayes (sighing to
be approved)/ O, could I love! And stops: God writeth, Loved.” In fact,
there is a fusion of God’s words within the poem. This “already-always
love” is guaranteed in the divine dialogue between God and the speaker;
there is a sense of call-response deeply rooted in this conversation. It is
worthy to consider the circularity of the poem since the title “A true
Hymne” is reference to God’s words that reflect a sense of truthfulness to
the verse. The divine poem does not show the limits of the poetic text; yet,
it makes the strength of the poem when God contributes to the writing.
Eventually, the poem owes its sublimity to the present-absent God.
The text praises itself since it gives direct truth. In this way, Herbert’s
verse diverges from praising God to praising itself; it produces a new
theory: God is praised from within. The divine verse is self-reflexive in an

original way that it praises itself at the very moment of praising God for
the language comes originally from Him.
In fact, there is interplay of “absence-presence” movement between
God and the poet. The divine verse is based upon the “already- always”
presence of God; He reminds the sinful speaker of his absence spiritually
so when the poet shows his love to God, he reinforces that he is present
with God and then he eradicates his sinful human self. In this way, he
proves that his existence within a Utopian world, this presence is truthful
since it is a manifestation of God’s presence in it. As a testimony, we can
refer to “Praise III” in which the speaker shows the power of God as related
to the performance of this verse:
“Lord, I will mean and speak thy praise,
Thy praise alone ,
My busie heart shall spin it all my dayes :
And when it stops for want of store,
Then will I wring it with a sigh or grone ,
That thou mayst yet have more.
A creative power, the poet makes his presence secondary, besides
to its redeeming effect; Herbert’s verse emphasizes the human ability to
create the sense of self-expression. When the speaker highlights God’s
presence as the spiritual source of his poetic creation, he does not deny
his creative self. The divine verse is written with God’s providence
therefore, the poet guarantees the existence, the performance and then
the continuation of the verse. In this way, he proves that his creative
because it is divine par excellence, the imperfectness of the human
language is supplied by the presence of God.

As far as we consider that God is the central audience of the verse,
we may analyze the “call –response” aspect of the two poems
“Submission” and “Praise II”; in fact, they are interrelated with the aspect
of praising in writing. In the fourth stanza of “Submission” he writes:
“How know I, if thou shouldst me raise,
That I should then raise thee?
Perhaps great places and thy praise
Do not so well agree.” (Emphasis added).
Then he replies in “Praise II”
“Sev’n whole dayes, not one in seven,
I will praise thee.
In my heart, though not in heaven,
I can raise thee.”
According to the poet the praise and the raise are interconnected as the
divine verse is concerned with rising the speaker position as an individual
Christian therefore, the poet becomes closer to God within the verse;
when he speaks about himself as a talented poet he makes his verse too
divine. God’s presence in the poem is unreachable not only for the
ambiguous relation between “praise” and “raise” but also for the
sacredness of God so he urges for a divine presence in his heart. It a
reference to the deep relation between the speaker and The Divine so that
this harmonious affinity may transcend even the artistic writing.
Eventually, the divine verse foreshadows the greatness of the divine
power; despite its artistry, this sacred verse declares its inability to reach
the wholeness of The Divine. What makes the peculiarity of the verse is

the “unsaid” about the Sacred, the complete sense of the divine power is
left ambiguous because it is unreachable.
The Divine (God/ Christ) is more sublime than the divine poetic
language; preaching God transcends the verse itself so the valorization of
the Divine is achieved when the poet assumes the inability of language to
research the wholeness of the Divine.

CONCLUSION:
This research paper unfolds three major aspects of George Herbert
literary divine experience. The revolutionary characteristic of the verse as
far as it is different from the whole trend of the metaphysical poetry; the
form of the poem reflects its deep meaning which is a modernist mark.
Poems such as “Easter Wings” and “The Altar” foreshadow the religious
implications and reinforce the interdependence relation between form and
meaning what constitutes a major part of Herbert artistry. He makes his
distinctive literary identity as a protestant priest and a rhetorician at the
same time and then he urges for an affiliation between poetry and
religion. Yet this harmonious relation is the outcome of several contests,
the Herbertian verse is paradoxically a verse of conflict and rest at the
same and this peculiarity entails a sense of sweetness of the art as it is
between Man existence and his conflict with the world. Notably, we may
assume that there is not a single conflict in the verse, there is different
levels of contest.
The existing struggle between the Sacred and the speakers is
extended to be an internal conflict within the Self, which is a turning point
in the divine experience. God is not seen as an external power so that the
speaker in “Dulnesse”, for instance describes his state as:
“But I am lost in flesh, whose surged lies
Still mock me, and grow bold:
Sure you didst put a mind there, if I could
Find where it lies.

This situation of wavering between lost and relief is not a constant
movement. The settlement is achieved when the speaker makes
reconciliation within his self; he declares that his love for the Divine is a
certain fact therefore at the peak of conflict comes the rest within the
speaker’s heart; the divine love emerges from God and is extended within
the soul of the Human Being.
The journey within the Self to find a kind of ease is more significant
than the resolution. The poet discovers that the peculiarity of the divine
experience lies in the assumption that once you reach a harmonious state
with God you are able to find yourself.
The fragmentation of the Self leads to the unfinished ways of
exploring the divine experience. The tormented self is present when God is
absent yet, when the speaker reminds himself of God’s presence within his
Self, the experience changes and his peaceful Self is present. Actually, the
poet searches for a united Self since he is lost, tormented and struggling.
The religious discourse leads to a peaceful settlement; accordingly, in the
same poem we find a revolutionary voice, which rests after a divine
journey.
Herbert’s verse is not limited: the modernist aspect allows for a
multiplicity of voices. In fact, there is a two-leveled discourse; on the one
hand, there is the human discourse that is impure and revolutionary; on
the other hand, there is the counter discourse; the divine that is sacred
and pure. Then, these two different voices are expressed in the same
poem in order to foreshadow the fragmentation of the human Self so the

unity is owing to the Divine presence. In this way, the divine verse
delineates the Sacred power in terms of re-writing the relationship
between the Human and the Divine; the verse is a discourse by which
illuminates truth and power.
Showing the uneasiness of this relation can be considered as a way
to demonstrate the divine journey within the Self. To redeem his sins, the
poet discovers that the divine Art cures his physical sufferings as well as
his moral torments; when the speaker confesses his sins, he becomes able
to ask for forgiveness therefore the more he writes, the less sins he has. At
the very moment of preaching God, the speaker discovers that his
existence as a true Christian is paralleled within his creative power.
God gives him the power of writing so that he can redeem his sins
and then immortalizes his love for the Divine. The suffering is deeply
manifested in the very act of writing, Herbert writes spiritually as far as he
is in a tormented situation therefore he speaks for his souls and blames
his physical being as it brings only suffering for him. He makes himself
irresponsible for his sins; his sinful human side is cured because Christ
suffered for all humanity. When the poet preaches Christ, he manifests His
sacrifice and then shows that the human divine experience is deeply
linked to Christ.
The objective of the divine journey is already always known, yet to
achieve spiritual rest is not such an easy way. The internal conficlict paves
the way to show that the Divine exists within the human self so Man
cannot escape his existence with a religious experience. In this way, the

divine experience is more significant than the aim itself. Moreover, this
shows that the true Christian is the person who questions the validity of
the religious experience and then proves the truthfulness of the divine
discourse.
Constructing a harmonious world between Man and God makes the
true existence of the poet. The religious constraints are dismantled to be
the true way to happiness therefore; Herbert constructs a utopian world
where Man is the manipulator of his experience. The poet plays upon the
transformation of the divine experience from a hard experience to a restful
one. The suffering is transfigured into a light to cure his sins and then his
spiritual torments only exist to display the greatness of the Divine.
Politically speaking, God is not the dictatorial king in the constructed
utopian world. The religious aspect is a primordial in the Christian Man life,
so that the individual is not separable from the divine and then this
interdependence constitutes the major dilemma. Along the spiritual
journey the poet discovers that he cannot exist outside the divine; Herbert
writes in “The Cross”:
“Then when after much delay
Much wrestling, many a combate, this dear end,
So much desir’d, is giv’n, to take away
My power to serve thee; to unbend
All my abilities, my designes confound,
And lay my threatnings bleeding on the ground.
Accordingly, the power of God dismantles all the internal conflicts. The
love of God offers stability and easiness instead of torments and

dilemmas; what makes a business aspect in the relationship between the
speaker and the Divine power. Herbert employs business imagery when he
highlights Christ’s sacrifice for all humanity; in this way, Man gains
redemption and forgiveness not only when he unfolds his sins but also if
he shows his loyalty to the Divine.
From critical perspective, the poet plays upon making a perfect
world when he deals with his relationship with the Sacred. When the
individual Christian transcends his torments he shows his powerful side,
freedom is deconstructed since it leads to lost therefore Herbert makes
the spiritual sense of his verse a logical manifestation of the religious. Man
can exists only when he follows the divine will; otherwise, he will suffer
from his self. In this way, God creates Man to continue the sacrifice of
Christ; conscious about this fact, the poet manifests his divine love
artistically when he unfolds his sins and preaches the Divine.
Herbert’s divine verse is distinctive from the other metaphysical
poets for it is self-reflexive in terms of form and content. Apart from the
mimetic poems that foreshadow the dwelling of the Christian poet in the
church, some poems reflect from their titles the manifestation of the
Divine Liturgy. In “Sin I”, for instance he declares that he makes journey
within “schoolmasters” and their “rules” and then “the rules of reason” of
“the holy messengers” yet, as a true Christian, he recognizes “within his
conscience” that God is graceful therefore he puts an end to his sins as he
lives as a Christian. At this level lies a sense of loyalty to his belief: the sin

does not exist for he devotes a whole poem to show logically that “One
cunning bosome-sinne blows quite away”.
From another perspective, the divine verse is self-critical; the use
of language to preach God is considered by the poet himself as an
inadequate way for the inability of language to achieve the wholeness of
God. Herbert reinforces that the religious has no limits as far as his great
love for the Divine is concerned yet, poetry allows for foregrounding the
sense of creation; at the beginning of The Temple Herbert declares that
God is the true writer of the poems, this declaration might be interpreted
as an insistence upon the greatness of the human as a divine creation.
Accordingly, Man is a creator for he is able to write such artistic verse yet,
he gains this sense of creation from God as well as he is embodied by a
great love for the divine.
God existence within the poet’s self erases any sense of
fragmentation, as a human being the speaker establishes his wholeness at
the end of the poem when he reaches rest. He is able to exist in the
church for it is the unique peaceful space; at this point, one my heed the
peculiarity of the established utopian world. The Temple is not only a
poetic space, yet it foreshadows the settlement of the spirit. Hence, this
spirituality is the source of rest what calls for all humanity to share these
deep peaceful moments.
Accordingly, Herbert does not only address the Divine but he also
speaks to all humanity to dwell in the temple as a peaceful space. Notably,
this sense of peace dismantles all the hard torments he encounters within
his self; within the church he finds his united self not only in the liturgical

practices but also when he addresses his humanity. Writing unfolds the
creativity of in the human self; within his verse one may notice the
biographical sense of Herbert poetry since he writes about his afflictions,
his sins and his torments. Yet, as a Christian rhetorician he calls for
preaching God artistically so that art is viewed as a means of redemption.
Art is not considered as a sin because it is a way to establish a truthful
ralationship with the Sacred; at this level, we disclose Herbert’s view of
poetry: art is God creation and so it written to preach Him. Secular verse is
disapproved since it deals with the forbidden love; this love should only be
adressed to God.
The Temple is a book of scrutining the perfect relationship
between Man and God. The sense of perfectness dominates the sacred
verse; though man is a sinful creature he has a spiritual part in his self
where God is present on him. The sinful self is present only when God is
absent however it is redeemed at the very moment of speaking; Herbert’s
verse foreshadows his eagerness to eternalize his self and to establish his
identity as a Christian poet. His powerful relationship with the Sacred
proves his substantial creativity; accordingly, as his love for God is great,
his verse is also forceful.


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INTRODUCTION:

Originally rooted in the tradition of metaphysical poetry, George

Herbert is the poet who creates an “artistic” peculiar relationship between

asserts him in an original style. Many critics unfold the relationship

tension ( at the surface level) can be considered as a beginning of a “new”

type of conflict; actually a conflict between Language and meaning or

between the world of reality and the poetic world.

reader ignore the issue of sinfulness, which is purely human.

Correspondingly, there is an innate transmission from the worldly stage to

a higher stage of artistic pleasure thus everything is constructed within

protestant values as well. At this level, the poet can be regarded as a

be interplay of power between the protestant poet and his creator.

Khawla khamassi Page 1

transcend the unworthiness of human beings and to go further to a world

of forgiveness. This can lead to an important issue seriously raised in

Herbert’s verse; the question of human identity or the problem of human

delineated by the poet; He is therefore “recreated” and personified (he

talks and participated in the poetic text). The rhetorical construction of

God makes Him more sacred than He is in “reality”.

The image of God is definitely questionable in George Herbert’s

foreshadows a tormented, restless self that seeks determination in the

Other (God). Ceasing the dilemma and leading it to a resolution is the

power of the verse as well as the “greatness” of the poet’s philosophical

view towards religious issues.

Although it seems to be a childish end, the speaker’s resolution of

mind plethoric questions. Throughout the wavering of the struggle then

submission, the poet imitates God in his creation in order to achieve

perfectness, but the raised questions in the poem remain unanswered,

hence the reader is involved to make a “supplement” or to construct

another text to fulfill the “unsaid” in the poetic text. Correspondingly,

Herbert’s divine verse resists closure; it is open to various readings. This

Khawla khamassi Page 2

since the poet is the victim of “the metaphysics of presence”, he

constructs an ideal image of God through a perfect verse.

In “Easter wings”, for instance, there is a crisis of presentation or an

two birds: the poet and Christ.

speaks for his community (Easter day represents, symbolically, the

Christian community). The stylistic features of Hebert’s divine verse

(repetition, oxymora, similie…) show a tortured, self-accusing protestant.

Man’s sinfulness, he writes

“I have deserv’d my condition as an eternal Adam because my lust

Hath still sow’d fig-leaves to exclude thy light:

But I am frailtie, and already dust;

O do not grinde me!”

Throughout this research paper, I want to scrutinize George

Herbert’s poetry from a different prospective. His divine poetry can be

closely read from a modernist view, here the problematic relationship

Khawla khamassi Page 3

interchangeable because they are dependent upon each other

linguistically which may to other different forms of dependence.

At this level, we can evince the revolutionary aspects of Herbert’s

Eliot for instance who focuses deeply in the criticism of Metaphysical

poetry in general and notably in George Herbert’s divine verse. He finds in

it real modern aspects; Herbert’s fragmented self and his extreme

Cummings. As it is known, Herbert is said to be “the father of Deism” and

Reason and Metaphysics, which is originally unreasonable? An issue

continues simultaneously with human’s existence.

The second part of the research will be devoted to the exploration of

the interplay of rhetoric and philosophy. The relationship between form,

Consequently, a mimetic art is established in parallel with the delineation

of God’s power. Then,“the construction of God” (textually) in a poetic

especially at the level of Creation. To illustrate this idea we can refer to