This Fashion of false Wit was revived by several Poets of the last Age, and in particular may be met with among Mr. There may'st thou Wings display, and Altars raise,Īnd torture one poor Word a thousand Ways. Actually a sequence of poems, The Temple is shaped by the order of church ritual and liturgy. Some peaceful Province in Acrostick Land 4.18 555 ratings42 reviews In 1633, George Herbert published what has become the best-known religious poem in the English language, The Temple. Dryden hints at this obsolete kind of Wit in one of the following Verses in his Mac Fleckno which an English Reader cannot understand, who does not know that there are those little Poems abovementioned in the Shape of Wings and Altars. 1In The Poetry of Meditation, Louis Martz makes a brilliant analysis of The Tem- ples structure, but he. 58, Monday, May 7, 1711, argued against ancient Greek poems in the shape of eggs, &c. We cannot take them as being necessarily in chronological order: they have. Some of them may be the product of careful re-writing. The first is that we cannot date the poems exactly. About The Temple there are two points to be made. Personal Commentary: Tim Nortgren, 'The Altar.' The poems on which George Herbert's reputation is based are those constituting the collection called The Temple.

' 'To love the strife': George Herbert's Struggle for his Poetry' by Bruce A.O let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine, And sanctifie this A L T A R to be thine. Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy Name That, if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. A H E A R T alone Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy powr doth cut. George Herbert: The Altar (1633) from The Temple (1633), by George Herbert:Ī broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant reares, Made of a heart, and cemented with teares: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame No workmans tool hath touchd the same.

The temple by george herbert summary