These days, traffic whizzes by on both sides.

St Andrew’s church at Bemerton, where Herbert served as priest for the last three years of his life. He is traditionally interpreted as a model for Christian priests to follow. In the Old Testament Book of Exodus, Aaron, Moses’s brother, is a prophet and temple priest. Like other Herbert poems, it is a virtuoso verbal performance, rhyming on the same five words in each of its five stanzas, and ingeniously varying the contents within this rigid frame. Since it tells us how he viewed his vocation as priest to the Temple, “Aaron” is a suitable place to begin this discussion.

The human body as the temple of the holy spirit.

The title suggests at least five meanings: Ferrar was to publish the collection, only if Ferrar thought they might “turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul.” Since its first publication in 1633, The Temple has been a delight and an inspiration that has given comfort and hope to spiritual seekers and poetry lovers alike. Shortly before his death, he collected these and sent them to his friend, Nicholas Ferrar, leader of the Anglican spiritual community of Little Gidding in Cambridgeshire. In the last three years of his life, while he was parish priest at Bemerton near Salisbury in the south of England, Herbert completed a body of poems that offered spiritual guidance to his parishioners, “they are a picture of spiritual conflicts between God and my soul before I could subject my will to Jesus, my Master”.

(Present-day pilgrims to Herbert country will find that the walk between church and cathedral is much the same as in Dyce’s day.) Oil on Canvas: Guildhall Art Gallery, London George Herbert at Bemerton by William Dyce. Guides to some of Herbert’s best-known and best-loved poems follow.

Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,1977). Present-day Bemerton residents have provided an excellent illustrated biography of Herbert. Helen Gardner’s introduction to her edition, The Metaphysical Poets (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), is an expert discussion of the leading features of this school. George Herbert (1593-1633) belonged to the school of seventeenth-century which included John Donne, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley and Thomas Traherne.

Love 3 by george herbert