Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Herbert Discussing the Word 133
signal both sides of the Works-Grace comparison’, 18 which then helps to accentuate the
various paradoxes and dialectics that would be required of a Christian, and which Herbert
also portrays in his book of verse. There is the social and historical movement of the
Church, just as there are also static church buildings, and an individual believer must act in
accordance to the moralities of Christianity, while also living free from the bondages of sin
through justification through Christ. The believer must likewise acknowledge God as
King, while also approaching him as a Father, and Christ as a brother, through the
Incarnation. Herbert’s The Temple does all of this, and so the architecture must also be
understood as static and ever changing as one approaches each new poem.
Although it is the incarnational Jesus that gives him access to the divine, Herbert
often addresses his poems to ‘God’ or ‘Lord’, rather than to Jesus. Herbert exists in a
physical world, and believes in a physical resurrection, but it is a relationship with the
eternal and ineffable Lord that is his goal. This can be observed through the manner in
which The Church ends – which is with the poem ‘Love (III)’, a poem that combines Jesus
and God into one being, and allows Herbert to exist in the same space as them as he enjoys
the first banquet and final Holy Communion after the judgment. Jesus allows for a very
personal and intimate knowledge of God, which Herbert uses to create a method for
relating to God which is unique in British devotional verse. He is both reverent and
irreverent, and this allows him to express his joys and fears confident that he cannot lose
his access to God in the process.
A poem that appears towards the end of The Church is a perfect encapsulation of
how he will communicate with God in his verses. The poem is ‘Bitter-sweet’. It is a short
poem, only eight lines in two stanzas each consisting of six syllables, but it has a wealth of
personality and theology. The poem begins with what is probably Herbert’s cheekiest line,
18 Utmost Art, p. 5.