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This paper examines the language and poetry of George Herbert’s The Temple with regard to his religious leanings. Despite the preponderance of studies that identify Protestant characteristics in Herbert’s poetry, few can explain the relationship between his religious leanings and his poetics, especially regarding the presence of opaque poetic forms and language in The Temple. The condition of the fall necessitates fallen modes of communication, where opacity cannot be avoided. I see in The Temple, especially in “The Altar” ― which is the first poem in the main body of The Temple that falls under the title The Church ― an acute awareness and celebration of the physicality and opacity of the poem’s form, which is not meant to be negated, despite what champions of Herbert’s Protestant poetics say. Rather than try to explain Herbert’s formality away through broad-sweeping poetics, I suggest we take a serious look back to the position once held by Herbert scholars in the mid-20th century ― that Herbert’s religion was a fairly comfortable confusion of Catholic and Protestant elements that were the lamentable traits of Anglicanism that were loudly denounced by the Puritans.
