George Herbert's Building Works

For most of his adult life, Herbert needed to know the concrete details of contemporary construction techniques. It is usual to read The Temple as a celebration of the biblical image of the divine architect, but no one has yet looked at the poems as reflecting Herbert's rueful use of his own expertise in building works, acquired in the course of the lengthy and expensive church and rectory repairs he undertook. Doing so makes it clear that physical objects in his building poems are often used analogically rather than metaphorically, and might, moreover, explain the titles and ordering of sequences in the collection.