Today’s Poem: The Altar

George Herbert and the sanctuary of the imagination

Evelyn Simak, photograph of a medieval altar stone on a 17th-century base (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Altar

by George Herbert

A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,
 Made of a heart and cemented with tears:
  Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workman’s tool hath touch’d the same.
                   A HEART alone
                   Is such a stone,
                  As nothing but
                  Thy pow’r doth cut.
                  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.
   Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
     And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.

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The first thing you notice about Today’s Poem, by the Anglican clergyman-poet George Herbert (1593–1633) is, inescapably, its appearance on the page. Like Herbert’s equally famous “Easter Wings,” “The Altar” is a shape poem, its lines arranged to suggest its subject. But as Karen Swallow Prior has pointed out in a recent reading of the same poem, it’s not enough simply to break lines at various points to create an image out of text. 

Anyone who has ever had to complete a “concrete poem” assignment for middle-school English has probably done exactly that: arranged words to make a text-picture, rendering in visual terms whatever the poem’s subject happens to be. But there’s a reason why Herbert’s shape poems have endured, not as mere oddities or models for middle-school imitation, but as poems, and as formal influences for later poets: George Starbuck, for example.

Two essential elements raise this shape poem by Herbert — catapult it, even — far above and beyond  the level of an exercise. The first is its large theological concern. Vicar, in the last years of his short life, of two quiet country parishes near Salisbury, Herbert was haunted by the problem of fallen humanity’s utter insufficiency, and by the need for reassurance that God does supply, and will supply, and has already supplied in full measure, what is wanting in his creatures. It’s a worry we’ve seen before, in “Love (III),” Today’s Poem for April 25, as well as in “The Hold-Fast” and other poems that make up Herbert’s one posthumous collection, The Temple. 

For that matter, The Temple is itself a kind of conceptual “shape book,” its poems sketching the architecture of a church, and seeking, at the same time, to establish and furnish an interior holy space. For the later-life Herbert — retired from his public role as University Orator at Cambridge, and from a turn in Parliament — this space was the soul-transforming sanctuary of the imagination. The poems of The Temple become Herbert’s working-out of his theology, a clarification of his belief system, as Victoria Moul has noted, as touched by yet distinct from both Catholic and Puritan frames of reference. 

Robert White, George Herbert, 1674 (Wikimedia Commons)

“The Altar” unites a Calvinist anxiety over human depravity to a high-church inclination to consider the salvific grace of the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist with its economy of sacrifice. In this poem, the speaker offers the“broken altar” of himself as both the receiving surface on which the sacrament is enacted, and the offering itself. Like the altar, the offered sacrifice is insufficient. For what the fallible human supplicant has to offer, Christ the perfect sacrifice must substitute himself — and has already done so, as the poem’s shape indicates, perfecting the imperfect offering, restoring the “broken altar” to its original, intended wholeness. 

That brings us to the second element essential to this poem’s achievement: its form. If you want to know how the broken thing is knit up, look at the knitting, whose pattern is more intricate than you might at first suppose. The poem is a series of couplets, but even within couplets the meters, and thus the visual line lengths, vary. 

The opening couplet, for example, suggesting the altar’s tabletop or mensa, consists of one pentameter and one tetrameter line. The second couplet: also tetrameter. From there the lines, forming the support constrict to dimeter. They also accrue in urgency, forcing the reader to slow down against the forward impulse of the syntax.

At the altar’s base, the meter expands again to tetrameter, and the poem closes on a pentameter couplet. With its echo of the “ALTAR” of the opening line, this ending demonstrates both that, and how, what was fractured has been remade. And on the page you see it: not the broken altar, but the thing made whole, as it was meant to appear and be. 

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