Notes on the Psalms in Herbert's The Temple

The relationship of George Herbert's lyrics to the Psalms has often been acknowledged, but until recently has usually been taken for granted. Although editors' notes, for example, are full of references to the Psalms, there have been relatively few attempts to deal with the significance of these references in Herbert criticism. There are studies of St. Augustine's commentaries and the five poems called "Affliction"' and of the links between images in the Psalms and Herbert's language of love.2 Coburn Freer, in Music fora King, examines Herbert's affinities with the metrical psalmistsand proposes a number of Psalms as "analogues" to his poems.3 One of the best and also one of the earliest discussions of Herbert and the Psalms is in The Poetry of Meditation, where Louis Martz says of "The Church" that it is "hardly too much" to call it "a book of seventeenth-century psalmody."4 But Martz's comments are all too brief and, as valuable as they are, only underscore the need for a fuller study of the subject. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski's recent Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-CenturyReligious Lyric goes a very long way towards satisfying that need and provides a strong basis and justification for a still closer look at the ways in which Herbert makes use of the Psalms as an "important generic resource."5 Three of these ways are of particular interest and will be considered here: the use of Psalm structures, the use of allusions to individual Psalm verses, and, finally, the adaptation of particular Psalms as the basis of otherwise highly original poems.