George Herbert's Revisions in "The Church" and the Carnality of "Love" (III)

"Love" (III) is the final and climactic poem in "The Church," the central section of George Herbert's Tho Temple. One of Herbert's most admired and complex lyrics, "Love" (III) identifies the love between man and God with the sacrament of communion and with the soul's reception into heaven. But it also compares that love to human sexual love, an analogy that some readers seem to find unnerving in the context of Herbert's devotional verse. Chana Bloch, for example, remarking on the debt Herbert's imagination owes to the Song of Songs, implies that he used erotic language almost reluctantly in this poem: "It is possible that in his presentation of this situation Herbert has been unconsciously guided by the memory or imagination of a human sexual encounter; it is unlikely that he would have intended an explicitly sexual scene. At all events, I hardly think Herbert would have used the sexual metaphor here without the precedent of the Song of Songs. I would suggest that in this respect the Bible has freed his imagination to more direct expression than he would otherwise have attempted."1