Herbert’s The Temple as Early Modern Psychomachia

One does not read very far in the second and by far the longest section of Herbert’s The Temple before the single-minded exhortations of the speaker in “The Church Porch” and the early Lenten “complaints” of Christ to his people in “The Sacrifice” turn to the unpredictable elements of the speaker’s human condition: puzzlement, striving, grief, joy. The quick movement between these elements is due not only to Herbert’s poetic sensibility, I argue, but also to his anthropological understanding and his interest in early Christian precedent. I focus on remnants of Prudentius’ 5th-century Psychomachia in Herbert’s poetry and prose and suggest that they open a new vista onto Herbert’s performance of the unsteady dual state of the temple builder, whether poet or reader.