George Herbert: "The Altar"

"A heart alone is such a stone."

[Ancient altar stone at Jacobstow Church, Cornwall, England, source: https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/713525]

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.

I begin this essay with the poem itself. It is a poem to see even before reading and hearing and understanding it.

George Herbert’s “The Altar” is an example of a shape poem, a poem whose lines are arranged in the shape of their subject matter. The lines of “The Altar” are shaped like an altar.¹ Pretty cool, huh? This kind of verse is also sometimes called visual poetry.

Let me stop now and clarify that visual poetry (the good kind, anyway) is not made simply by randomly chopping up lines anywhere so that they can be put into a certain shape. Not at all. The skill required to make a shape poem includes the ability to make the length of the lines maintain the rhythm and rhyme of the entire poem and correspond to the shape. If a poet does this well, then the shape of the poem will be heard by the ear when reading it, not merely seen on the page.

To see (or rather hear) what I mean, for those listening to the audio, listen as I read it now. (And for those not listening, read it to yourself now and hear in your voice the line lengths for yourself.)

You can hear the lengthening, shortening, lengthening lines pile up on one another and into a tall structure with a broad face and equally broad base—held together by a slender, sturdy post. This effect (both visual and auditory) is achieved by the varying number of poetic feet in each couplet. The rhythm for each line is iambic, but the meter changes throughout. The couplets follow this pattern: pentameter, tetrameter, dimeter, dimeter, dimeter, dimeter, tetrameter, pentameter. As is always the case with shorter meters punctuated by rhyme (and the rhyming couplets of this poem also contribute significantly to the poem’s effect), the pace quickens with the shorter lines. This emphasis suggests more urgency—or perhaps even intimacy.

The poem communicates emphasis in other ways, as well. The capitalized words—ALTAR, HEART, SACRIFICE, ALTAR—are rendered so in order to draw our attention to them. Likewise, the repeated words—”altar,” “heart,” “frame,” “praise” (have I missed any?)—also reinforce our sense of what the poem is saying through emphasis.

The rhyming words at the end of each couplet are also worth examining. They are intentionally chosen and well chosen. I will just point out two pairs, the first and last. “Rears” and “tears” (lines 1 and 2) are emotion-laden words. While the literal meaning here of “rears” is to build or erect, it also suggests the anger, wildness, and resistance displayed by a rearing horse—or a rearing heart. “Tears,” too, denotes deep emotion, of course. Among all the other things we can say about this poem, we should remember that it is, like so many of Herbert’s poems, also a prayer. And as we saw in the turn from “I” to “Lord” in “The Collar” last week, we see a similar turn reflected in the final couplet here in the shift from “mine” to “thine.”

And what is at the center of this altar—mentioned first in the second line, then twice again, once in each short middle stanza? Heart. “A heart.” “My hard heart.” The stone from which this altar is made is the speaker’s hard heart, a heart so hard that only “thy pow’r” can cut it. No mere human workman’s tools (line 4) can do this job.

This “broken altar” that is raised up is made of “a heart” (and “cemented with tears”). The stone of which this altar is made is a stony heart. This heart is the altar where God’s name is praised—praised prayerfully without ceasing. The altar, first a place of sacrifice, is now a place of worship.

And herein is found the metaphysical conceit: a stone altar is compared, through extended metaphor, to a hard heart. An altar exists in order to offer praise to God. (Even the stones, Luke 19:40 says, will cry out, Jesus tells the religious leaders who tell him to stop the people from worshiping him.) So, too, does a human heart exist for the same purpose. Both—a stone altar and a human heart—are made from materials that are hard to cut and shape, materials that must be put into a proper frame, reared, and sanctified in order to fulfill their purpose.

NEXT UP (order may change at my whim):

• “Prayer (1)”

• “The Pulley”

• “Easter Wings”

• “Jesu”

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”²

BOOK NOTE:

This week’s book is, aptly, about literature and the Bible. Reading the Margins: Encounters with the Bible in Literature by Michael J. Gilmour (Fortress Press) covers a wide range of literary works and authors, from Anne Brontë to C. S. Lewis and Richard Adams and Charles Dickens—to name a few. In endorsing the book, I noted how Gilmour is an exemplary host, one who models what it means to read widely and read well—just what I hope we are doing here at The Priory!

1. Eileen Lass, our faithful proofreader at The Priory (your Prioress is also Queen of the Typos), observed that the poem also takes the shape of an “I” — which also fits the sense of the poem. It connotes both the “I” who becomes the altar through the work wrought in his heart, and the great “I AM,” too. I had never noticed that before! I think the usual layout of the poem gives a more squat, altar appearance. But this further shows the effect of a shape poem.

2. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.