‘The Altar’ by George Herbert (1593-1633)

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.  4
                          A      HEART     alone
                          Is     such      a     stone,
                          As       nothing       but
                          Thy pow’r   doth  cut.    8
                          Wherefore each part
                          Of    my   hard     heart
                          Meets   in  this frame,
                          To  praise  the  Name.  12
That    if    I    chance   to     hold     my     peace,
These  stones to praise thee may not cease.
O   let   thy  blessed   SACRIFICE   be   mine,
And    sanctify   this    ALTAR   to    be   thine.  16

Considering the Poem

The immediately striking thing about this poem is that, as an object on the page, it has been formed in the shape of an altar by the poet’s managing of the line lengths and the spaces between words. This is witty, of course, but it is also more than just a clever trick.

|In fact, the amusing manipulation wordlessly announces the idea of the poem. It is about transformation. In the same way as the words of which the poem is made are transformed into an altar, the poet is striving to re-shape the materials of which he himself is made so that he may imitate Jesus by devoting himself entirely to the Christ who had devoted his own life to others.

Altars are made of stone. The altar-shaped poem is made of words. If Herbert is to make himself symbolically into an altar, he must use the materials of his own body to do so. He must transform his ‘heart’ (2).

The raw materials which he must use for his own transformation, however, do not promise a certain success: the ‘frame’ or design for their creation was made by God (3-4) but the ‘parts’ (3) of his body, and their planned functions seem inadequate for the work of renewal. They have become imperfect in an imperfect world, a vale of tears. The starting point for the process of change is imagined as a ‘broken Altar’ made from a heart (2) that is held together by ‘tears’ of sorrow and suffering. How can the ‘servant’ of God, the priest Herbert, make himself new in a broken world and with poor materials?

As he explores the question, Herbert sets up a variety of verbal connections and interplays between the altar made from stone, the altar made from himself and the poem made from words. This is a kind of verbal triangulation. The web of connections starts being made in the first statement of the poem: we know that a stone altar is ‘cemented’ (2) but the water that’s used to make the cement here is human tears, and stone is here in the form of the poet’s human ‘heart’ (2, 5, 10), a heart that is ‘hard’ (10) like a ‘stone’ (6) and, the stones that are to be used to make an altar will be placed in a ‘frame’ (11) so that what is made may be strong and true.. The ‘frame’ that God has provided for Herbert to use in his effort of transformation is his body and its parts (3).

You will find more of these intricate correspondences. This web of verbal associations made from the comparison of the altar and the human body invites us to look at the poem in much the same way as we might look at a painting in an art gallery. We ‘read’ a painting by looking around its surface, left and right, top to bottom, in whatever ways the artist has induced us to look. This poem is, of course, a kind of picture and it is worth looking at it in that way to enjoy tracing the web of associations spatially not just left to right and down the lines.

The final lines, the base of the altar holding the structure up, give a kind of conditional hope that Herbert will succeed even with his poor materials and beginning from a ‘broken’ (1) place that he would not have chosen as a starting point: there is a ‘chance’ (13 ) that Herbert will be able to find a state of inner ‘peace’ (13) and with God’s power (8) the transformed self he becomes will be stable enough to offer his endless ‘praise’ (12, 14), thus achieving his aim of imitating Christ’s sacrifice by making himself both an altar and a ‘blessed SACRIFICE’ (15-16).

This will not be achieved without spiritual and divine aid, however, so the poem ends with what is actually a short prayer: ‘O let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,/And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine’.