The Complete English Poems

The Temple, Herbert's great structure of poems, first appeared in 1633, the year of his death. Centring on the Eucharist, these poems contain both the struggles of a man wishing to give himself up to God, and those of a poet for whom true humility was the sharpest agony simply because he was a great poet. All the elements in Herbert's poetry-its mosaic of biblical themes, its complex simplicity, compression and understatement-combine to make it a poetry of connection, celebrating the divine plan and dramatizing how contradictions and ambiguous states can be transcended in response to God's love.This Penguin Classics edition takes in significant variants and early versions as well as English poems not included in The Temple, and selections from Herbert's Latin poetry with translations.