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  • Introduction
  • Chauncey Wood

Readers of The Temple soon realize that it is comprised of three parts: “The Church-porch,” “The Church,” and “The Church Militant.” However, more advanced readers discover that “The Church Militant” stands apart from the other two in several ways. The first published edition of The Temple in 1633 acknowledged a separation between “The Church” and “The Church Militant” by introducing a printer’s border at the top of the first page of “The Church Militant,” and by having its title as a running header on each succeeding page. In the printed volume the word “FINIS” appears at the end of “The Church,” while in the manuscripts “The Church Militant” is separated from “The Church”: by five pages in the Williams manuscript and by one page in the Bodleian.

For many readers this would be reason enough to assume that the volume called The Temple is comprised of two parts: a section called “The Church,” which has its own subdivision into two (“The Church-porch” and “The Church”), and another called “The Church Militant.” But Herbert is a decidedly Christian writer, with a penchant for the number three, as seen in his poem “Trinitie Sunday,” which has three rhymes and three stanzas of three lines each. Accordingly, the desire to see two parts of The Temple as three has proven irresistible to many readers of the volume.

There are other problematic structures in the volume as well. Herbert himself invites consideration of internal links and complex patterns by giving the same title to more than one poem: there are five poems entitled “Affliction”; three entitled “Love”; two entitled “Prayer,” and so on. Moreover, there are some clear thematic groupings such as the Easter sequence comprising “Good Friday,” “Redemption,” “Sepulchre,” “Easter,” and “Easter-wings,” as well as the perplexing closing group on the traditional four last things, which omits Hell, has two poems on Judgment, and adds a poem on Love. We therefore need to revisit the structures of The Temple from time to time. [End Page v]

These intriguing issues prompted the planning of a conference, co-organized by Chauncey Wood and Patricia H. Ward. We gave the conference the working title “The Structure of The Temple; Structures in The Temple.” Scholars from around the country and from as far away as Japan gathered at the College of Charleston on March 8, 2013, to discuss these kinds of structural questions, and the nine papers gathered here represent both the vigor and diversity of response critical attention and commentary that the conference encouraged.

The first essay in our collection is “The Poet as Prophet: Ending The Temple,” by Adele Davidson, which offers a detailed argument for a tripartite structure of The Temple based upon the traditional three offices of Christ: prophet, priest, and king. In addition, the essay opens up a new avenue of Herbertian research by unearthing a number of acrostics in “The Church Militant.” Debra Rienstra also takes a broad view of The Temple, arguing that the English sonnet sequences not only served as a convenient antagonist for Herbert, because of its adoration of the physical rather than the spiritual, but also furnished him with the secular pattern of digression, retreat, and recapitulation that came to serve him well in his poetic presentation of the spiritual life. Paul Dyck undertakes another overview of Herbert in “Approaching the Table: Invitation and the Structure of Herbert’s ‘The Church.’ ” Noting that “The Church” both begins and ends with a table, thereby pointing towards a Eucharistic structure, Dyck nevertheless notes that Herbert cycles back and forth through his perspectives, now focusing on the physical church, now on the metaphysical.

Moving to a more specific focus on individual poems, Kensei Nishikawa’s essay, “God and the Poet Transposed: The Thou-I Chiasmus in George Herbert’s Poetry,” examines the reciprocal relationship that the chiastic form underlies, and demonstrates how this form shows “the mutual submission of selves which paradoxically restores their respective freedom.” Robert Kilgore’s essay “From ‘Employment’ (I) to ‘Grace’: George Herbert’s Restructuring of Work,” discovers a sequence of interrelationships among five poems – “Employment” (I), “The Holy Scriptures” (I) and (II), “Whitsunday,” and “Grace” – based upon a...

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