How The Temple drew on Colossians
A documented line of influence: George Herbert demonstrably engaged Paul’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
Relevance
6/10
On The Temple’s page
- The poem titled "Coloss. 3.3" is exactly what it says — Herbert citing Paul and turning the verse into form, the line "My life is hid in Him" running diagonally through the text
- Colossians 3:3 gives the poem its whole idea: a life hidden with Christ, hidden so completely that Herbert hides the line itself inside the poem
- Read the source verse and the trick clicks — the page is doing what Paul says
On Colossians’s page
- One verse of Paul's became a whole poem — Herbert built a piece in The Temple around Colossians 3:3, "your life is hid with Christ in God"
- He titled it after the verse and threaded the line "My life is hid in Him, that is my treasure" diagonally across the lines, so the page enacts the hiddenness it names
- A small, exact debt: see how a single Pauline sentence becomes architecture in a seventeenth-century English devotional poet