How The Temple drew on Psalms
A documented line of influence: George Herbert demonstrably engaged David’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
Relevance
9/10
On The Temple’s page
- The Temple is a seventeenth-century Psalter — Herbert took the Psalms' full range of praise, lament, and penitence as his model for addressing God
- The debt is structural as well as thematic: "The Church" has the same number of poems as the Psalms parceled out across the Anglican liturgical calendar
- His paraphrase of Psalm 23 — "The God of love my shepherd is" — shows the source in the clear; read the Psalms first and Herbert's whole architecture comes into focus
On Psalms’s page
- The model for the entire book — Herbert built The Temple as a Protestant Psalter of his own, taking the Psalms as his pattern for the soul speaking to God
- He matched the structure to the source: "The Church" holds the same number of poems as the Psalms divided across the Church of England's liturgical calendar
- He even paraphrased Psalm 23 directly — "The God of love my shepherd is"