George Herbert's "The Altar" - HELP?

Question

I need help with finding to literal meaning, setting, speaker, plot, theme & purpose, thesis statement and anything else you might want to add. Here is a link to read the poem if you need to... http://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/Altar.html

Answer 1

In "The Altar," for example, Stein identifies a trait of "suspicion . . . which anticipates the signs of idol worship and exposes the ingenious variety of techniques devised to advance the human interest in the name of God" (20). Herbert might be especially suspicious of his own motivation in writing an ornate and meticulously crafted poem like "The Altar," which threatens, despite its theme, to become as much a monument to self as to God. The poem's main point is that the altar that matters to God is the broken and contrite heart of the speaker, not a splendidly built monument on which sacrifices are made. The final lines of the poem say emphatically that not only is the new covenant altar God's work and not human work since the new altar is "a heart . . . / Whose parts are as thy hand did frame" (11. 2-3), but also that the sacrifice which sanctifies that altar is God's: "O let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine, / And sanctifie this A L T A R to be thine." But yet the very real problem for the poet remains. Has the well-crafted offering which is the poem itself--"The Altar" is typographically shaped as an altar--served to deepen through irony the poem's message that both altar and sacrifice are God's work and not humankind's? Or has this beautifully built poem subverted its purpose by standing as a monument to human craft? As Stanley Fish says, "The first thing the poem does, even before we take in any of its words, is call attention to itself . . . [to] the skill and ingenuity of the maker" (207). Herbert's suspicion is directed at least partially at himself as he erects such a splendidly built altar to God.

Answer 2

The Altar George Herbert

Answer 3

George Herbert The Altar