A photo of the poem Altar from one of my Victorian editions. I wonder if children ever coloured in these delicate drawings?
THE ALTAR
A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant reares,
Made of a heart, and cemented with teares:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workman's tool hath touch’d the same.
A H E A R T alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow’r doth cut.
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy Name;
That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.
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.
In a culture fixated on self-fulfilment, self-promotion, self-affirmation and even self-preservation, the notion of self-sacrifice and self-giving is in danger of seeming a bizarre way to go about living.
This poem is unashamedly biblical, and positively revels in the idea that sacrifice is the key to the meaning, purpose and fulfilment of life. The altar's foundation is made of the last two lines, stones laid deep on Mount Calvary. Woven through this poem like red thread, is the prior sacrifice of Christ, which evokes such profound love that the only response is the answering gift of the heart.
The great themes of Herbert's poems are anticipated in this pattern poem; brokenness of heart, tears of contrition, the mystery of being a creature in the image of God, the cutting and shaping power of grace, the conversion from stony heart to a beating heart of renewed love and trust, the imperative to praise, and those last two lines, a prayer to receive the benefits of Christ's sacrifice, and in return giving back the redeemed life in praise and service.
Herbert has distilled into this poem both a printed image of an altar, and a verbal description of penitent love, spiritual longing, and self-abandonment in trustful praise that is the essence of Christian devotion. Only God has the power to shape the original and primary stone into pieces fit to fit together again, now in the shape of an altar from which will be offered the sacrifice of praise.
In the background there are familiar biblical echoes: Deuteronomy 27.2 'set up stones and cover them with cement…'; 2 Corinthians 3.3 when God is given his place, "not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart"; Zechariah 7.12, used by Jesus on his way to Jerusalem and Calvary, "if these [my disciples] hold their peace, the stones themselves would immediately cry out."
The poem is a display of virtuosity, a playful seriousness informing its images and form, "a sort of visual punning, showing the poet building words into a sacred game for the glory of his heavenly Father" (Quoted in Wilcox) It was never Herbert's intention that the reader should be so taken with the poet's cleverness that they overlooked the central point. In case we do, the original has four words in capital letters; the ALTAR brackets and contains the HEART and its SACRIFICE.
Which brings us to reading this poem during Lent. It's short enough to read each day of Lent. The central pillar is the cry, "O for a heart to praise my God, a heart from sin set free." Above are the tears that cement the newly shaped fragments together; below the prayer that through Christ's sacrifice, the broken stony heart may be re-formed to a new wholeness as the heart of stone becomes a living altar from which is offered the sacrifice of praise.
A number of literary critics rubbish this poem as near parody of what a poem, let alone a prayer, should be. But more recently there is appreciation of how a perfectly shaped poem points towards human imperfection, and provides the crucial cruciform clue to its redemption on the altar of Calvary.
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