Few poems begin by almost scolding God, yet George Herbert's sonnet opens with exactly that kind of startled question: "My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee". The complaint is really aimed at his own world, and perhaps at himself. Love poetry blazes with passion, while religious feeling seems to have cooled. Why, he asks, should verse be spent on Venus when it could be offered to God? The poem is an argument about what poetry is for.
Fire holds it together. Herbert begins with the "heat" of early Christians, "whole showls of Martyrs" who "did burn". The phrase "Besides their other flames" is brilliantly double-edged: the martyrs burned with devotion, and they may also have burned in a literal sense. "Showls" suggests a swarming crowd, like fish, and that sense of numbers makes the present coldness more embarrassing. The image keeps returning. Poems should be "layes / Upon thine Altar burnt", like a sacrifice, and in the last two lines the fire is "by thy power and might / Each breast does feel". Herbert's point is that passion itself comes from God. It has simply been burning the wrong fuel.
Against God he sets Venus and Cupid, the machinery of fashionable love sonnets. Poetry, he complains, seems to "Wear Venus livery", as if it were a servant in uniform, hired "only" to "serve her turn". Then comes a pair of rival images. God's love should "Heighten a spirit" to praise him "As well as any she", and his "Dove" should "Out-strip their Cupid easily in flight". The Dove is the traditional emblem of the Holy Spirit, and Herbert pits it against the little archer of love poetry in a race. The line itself, with its light syllables, almost flies.
The structure supports this. The poem has fourteen lines and rhymes *abab cdcd effe gg*, so it ends on a couplet, as English sonnets do. Almost every sentence is a question: "Doth Poetry...?", "Why are not Sonnets made of thee?", "Cannot thy love...?", "Cannot thy Dove...?". No answers are offered. The questions pile up like accusations and make the speaker sound pressed and impatient. Long sentences spill over line endings ("Cannot thy love / Heighten a spirit", "Cannot thy Dove / Out-strip..."), so his thought seems to rush ahead of the verse form. The line "Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name!" is also a neat piece of proof. It is perfectly regular iambic pentameter, so it demonstrates the very smoothness it asks about. (The text supplied prints "still the fame" in the line before. Judging by the sense and the rhyme with "name", "same" is almost certainly what is meant, so God's ways are "deep, and still the same".)
The couplet turns downward. After altars, flights and martyrs, Herbert ends in the grave. The fire in every human breast, he says, chooses no "braver fuel" than something that "one day, Worms, may chance refuse". "Braver" means finer or more splendid, but it also hints at courage. The fuel he describes is mortal, passing and decaying, so wasteful that even worms might turn it down. Earthly beauty, the usual subject of love sonnets, is shown as food for the grave, and the grim joke lands with real force.
What makes the poem important is that it practises what it demands. Herbert asks "Why are not Sonnets made of thee?" and the answer is the sonnet we are reading, a love poem addressed to God, in the borrowed form and with the artistry usually spent on Venus. He does not reject the glamour of the love sonnet. He takes it over and redirects it, and that boldness helps explain why he is remembered as a devotional poet who thought religious verse should be as skilful as any other. The complaint at the start turns out to be a first offering on the altar.