The Full Text of “The Altar”
1A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,
2 Made of a heart and cemented with tears:
3 Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
4No workman's tool hath touch'd the same.
5 A HEART alone
6 Is such a stone,
7 As nothing but
8 Thy pow'r doth cut.
9 Wherefore each part
10 Of my hard heart
11 Meets in this frame,
12 To praise thy name:
13 That if I chance to hold my peace,
14 These stones to praise thee may not cease.
15 Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
16 And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.
The Full Text of “The Altar”
1A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,
2 Made of a heart and cemented with tears:
3 Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
4No workman's tool hath touch'd the same.
5 A HEART alone
6 Is such a stone,
7 As nothing but
8 Thy pow'r doth cut.
9 Wherefore each part
10 Of my hard heart
11 Meets in this frame,
12 To praise thy name:
13 That if I chance to hold my peace,
14 These stones to praise thee may not cease.
15 Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
16 And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.
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“The Altar” Introduction
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"The Altar" is one of Welsh poet George Herbert's famous shaped poems (also known as concrete poems): poems that take the form of an object on the page. In this case, that object is an altar—the sacred altar that the speaker hopes that they might transform their heart into. Speaking directly to God, this poem's speaker prays that even their stony, sinful heart might (with some divine help) become a holy place of Christian worship, where they can perpetually remember and commune with Christ. With its mixture of longing, humility, and awe, this poem is characteristic of Herbert's devotional poetry, which was collected posthumously in the influential book The Temple (1633).
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“The Altar” Summary
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I—your humble servant, my God—build a broken altar for you, made from my heart and stuck together with my tears. All its parts are just the way you made them; no other laborer has touched them. Only a heart is the kind of stone that nothing but your power can shape. Therefore, every part of my sinful heart comes together in this shape to worship your name—so that even if I happen to say nothing, my heart will go on praising you. Oh, let me take part in your sacred sacrifice, and bless the altar of my heart so that it becomes yours.
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“The Altar” Themes
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Humility and Christian Faith
This poem's devout Christian speaker prays for their stony, sinful heart to be transformed into a holy altar, a place where they can constantly remember, celebrate, and experience the presence of God. But they're profoundly aware that they can't make this happen on their own. The work of a faithful Christian, George Herbert suggests in this poem, is to humbly admit one's sins, long for God—then get out of the way and let God do the fixing.
Herbert makes this point through careful biblical allusions. The poem is founded on the image of the sinful heart as stony—a classic Christian image that perhaps most famously appears in the biblical book of Ezekiel, in which God tells Ezekiel, "I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." Here, the speaker instead uses their stony heart to build a "broken ALTAR"—a metaphor that suggests they're trying to make a home for God in their heart even though (or because!) they know that heart is flawed and sinful.
They also know that they can't fix their heart on their own. Drawing on a passage in the book of Exodus in which God tells Moses not to build altars out of cut stones, the speaker assures God that "no workman's tool" has touched their heart—because "nothing but / [God's] pow'r can cut" a heart into shape. Through this image, Herbert maintains that human beings can't make themselves less sinful under their own steam. Holiness and goodness, rather, come only from God's work on the heart.
The speaker feels that their job, then, is simply to build their broken altar and reach out to God, who can "sanctify this ALTAR" and make it holy in spite of the speaker's sinfulness. To have faith in the Christian God, Herbert thus suggests, demands deep humility and surrender. Sinful human beings, this poem suggests, can't simply fix their hearts and make themselves good. They can only recognize God's goodness, long for it, and submit themselves to it. Such humility leads to a deep transformation: build an altar of one's heart, and one might find oneself permanently altered.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Altar”
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Lines 1-2
A broken ALTAR, Lord, thy servant rears,
Made of a heart and cemented with tears:One of the first things readers might notice about George Herbert's "The Altar" is the way it looks on the page. This is a shaped poem, a poem that takes the form of what it describes: in this case, an altar, a table prepared for a holy sacrifice.
For the devout poet-priest George Herbert, that sacrifice can only be the one acted out in the Christian ritual of the Eucharist, in which (in Herbert's Anglican tradition) bread and wine mystically become the body and blood of Jesus. In this poem, Herbert's speaker will describe their attempts to build an altar worthy of the God they love.
The speaker begins from a position of deep humility, declaring that they're merely God's "servant." They wish to build an altar at which to worship God—but the best they can do is to raise a "broken ALTAR," an imperfect structure "made of a heart and cemented with tears."
They're not trying to build a literal altar, then, but a metaphorical one: an altar made of their heart. And that heart is "broken," far from pristine. They don't feel good about that. The tears with which their altar is "cemented" seem likely to be tears of remorse for the sins that have left their heart so stony.
But the humble speaker clearly feels a trusting intimacy with their God. They address him in an apostrophe, speaking directly to him, clearly feeling he's right there and listening. And when they address him, they use the pronouns "thy" and "thee" rather than "your" and "you"—pronouns that once worked a lot like the "tu" of modern French or Spanish, suggesting a close relationship. They're not afraid to admit to a friend so close that their heart is broken. For that matter, they know that their "tears" of remorse will form an important part of transforming that heart into a holy altar: there's no building an altar without "cement[]."
The big question that these first lines raise might be: why does the speaker wish to build an altar from their heart, in particular? What does the conceit of the heart as a "broken ALTAR" suggest about how the speaker longs to relate to their God? Answers to these questions will unfold as Herbert builds his altar of words on the page.
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Lines 3-4
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workman's tool hath touch'd the same. -
Lines 5-8
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut. -
Lines 9-12
Wherefore each part
Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
To praise thy name: -
Lines 13-14
That if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease. -
Lines 15-16
Oh, let thy blessed SACRIFICE be mine,
And sanctify this ALTAR to be thine.
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“The Altar” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Conceit
"The Altar" reveals its conceit in its title—and in its shape on the page. The big extended metaphor that gives this poem its form is the idea that the speaker's heart is an altar to God—a "broken ALTAR," marred by sin and "cemented with tears" of remorse. As an altar, this heart is a place where the speaker can worship God, but also a place where the speaker can invite God into their whole being.
That's because the altar Herbert has in mind is one in a Christian church, a place where the Eucharist is celebrated:
- This ritual honors the moment recounted in the Bible in which, on the night before his death, Christ tells his disciples that the bread and wine at the dinner table are his body and blood and that they should eat and drink them in memory of him. Most Christian denominations continue to celebrate this ritual.
- In Herbert's Anglican Protestant tradition, the bread and wine are said to mystically become the body and blood of Christ (though exactly what this means has been the subject of much religious controversy and even the cause of much bloodshed, some of it in quite recent memory for Herbert and his contemporaries).
Herbert's speaker, then, wishes that their heart might be made into a place where this sacred transformation occurs.
The conceit is rich with theological implications. Presenting the heart as a stony thing that God can "sanctify" and transform into a place of worship, Herbert stresses the idea that goodness and faith aren't things that people have to dredge up out of their imperfect selves in order to serve God. Rather, they're gifts from God. Building an altar, in this poem's metaphorical sense, suggests that the faithful speaker's role is to become ready and willing to receive God's gifts—which also means admitting that their heart might be "broken," or imperfect and sinful. There's no building this altar without the "cement[]" of guilty tears.
The fact that the poem also takes the physical shape of an altar helps to suggest that it's a true expression of the speaker's heart, or of what they pray their heart might become. Perhaps the shape of the poem also invites readers to think about inspiration and the human relationship with the divine. A literal stone altar gets built from the bottom up; this speaker's altar of words can only be built top-down, from the heavens to the earth.
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Allusion
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Repetition
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Apostrophe
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"The Altar" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Altar
- Rears
- Cemented
- Frame
- Pow'r
- Wherefore
- Frame
- Hold my peace
- Blessed
- Sanctify
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A table used in religious rituals, particularly for sacred sacrifices. In the Christian tradition, the altar is used to prepare the ceremonial bread and wine known as the Eucharist.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Altar”
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Form
"The Altar" is a shaped poem. That means it's a poem that takes the form of an object on the page: in this case, an altar. As the speaker builds a metaphorical altar from their heart, they also build an image of an altar with the words on the page.
George Herbert's altar is a balanced, symmetrical construction of 16 lines, all written in steady couplets:
- The top and bottom of the altar are built from four-line blocks of iambic pentameter (lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "A bro- | ken ALT- | AR, Lord, | thy ser- | vant rears") and iambic tetrameter (four iambs, as in "Whose parts | are as | thy hand | did frame").
- The central pillar, meanwhile, is written in eight lines of short, punchy iambic dimeter—just two iambs, as in "A HEART | alone."
This solid structure helps to suggest the speaker's firm faith in God's benevolent "pow'r." In this speaker's vision, God creates and shapes human hearts—and the bearers of those hearts can only put themselves in God's hands, praying that he'll transform them from stony-hearted sinners into little temples. The poem's sturdy, elegant form suggests that the speaker has great faith in God's miraculous stonecutting skills.
By arranging his words into the shape of an altar, Herbert also suggests that this poem is a true expression of his heart. The altar on the page reflects Herbert's deepest wishes for his inner altar.
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Meter
"The Altar" uses three different patterns of meter to build a picture on the page. The top of the speaker's altar (lines 1-2) is built from iambic pentameter: lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 1:
A brok- | en ALT- | AR, Lord, | thy ser- | vant rears,
Then come two lines of iambic tetrameter (lines 3-4): four iambs in a row, as in line 3:
Whose parts | are as | thy hand | did frame;
Together, these lines build the graduated upper part of Herbert's "altar." They're supported on an eight-line passage written in short, intense iambic dimeter (lines 5-12), lines with just two iambs in a row. Here's how that sounds in lines 5-6:
A HEART | alone
Is such | a stone,Then, the pattern of the first four lines repeats in reverse to form the altar's base: two lines of iambic tetrameter in lines 13-14, two lines of iambic pentameter in lines 15-16.
The altar on the page thus takes on a symmetrical shape—one that suggests a kind of balanced, harmonious rightness. Putting their altar in God's hands, this poem's speaker trusts that God will make something solid even of their "broken," imperfect, sinful heart.
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Rhyme Scheme
"The Altar" is written in rhymed couplets, like so:
AABBCCDD
...and so on. These couplets are nearly all made of strong monosyllabic words: rears / tears, frame / same, mine / thine. While the poem's rhythm dramatically changes, the consistent rhyme scheme creates a feeling of firmness and continuity. The sturdy rhymes here help to reflect the speaker's longing for God to shape his heart into a solid, enduring altar.
The poem returns to one rhyme: the frame / same rhyme in lines 3-4 returns in the frame / name of lines 11-12. But the word "frame" means something different in each of these two places. The first "frame" is a verb describing how God shaped the speaker's heart, and the second a noun describing the metaphorical altar built from that heart. Herbert's reuse of the rhyme word stresses God's unique power over the speaker's heart: "nothing but / [God's] power" can first create the heart and then shape it.
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“The Altar” Speaker
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The poem's speaker seems likely to be a voice for George Herbert himself. Much of the devotional poetry in Herbert's "The Temple" offers first-person reflections on the mysteries and joys of Christian faith. These were experiences that Herbert knew intimately: he gave up the possibility of a glittering career at court in order to become a small-town priest, following what he felt to be an undeniable vocation.
The speaker also reveals a sharp wit, in the grand tradition of the 17th-century Metaphysical poets. Not only does Herbert construct a rich conceit in his image of the heart as an altar, he constructs a rich image of his conceit! Shaping the poem to resemble an altar on the page, Herbert suggests that this poem itself is an expression of his heart. The poem becomes an offering to God, just as his heart is.
Even if readers don't interpret the speaker as Herbert himself, the speaker is certainly a Herbert-like figure, a person who combines a forthright consciousness of their own imperfections with a passionate longing for the God they love. This speaker knows that the only heart-altar they can build to their God will necessarily be "broken" and "cemented with tears"; they're keenly aware, in other words, that their frail human heart is sinful, and they feel deep remorse for all the ways in which they've fallen short. It's for precisely this reason, however, that they hope to make their heart into an altar to God. Only God, they feel, can make them into something whole—and to be whole, for them, is to be fully dedicated to worshiping God.
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“The Altar” Setting
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If this poem has a setting, it's the speaker's own inner world. Here, they can raise a "broken ALTAR" to God, a metaphorical structure built from their own imperfect heart. In this vision, readers might imagine the speaker's body as the church in which the altar stands. The speaker's whole being, the poem's conceit suggests, is dedicated to God—or, at least, the speaker prays that it might be so.
The poem's implied image of the body as a church nods toward an important idea in Christianity: the church as the body of Christ. The idea here is that all Christians together join with and embody Jesus (who plays the role of the "head" of this big, communal body). Part of the way this happens, according to Christian theology, is that Christians become one with Jesus through the Eucharist—a sacred offering of bread and wine, prepared on an altar like the one the poem describes. So prepared, the bread and wine are said to become the body and blood of Christ.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Altar”
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Literary Context
A passionate soul, George Herbert (1593-1633) lived a humble life as a country priest, serving a small English parish that bore the exuberant name of Fuggleston-cum-Bemerton. Herbert, who was born to the nobility and grew to become a brilliant scholar, often struggled with the limitations his calling imposed on his life; he could easily have made a splash in a royal court. But, as his poetry recounts, he felt inexorably drawn to the priesthood.
While he never found (or sought) public poetic success during his short lifetime, Herbert is now remembered as one of the foremost of the "Metaphysical Poets." This group of 17th-century writers, which included poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell, shared a combination of brilliant intellect, passionate feeling, and religious fervor. Herbert was not the only one of these poets to work as a clergyman or to explore his relationship with God in poems that sometimes sound more like love songs than hymns.
Like his fellow Metaphysicals, Herbert wasn't shy of poetic innovation. In "The Altar" and "Easter Wings," for instance, he experimented with shaped poetry (poetry that takes the form of an object on the page), playing with the idea that language might become a visual art.
The Temple (1633), the book in which "The Altar" appears, was Herbert's only poetry collection, and it might never have seen the light of day. Dying at the age of only 39, Herbert left the book's manuscript to his friend Nicholas Farrar, telling him to publish it if he felt it would do some "dejected poor soul" some good. Farrar, suspecting it would, brought to press what would become one of the world's best-known and best-loved books of poetry. The Temple went on to influence poets from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to T.S. Eliot to Wendy Cope.
Historical Context
George Herbert lived and wrote during an unsettled period of British history. During Herbert's childhood, Britain was enjoying a golden age. The powerful Elizabeth I was on the throne, and Britain was both a formidable military power and a literary treasure-house, boasting writers like Shakespeare, Spenser, and Marlowe. But the great "Virgin Queen" died without children in 1603, and her successor, James VI and I of Scotland and England, was not quite such a unifying figure. Many of his people were either skeptical of him or downright hostile to his rule. (The infamous Guy Fawkes, who was executed for trying to blow up James's Parliament, is one vivid example.)
The anti-monarchist plots James grappled with would eventually feed into an unprecedented uprising. By the time that George Herbert died in 1633, James's son Charles I was on the throne—but he wouldn't stay there for long. In 1649, a rebellion led by Oliver Cromwell would depose Charles and publicly behead him, a world-shaking event that upended old certainties about monarchy, hierarchy, and even God's will.
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More “The Altar” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Read the Poetry Foundation's short biography of Herbert.
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Herbert's Church — Take a look at the church where Herbert once preached (and learn more about his life and work there).
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Herbert's Legacy — Read the contemporary poet Wendy Cope's appreciation of Herbert.
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An Early Edition — Take a look at an image of "The Altar" as it was presented in a 1670 edition of The Temple: with an elaborate architectural illustration depicting an altar decorated with a stone heart and tears, in case readers might have missed the conceit.
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The Temple — Read a short overview of The Temple, Herbert's lone surviving collection of poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by George Herbert
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