"Love (III)," as its title suggests, is the third poem on love in George Herbert's collection of Christian verse, The Temple. It's also the last poem in that book and can be taken, in some sense, as Herbert's final word on the matter. The love in question here isn't romantic love, but divine love: God's love for humanity, and for one anxious soul in particular.

That poor soul, the speaker himself, first appears standing at God's front door. But he's simply too ashamed to come in. Though God, in the form of Love personified, cheerily welcomes him, he shrinks away, feeling "guilty of dust and sin": in other words, on God's threshold, he's painfully aware of his own grimy mortal failings. Being this close to Love itself seems to have made him self-conscious.

God, "quick-eyed," notices the speaker’s hesitation, and greets him, "sweetly" asking "if I lacked anything." To a modern reader, this question just sounds makes God sound friendly, like a good host. To Herbert, these words would also suggest something more specific: "What do you lack?" is what a 17th-century bartender would ask a customer, something in the vein of "What can I get you?" In these lines, God appears as a kindly innkeeper, practically wiping their hands on their apron as they check on their nervous guest.

Right from the start, then, the poem layers gentle humor on top of awe (a classic Herbert move). The speaker, encountering God face to face, finds himself horribly aware of the stains on his own soul. But this momentous encounter happens in the earthliest of contexts.

As is often the case in Herbert, the poem's shape reflects its emotion:

• The poem's meter alternates between long lines of iambic pentameter (that is, lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm: "Love bade | me wel- | come: yet | my soul | drew back") and short lines of iambic trimeter (just three iambs: "Who made | the eyes | but I?").
• The lines thus move like the relationship the poem describes: God reaches out to welcome the speaker, the speaker shrinks away in shame.
• The rhyme scheme works similarly: in each sestet (or six-line stanza), a dithery alternating ABAB pattern resolves in a firm CC couplet, just as God replies to the speaker's hesitance with a firm welcome.

The poem's music makes meaning, too. Listen to the echoing sounds in the first lines:

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.

The alliterative and assonant chime between "bade" (pronounced bad) and "back" again meets God's welcome with the speaker's reluctance. And the sibilant /s/ running through "soul," "dust," and "sin" links the speaker's soul with all that he feels stains it.

Those stains don't matter to the innkeeper Love, though. This will be a poem about a God whose love and forgiveness are so far and beyond human capacities that they boggle the mind of even the most fervent believer.