The Poetics of Ethical Eating in George Herbert's The Temple

Abstract:George Herbert's poetic experiments are guided in part by a desire to influence how the early modern English ate. This article demonstrates that Herbert's verse collection The Temple is shaped by his responsibility as a rural parish priest for ensuring that his community was fed not just spiritually but also physically: as a country parson, he was tasked with collecting agricultural tithes and redistributing them to the hungry. Writing in a time of severe food insecurity, Herbert draws on a vast variety of poetic methods, from metrical sentences to verse emblems to hymns, in order to persuade his readers to join him in addressing the crisis of hunger that early modern England was facing through collectively restricting their consumption.