Restoring “The Church‐porch”: George Herbert's Architectural Style

Abstract

AbstractWhile many of the devotional lyrics in George Herbert's The Temple (1633) have attracted sustained critical attention over the past several decades, “The Church‐porch” has lain in comparative neglect for at least a century. This essay draws on sources in local history and ecclesiology to argue that the poem's proverbial style and didactic content—features that modern readers have found distasteful—are deliberate reflections of its architectural setting. Marginal as “The Church‐porch” has been in recent scholarship, the church porch itself would not have been marginal in seventeenth‐century parish life: the first part of the baptismal and marriage ceremonies, for instance, were originally solemnized in the church porch; children were taught there, contracts witnessed, alms disbursed, and debts paid. Herbert's didactic and moral precepts thus represent a common verbal and moral currency whose circulation and constant reuse mirror the kind of public exchange that took place in the church porch. (A.M.M.)