ABSTRACT
A wide and growing use of poetry in church services is noticeable: for example, in many of BBC Radio 4's Sunday morning services, at weddings and at funerals. On the other side, fundamentalists insist that God's Word is in the Bible alone and the Bible as expounded, often very crudely indeed, by themselves and according to their own unexamined prejudices. A spirituality of open attention to the truth is opposed by a spirituality of closure and possession of the truth. George Herbert's mind was intent on precise truth to everyday experience and the reduction of vaguer speculation. As T. S. Eliot wrote, he knew the difference 'between the reality and the unattained aspiration’. The result of George Herbert's complex and various revisions – the corrections, the omissions, the additions made over time – is a plain poem: which is how it should be and how it was to be, eventually, for T. S. Eliot too.
