Here the “sweet singer of The Temple” appears surprisingly disheveled, even déshabillé. We are reminded momentarily that he came of a dashing, handsome, often passionate family, and that his oldest brother, Edward or “Black Ned,” was a lusty, quarrelsome fashion plate who kept company with Jonson, Donne, and Carew, and served as ambassador to France.

Extrapolating from such words and associations, Michael Schoenfeldt has found sexual desire pulsing through Herbert’s entire Temple and his Church, coming to a courtly climax in the famed lyric “Love” (3), in which Schoenfeldt hears the androgynous voice of a seductive divine lover transforming “a comedy of errors into a comedy of Eros.” Even Anthony Low, who finds the erotic charge in Herbert’s poetry much less pervasive, nevertheless discovers an insistent reference to the sexual, if only to be rerouted and refocused. In fact, although Low generally resists the urge to psychoanalyze Herbert at a distance of four hundred years, he does speculate a bit on the implications of John Aubrey’s rather stinging comment about Herbert’s marriage: that Herbert’s wife—and Aubrey’s kinswoman—Jane Danvers Herbert was “a handsome bona roba and ingeniose” and that “his marriage, I suppose, hastened his death.” Low writes that this “seems to imply that [Herbert] found her dangerously beautiful and willfully clever.” The possibility of the supposedly pale and wan George Herbert bedded and spent by a voluptuous and dominating bride gives new poignancy to those lines, just quoted, about “the propositions of hot blood and brains,” but it is highly likely that Herbert’s tuberculosis, rather than an over-stimulating or overbearing wife, laid him in his early grave.