Here ‘fall’ picks up on that earlier ‘descent’ (the ‘stem’ or line of descent that all bodies can trace, leading back to our ancestral ‘dust’ from which the first man was made), but principally conveys two other meanings: our decline or ‘fall’ into old age and death, and our spiritual ‘fall’, i.e. Musing upon this will help Herbert’s own body to prepare for death ‘against thy fall’. Herbert ends by enjoining his body to look upon the ‘ashes’ of the dead that lie within church monuments, and observe that those bodies, once as filled with lust and desire as Herbert’s now is, are now free from such appetites.

This is a particularly neat analogy, since the glass from which hourglasses are made is, of course, fashioned from tiny grains of dust-like sand, the very stuff which fills the hourglasses. Indeed, even our fleshly hourglasses will crumble to dust, since all our bodies will return to the ‘quintessence of dust’, to borrow Hamlet’s phrase. Addressing his body or ‘flesh’, Herbert enjoins it to learn its true ‘descent’ – from dust, and ultimately destined to return to dust – while Herbert himself busies himself with prayer.Īs we move into the fourth stanza, Herbert asks his flesh to remember, when it grows fat and gluttonous or lustful (‘flesh’ suggesting, after all, sins of the flesh), to remember that flesh is like an hourglass that holds grains of dust: in other words, our bodies are like clocks which remind us of the passing of time as he grow older and gradually approach the grave. One possible interpretation is that the people who will visit the church monuments in future times will be unable to bow and kneel before the monuments as they now stand, since, they, too, are destined to fall to ‘heaps’ of dust, the stone crumbling away to the same powder as the bodies themselves. The third stanza is more difficult to analyse, since Herbert’s language becomes more obscure. The jet and marble (from which tombs are made) try to elevate man to something higher, with their ‘signs’ and dedications and inscriptions, but man is – in the last analysis – mere dust and earth. His dust can be compared in the tomb to the dust already there his earth can be compared to the earth surrounding the tomb. Another lesson provided by the tomb or church-monument is the knowledge that a man’s body is composed of dust and earth, and will return to these states after he decomposes.

The school of death that is the church monument provides a sort of ‘spelling lesson’, which enables Herbert to learn how to decipher his ‘birth / Written in dusty heraldry and lines’, i.e. In the second stanza, Herbert says this is why he gladly entrusts his body to the ‘school’ of death that is the tomb: so that he may learn what death is like.

George herbert metaphysical poems