Where It All Goes Down
We're all over the place in this poem. Okay, not really, but there a few things to discuss when it comes to the whole issue of the poem's setting. This poem definitely has a meditative feel, don't you think? All we mean by that is that in some ways it resembles something a guy would recite out loud in his bedroom before going to bed, kind of like a prayer or something.
Let's run with this for a little while longer. Let's suppose the guy reciting this poem in his bedroom at night is George Herbert. Okay, cool. Herbert was a priest, and worked for the last three years of his life (1630-1633) in the small village of Bemerton. Back in those days, Bemerton was still pretty rural, the kind of small village where everybody knew each other. It was the kind of place where a guy like Herbert was able to visit regularly most of his parishioners and offer spiritual counsel.
We can't talk about Bemerton and Herbert's life there without also talking about St. Andrew's Church, where Herbert preached and lived. St. Andrew's was a small, one-room building that could only seat about 30 people (that's about the size of a classroom, folks). Herbert actually used his own money to have the place fixed up when he got there in 1630, which you can read a little bit about right here. We can't read "The Altar," or really any of Herbert's poems, without thinking about his life in the small village of Bemerton.
Before we move on, we need to talk about all those stones in the poem. No, this poem doesn't take place in a granite quarry or something like that. However, the references to stones, and all the echoes of the Old Testament (see our "Allusions" section for more on that), make us think of the world of the Old Testament. Now by "world of the Old Testament," we mean way back in the B.C.E. days. In those days, God was in much more regular contact with his followers (at least according to the Bible), he was a little meaner, the rules were stricter, and, well, life was much harder. People essentially lived in primitive villages, and Judaism was in its infancy. While Herbert doesn't go on at great length about this world, you could say it's the background of "The Altar," which refers to it in passing a number of times.
The best way to summarize this poem's setting is like this: old and new—the old, old world of the Old Testament, which is hinted at here and there, and the newer world of 1630, when Herbert was writing and preaching. Okay, we know it's not that "new," but it is when compared to the Old Testament.