Podcast: Get to Know Your Favorite Theologians’ Favorite Poet (Stephen Witmer)

February 02, 2026 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

One of the Greatest Spiritual Poets of All Time

In this episode Dr. Stephen Witmer talks about George Herbert, “The Greatest Spiritual Poet.” Dr. Witmer discusses George Herbert's life, how his work has influenced Christians and pastors through generations, and how poetry is a counter-cultural way to meditate on Christ. Dr. Witmer also helps us understand a few of his meaningful poems and shows us how these poems can shepherd us today.

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In All Things Thee to See

In All Things Thee to See

George Herbert

This devotional guide invites readers to enjoy one of the greatest spiritual poets of all time. With brief analysis and reflections, this beautiful volume beckons readers to experience not just George Herbert’s poetry but also Herbert’s God.

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:40 - Reading Poetry Is Not Like Husking Corn

Matt Tully
Stephen Witmer is the lead pastor of Pepperell Christian Fellowship in Pepperell, Massachusetts, and serves as a council member for the Gospel Coalition. He’s also the editor of In All Things The to See: A Devotional Guide to Selected Poems of George Herbert from Crossway. Stephen, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Stephen Witmer
It’s my great pleasure, Matt.

Matt Tully
Today we’re going to be talking about a poet and his poetry, and you share a really interesting analogy in this book that you’ve edited and contributed to that I thought was really helpful. You say that reading poetry is not like husking corn. I wonder if you could just start by unpacking that for us.

Stephen Witmer
One of my qualifications for writing this book is that I was one of those people until about ten years ago. I was intimidated by poetry. It felt like it was just too much work. It felt like husking corn. I just want to eat the kernels of corn; I don’t want to mess around with all those fiddly little silks that make your skin crawl and that husk that you’ve got to work to get off. I just wanted the message of the poem. And I think a lot of readers think about poetry that way. They think, If I could just get what it’s saying . . .—it feels like a code that you have to crack. And one of the main things I’ve learned by reading poetry, especially through reading George Herbert’s poetry, is that that’s not true. The message is not separable from the poem. You don’t want to interact with just the soul or just the mind of a friend. You want to interact with an embodied person. That is the person—a mind and a spirit and a body. And a poem is a whole thing.

Matt Tully
It strikes me that sometimes people will draw the obvious connection between music (songs) and poetry. And in my experience, some people love poetry, they understand it, they are drawn to it, and then a lot of people don’t understand it and find it maybe very confusing and very difficult and would almost prefer to avoid it if possible.

Stephen Witmer
I’ve been reflecting quite a bit on that recently. I do feel like reading poetry is pretty countercultural these days, because we tend to devalue words. We tend to use them disposably, like paper towels. They get a job done. If you read a text message, you’re not going to go back and admire the text message. It’s just going to accomplish a thing. We’re hurried. We’re harried. We want to get things done. I feel like if anyone in our day pauses to read a poem, we often tailgate the poem. We’re too busy, we’re too fast. We either tailgate it, or swerve into the passing lane, or we don’t even get on that road at all. But there’s such blessing and there’s such formation in pausing to go the pace of the poem.

03:51 - Who Was George Herbert?

Matt Tully
Let’s talk a little bit about George Herbert. Give us a little bit of a background for him. When did he live? Where did he live? Sketch a little bit about his life.

Stephen Witmer
In many ways, he had a fairly uneventful, unexciting, external life. He had an incredibly significant internal life. He lived for just less than forty years. He died at age thirty-nine. He was born into a wealthy family, an important family. He was very promising from an early age—brilliant. He attended the Westminster School in London. He went to the University of Cambridge. He became a fellow at the University of Cambridge. Then he became the public orator of the university, which was a very prestigious position. He addressed the king as the orator. He was composing orations in Latin. He was pretty well respected. He was sort of featured as a potential member of the King’s Court at some point—the former public order had gone on to do that. And then for a number of reasons, that didn’t happen. He entered a season of time where he was drifting and a bit aimless. This would’ve been in his twenties and thirties, maybe early thirties. He stayed with some relatives. I think some of his poems are said during this period. He was writing poems in English. He had written Latin poems, but he was writing poems in English by this time. But he was not publishing them. There were probably about 160 of them in unpublished manuscript by the time he died. About three years before his death in 1633, he became a priest in a tiny little town called Bemerton, near Salisbury in England. In many ways, this is a downward career arc. He was a member of Parliament for a brief time. He looked like he was moving toward the court of the king, and now here he is a priest in a tiny rural, agricultural parish. And so in the eyes of the world, I think it didn’t work out so well for George Herbert. But we know the end of the story, because if we’re familiar with his poetic works, he is considered one of the greatest spiritual poets of all time.

Matt Tully
You mentioned that he had written dozens of poems before his death, but none of them were published before his death. It was actually a friend of his who had the collected poems, and they published them posthumously. What do we know about what Herbert’s motivations were for writing those poems? Was he intending to publish them? Were they just his own personal reflections and prayers to the Lord? What was his goal behind that?

Stephen Witmer
We know what he tells us in the poems. We do know they’re intensely personal poems. Many of them are prayers to God. He loved Augustine. He read Augustine’s Confessions, and like the Confessions, the poems are addressed to God. But he also tells us a little bit about his aims for the poems in the poems—in his brief introduction. He wants to pastor readers. In one poem he says he wants us to thrust our hearts into his lines. He’s a generous poet because he gives space, just like the psalmists do. Even as they say, I feel this way, they’re writing songs for the community to make their own. And I think Herbert’s intention was for us to identify with the kinds of things he was feeling and saying and make these poems our own.

Matt Tully
Stephen, you said that it was only about a decade ago that you first started to really appreciate poetry and the devotional value of poetry for us as Christians. Could you just briefly explain how it was that you came into contact with George Herbert and discovered all the wealth and the riches that he can offer us?

Stephen Witmer
In many ways, it was by accident. I was not coming to George Herbert for the poetry. Ironically, I was approaching him for his one English prose work, which was also published posthumously, The Country Parson. He wrote a handbook for rural pastors. I was writing at the time, and this would’ve been 2017 or 2018, I was writing a book on small town ministry that was published by IVP and called A Big Gospel in Small Places. And he became a hero of mine. I fell in love with his story. I appreciated The Country Parson, which is a good book. I don’t think it’s a great book, but a good book. It doesn’t reach the level of his poems. But then I started reading his poems, and I was amazed by his poetry. And that began to change me.

Matt Tully
You mentioned that as you were kind of digging into and getting to know him and his poetry, you quickly became aware of the fact that there are many modern and historic Christian leaders that we would all be familiar with today who had so many good things to say about Herbert. They would rave about Herbert and his poetry. Could you just share a few of those names that we might be familiar with?

Stephen Witmer
There are so many of them. T. S. Elliot. C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis, when asked to name the ten most influential works in his life, said The Temple. George Herbert’s collection of poems was one of the ten.

Matt Tully
Wow.

Stephen Witmer
Richard Baxter, the Puritan. Tim Keller. John Piper. Charles Spurgeon. There’s a great thing I found in one of the biographies of Spurgeon. At the end of a long day of preaching, he would come back to his house and he’d say to his wife, "Wifey, read me some George Herbert."

Matt Tully
That’s how he unwound?

Stephen Witmer
Yeah. That was his refreshment at the end of a long day of ministry.

Matt Tully
That’s amazing. That comment from Lewis, especially, that this was among the top ten books, in terms of influencing him. For all of us evangelicals who love Lewis, that should give us a minute to kind of think through that maybe there’s something here worth digging into.

Stephen Witmer
That was one of the things that was drawing me, frankly. I was just noticing that a lot of the people I greatly respect greatly loved George Herbert. So, that piqued my interest.

Matt Tully
Let’s talk through a couple of his works. As you mentioned before, the primary collection of poems that that was published after his death by a friend is called The Temple. And how does that work?

Stephen Witmer
There’s an introductory poem called "The Church Porch." In some ways, it’s kind of structured architecturally. You’re approaching the church through the church porch. That section of the introductory section of the work I don’t find quite as appealing. I think it’s actually better than I first thought, but the poetry I find not as compelling. It’s a little bit didactic, a little bit preachy. There’s some fruit in there, but it’s not my favorite section. The last section of the temple is quite a long poem called "The Church Militant." Again, it’s not quite as appealing. But it’s the approximately 160 poems in The Temple—the main body of the work—that are remarkable and transformative for many people. And they are still inspiring and changing lives. I saw an article from a British newspaper from a decade or two ago where one person, who was an atheist, said that George Herbert helped to convert her.

12:07 - “Easter Wings”

Matt Tully
Wow. So rather than just keep talking about Herbert and his poems and how great they are, we thought it could be a nice experience for our listeners to actually hear a few of his poems and then have you reflect on them a little bit for us. In addition to the print edition of this book that you’ve put together, which features forty of his poems, we’ve also produced an audio edition so that listeners can hear them performed by an amazing British voice actor who brings them to life in a really powerful way. And so I wanted to pick out three poems, have us all listen to them together, and then have you just reflect on them briefly. The first one is called "Easter Wings." I wonder if you can just set up this poem for us. What should we be listening for as we hear it?

Stephen Witmer
"Easter Wings" is one of George Herbert’s form poems. It’s great to listen to it, but you really also should pull it up on the web, or better yet, buy the book and open the book. You will see, as it sits on the page, it’s in the shape of wings. It looks like what it’s talking about. That is not unimportant. That’s actually very important. I think it’s a clue to what George Herbert is doing through his poetry, because he is, and this gets back to the ear of corn and the husk, he is embodying his message. He’s aiming to engage our senses—not just our ears, but our eyes and our bodies—and he’s giving us mini experiences of the things he’s talking about. His aim is to pastor us, to communicate spiritual truth, but he finds that the most effective way to do that is not just by stating a truth propositionally but by embodying it, because that reaches more of who we are.

Matt Tully
Let’s listen to this poem together and then we’ll come back and talk about it.

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poor:
With thee
Oh let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

Matt Tully
Stephen, as you hear that poem again, what are some of the specific things that you would want to call our attention to?

Stephen Witmer
Very briefly, I’ll just focus on the first stanza. Maybe you can hear this, but what you really should see is that each of the lines decrease in length. "Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, / Though foolishly he lost the same / Decaying more and more, / Till he became most poor: . . .” Now, maybe you can hear what’s happening. You can certainly see that the first line, “Lord, who createdest man in wealth and store," that’s the longest line on the page. In other words, Herbert is giving us a visual experience of the plenitude of Eden, of God’s blessing. The second line, “Though foolishly he lost the same” is shorter. “Decaying more and more, Till he became”—and here’s the nadir, the bottom point—”most poor.” It's the poverty of just two words in that line. And that’s where we are. I say in the book, that’s the prodigal’s pigsty. That’s where sin has gotten us. We’ve squandered God’s riches, and we are poor. And that’s exactly where Christ finds us, because that’s the next line of the poem: “With thee.” So, “most poor,” here’s the pivot: “With thee”—Christ. “Oh let me rise as larks, harmoniously, / and sing this day thy victories: / Then shall the fall further the flight in me.” And the lines get longer again. And what he’s saying in that last line is he’s talking about the new creation. The fall, that’s the first line, shall further the flight in me. That’s the happy fall, that we know Christ and we know God better through Christ. We’re not just back to Eden; we’re higher than it. The flight is furthered through the fall.

Matt Tully
Wow.

Stephen Witmer
He’s not just telling; he’s showing.

17:04 - “Sin”

Matt Tully
That’s so beautiful. Let’s talk about another poem called “Sin.” Again, set up this poem for us a little bit. What should we be thinking about as we hear it?

Stephen Witmer
All right. This is a sonnet. It’s fourteen lines.

Matt Tully
Are sonnets always fourteen lines?

Stephen Witmer
I want you to feel this poem because Herbert wants you to feel it. If you feel it, it will change you in a way that’s very different from him simply telling you something as a proposition. The way you can feel this poem is if you listen to it attentively, especially through the first twelve lines. Just listen and feel all of God’s goodness to you, because Herbert’s going to rehearse all the ways in which God guards you from sin—he poem’s title is Sin—all the ways that God cares for us and prevents us from sin. That’s the first twelve lines. You think, Oh, that’s what this poem is about. That’s not what this poem is about. Keep listening to the last two lines and especially the last line.

Matt Tully
Okay, let’s listen.

Lord, with what care hast thou begirt us round!
Parents first season us: then schoolmasters
Deliver us to laws; they send us bound
To rules of reason, holy messengers,

Pulpits and Sundays, sorrow dogging sin,
Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes,
Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in,
Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,

Blessings beforehand, ties of gratefulness,
The sound of glory ringing in our ears:
Without, our shame; within, our consciences;
Angels and grace, eternal hopes and fears.

Yet all these fences and their whole array
One cunning bosom-sin blows quite away.

Matt Tully
Actually, I need to look at this because I want to be able to actually—

Stephen Witmer
It’s awesome. It’s surprising. The first twelve lines are all these different things that God has done to care for us. And then the last two lines—“yet all these fences in their whole array, one cunning bosom sin blows quite away.”

Matt Tully
That’s just a punch in the gut.

Stephen Witmer
Surprise! That’s exactly the way I think of it. We think the poem is about what he’s writing of in the first twelve lines—the care of the Lord to guard us and protect us through our parents and school masters and sermons and Sundays. And the sorrow we feel that dogs our sin, and the Bibles that give us millions of surprises. There are so many things, and this is true. These are beautiful gifts of the Lord. But the point of the poem is something I think all of us can feel. It’s the punch of the last two lines. It’s lines thirteen and fourteen: “yet all these fences and they’re whole array”—in other words, all these things that guard us from sin—“one cunning, bosom sin blows quite away.” In other words, this is an inside job. It’s a bosom sin. It’s an internal desire, and in the moment of temptation, we throw all that other stuff out the window. Is that true or what? I think every honest reader will recognize that. But here’s the point, and this is what’s so captivating to me about George Herbert. He could just say, Internal sins and temptation often overcome all the external protections we have. But he doesn’t do that. He surprises us. He makes us feel how out of nowhere that haymaker of sin is. And that’s a gift to us because it’s teaching us. We’re given a mini experience of the very thing he’s saying. In fact, we have a previous manuscript of this poem, and in the first manuscript, the bosom sin is mentioned in the penultimate line, in line 13. And in his final version, he moves the bosom sin to the last line, and he does that because he wants to heighten the surprise. He wants us to feel that. He’s a pastor. He’s shepherding our souls. He knows he can do it better through poetry.

Matt Tully
That is such a compelling experience because it does, as you said, so perfectly mirror our experience with sin so often. We think intellectually that we have all of this under control and we are doing really well, and it’s in those precise moments, when it seems like everything’s good, that we can find ourselves completely caught off guard. And then we look back and realize, Oh my goodness. What just happened? As you said, it’s such a powerful way to help us experience the truth, not merely understand it intellectually.

Stephen Witmer
We should thank God for all those fences. We should make sure we keep our Bibles laid open and we listen to our parents—those are all great things. But this is a very specific and particular gift he gives us, to identify the power of a bosom sin and to allow us to feel that. We felt it before, but he gives words to it.

22:53 - JESU

Matt Tully
Let’s look at one more poem together, and this is the one that you wanted to highlight and end on. It’s called "JESU."

Stephen Witmer
This is a very short poem. It’s an allegorical poem. The first number of times through this one, I didn’t really like it very much. It felt a little bit teachy. I was just not really into allegory. And as I sat with it and pondered it, it actually became this remarkable, remarkable truth. So, in order to understand the poem—actually, this is very key—we need to understand that JESU can also be spelled with an I—IESU. In Latin and in typical Renaissance practice, the letters I and J were not distinguished. So, IESU and JESU are identical.

Matt Tully
All right, let’s listen together.

JESU is in my heart, his sacred name
Is deeply carved there: but th’other week
A great affliction broke the little frame,
Ev’n all to pieces: which I went to seek:
And first I found the corner, where was J,
After, where ES, and next where U was graved.
When I had got these parcels, instantly
I sat me down to spell them, and perceived
That to my broken heart he was I ease you,
And to the whole is J E S U.

Matt Tully
Stephen, help us understand what we just heard and what Herbert’s doing with this poem.

Stephen Witmer
It’s a story. Herbert loves to do theology through story. And it’s just a small story. It’s a short story. He says, “JESU is in my heart,” and he’s probably alluding to 2 Corinthians 3:3. Jesus’s name is written on his heart. His sacred name is deeply carved there. But he says, “the other week, a great affliction broke that little frame.” He suffered. He doesn’t say how, but it broke the little frame all to pieces. It was smashed. So he went to look for it. He went to look for his heart. (This is an allegory.) And he is walking around the room and he finds it. He says, “First I found the corner where was J. After where E, S and next where U was grave.” So he finds three pieces. It’s broken into pieces. “When I had got these parcels, instantly I sat me down to spell them”—he’s putting them back together again—“and perceived that to my broken heart he was I-E-S-U, and to the whole is Jesu.” So here’s what he’s saying: We know Christ differently in our sufferings. That is absolutely profound. I think every Christian can relate to that. That’s what he’s communicating through this story. When the great affliction comes upon him and his heart is broken, he sees something of Christ’s mercy and tenderness that he hadn’t seen before and couldn’t see before. So, this is a poem for people who just got the positive diagnosis. This is a poem for people who are working through divorce or miscarriage. It’s a poem for those in great affliction. And the hope of the poem is we will know Christ differently because of the broken heart.

Matt Tully
That’s so beautiful. It’s one of those things where, like you said, the more we invest, the more we put into this work of understanding and exploring and, as you emphasize, just enjoying the experience of reading these poems, the more we’re going to get out of them and we’re going to see deeper and deeper layers. I just want to say to the listeners that if you enjoy hearing Stephen talk about these poems and explain them and unpack them, that’s really what you’re doing in this book. You include the full text of all these poems, but then you also have two sections that follow for each of them. You have a "Savoring the Poem" section where you’re unpacking that and helping to explain what’s going on, and then you also have a section called "Shepherded by the Poem." Tell us a little bit more about what you’re intending with that portion.

Stephen Witmer
Both of those sections are very specifically chosen because I don’t just want to exposit poems; I want to reach the heart, because that’s what George Herbert is aiming to do. When we admire something, we study it more. Great are the works of the Lord! They’re studied by all who love them. Affection spurs inspection—we go deeper in the things that we care about. So, that’s the first section. The second section is "Shepherded by the Poem," and again, this comes back to George Herbert was first and foremost a pastor. In his own day, the poems weren’t published. A few people in his town, Bemerton, maybe walked by and they thought of him as the former public orator of Cambridge. But probably most just thought, He’s our pastor. He’s in our homes, catechizing us. He’s preaching on Sunday. They knew him as a pastor, and he was a pastor. I think of him as Pastor George, and he is shepherding us through these poems. He’s not writing the poems mainly for self-expression or to be a great poet of the ages. He didn’t publish them. He wants to shepherd anyone who will thrust their heart into his lines. So that’s what I want to do in this volume. I want to take forty of the most accessible, often quite short poems, some of the ones that have held up and blessed most people, and help those who haven’t appreciated poetry up to this point to actually feel, I can understand this with a little help. And my soul is being shepherded even as my senses, my eyes, my ears, my body through the rhythm (the meter), is engaged.

Matt Tully
Stephen, I think you’ve done that in this short book, and we so appreciate you helping to introduce many of us to George Herbert for the first time and help us to see the riches that can be mined from his poetry. Thank you.

Stephen Witmer
Yeah, thanks Matt.

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