In the context of our current wrangles about banks, fat cats and payouts, this week's poem, George Herbert's "Humilitie", seems to acquire additional edge. Although he ended up a rector, Herbert (1593-1633) had first, unsuccessfully, sought a career at court, and there are times in his work when he rather enjoys mocking venial courtly ways.

In this curious combination of fable, allegory and vision-poem, his target may be both the Jacobean court and the classical, pre-Christian concept of virtue. But there's something extremely familiar about the moral economics and squabbling indulged in by "the great and good", here depicted "hand-in-hand" on a complicatedly hierarchical throne, and it's certainly easy to think of modern public equivalents for the various beasts. The Virtues may be harder to cast, and Humilitie the most difficult of all.

Herbert's 160 poems, collected into a single, posthumously published collection, The Temple, are all devotional, yet their variety is extraordinary. In form, they range from shaped poems, such as Easter Wings, to simple hymn-like quatrains and sonnets. Many are in structures of the poet's own devising. Those beautiful symmetrical stanzas, composed of lines of varying metrical length, move across the mind like faint echoes of madrigals, and must be the closest English formal verse has ever come to music. In imagery they draw heavily on the Bible, of course, but also on science, architecture, music, law, sports such as falconry and bowls, and even card games. For all his artistry and learning, Herbert has a plain-speaking quality, and perhaps that is why, in a secular age, his poetry remains compelling. He must have had a great gift, and a great ear, for conversation. We're still gripped when that intense but unaffected voice utters a personal prayer.

"Humilitie" is not a prayer but a parable that might almost have been composed by Aesop. It tells how the birds and beasts were assembled to present gifts to the Virtues, gifts that were to be distributed by the most important, and most Christian virtue of them all, Humility. Symbolic of the submission of instinct to morality, the beasts rather disconcertingly offer body parts to those Virtues representing their opposite qualities: the Lion, for example, offers his paw to lamb-like Mansuetude, the Turkey's wine-coloured wattle is to be given to Temperance. The Peacock is too proud personally to offer his plume, so the Crow appears with it, and its grace (a spiritual as well as an aesthetic value) rouses the all-too-human Virtues to a jealous wrangle. The beasts take advantage of the chaos and try to seize the throne. Humility is too humble to claim what is rightfully hers, the proud plume now spoiled by her tears, but she exhorts the Virtues to fine the beasts by demanding they bring double the number of gifts to the next meeting of the (now legislative) court.

That's the bare and somewhat tortuous story: what it symbolises is a more complicated matter. The rich interpretative possibilities, will, I am sure be fully explored by that clever and dedicated band, the posters of Poem of the Week.
Humilitie

I saw the Vertues sitting hand in hand
In sev'rall ranks upon an azure throne,
Where all the beasts and fowls by their command
Presented tokens of submission.
Humilitie, who sat the lowest there
                              To execute their call,
When by the beasts their presents tendred were,
                              Gave them about to all.

The angrie Lion did present his paw,
Which by consent was given to Mansuetude.
The fearfull Hare her eares, which by their law
Humilitie did reach to Fortitude.
The jealous Turkie brought his corall-chain;
                              That went to Temperance.
On Justice was bestow'd the Foxes brain,
                              Killed in the way by chance.

At length the Crow bringing the Peacocks plume,
(For he would not) as they beheld the grace
Of that brave gift, each one began to fume,
And challenge it, as proper to his place,
Till they fell out: which when the beasts espied,
                              They leapt upon the throne
And if the Fox had liv'd to rule their side,
                              They had depos'd each one.

Humilitie, who held the plume, at this
Did weep so fast, that the tears trickling down
Spoil'd all the train: then saying, Here it is
For which ye wrangle, made them turn their frown
Against the beasts: so jointly bandying,
                              They drive them soon away;
And then amerc'd them, double gifts to bring
                              At the next Session-day.