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Staking his Heart: Herbert's Use of Gambling Imagery in The Temple

The act of worship, the writing of poetry, and the art of gambling are all very much alike in one essential respect: each demands the surrender of the conscious will and understanding to whatever power one wishes to intervene in one's behalf. Whether one calls those powers Lady Luck, the Muse, or even Almighty God, the giving over of rational categories or expectations is crucial, in order that not one's own but the will of the spirit or deity addressed may be done. Given this similarity, it is not altogether surprising that among all the other systems of repeated imagery employed in The Temple, Herbert also uses a system of gambling, or gaming, imagery. Expressed largely in terms of the card game primero, though also in those of an unknown dicing game, this imagery not only illuminates a fresh dimension of the poems' sacred parody, but unifies their playful spirit under the single concept of play, which, as Johan Huizinga observes, "always tendfs] to overlap" with "Holiness."1