Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Herrick

Herrick gives the soul a real-estate problem, and the body is both shelter and slum. Calling it the soul's "poor house or home" refuses the pious comfort of a single metaphor; the body is simultaneously necessary and humiliating, the place we live and the place that exposes our limits. That ambivalence is the engine of the line. It lets Herrick sound devotional without letting the body off the hook.

The craftsmanship is carpentry and agriculture welded together: "ribs the laths" turns anatomy into construction, as if the human frame were a temporary walling-in of something more valuable. Then "flesh the loam" shifts from workshop to earth, reminding you that whatever architecture we build out of ourselves is also compostable. The diction is deliberately plain - laths, loam - domestic materials that tug metaphysics down into the mud. It's a memento mori that doesn't need skulls or sermons; it just points to what bodies are made of and where they go.

Context matters: Herrick is a 17th-century English poet-priest writing in a culture saturated with Christian dualism and plague-era awareness of bodily fragility. Yet he's also the poet of sensuous, worldly pleasures. That tension sits under the line: the body is suspect, even shabby, but it's also the only address the soul has while it's here. The subtext isn't "despise the flesh"; it's "treat it as temporary housing - live in it, repair it, but don't confuse it with what it contains."