Next to his great contemporary John Donne, who was a family friend, fellow poet, and fellow churchman, Herbert is regarded as the foremost among the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets. His book of verse, The Temple, in which "Virtue" is included, enjoyed immense popularity throughout the seventeenth century in part because of the devotional aspect of his poetry and in part because of his reputation for having a character marked by gentleness and saintliness. His poetry remained popular despite the disfavor his religion, his family, and his allegiance to the monarchy earned him as a result of the displacement of the monarchy by the government of Oliver Cromwell between 1640 and 1660.

The great American intellectual Ralph Waldo Emerson, discussing Herbert's verse in his lecture "English Literature: Ben Jonson, Herrick, Herbert, Wooton," remarks that Herbert was "not content with the obvious properties of natural objects but delights in discovering abstruser relations between them and the subject of his thought." Emerson adds that Herbert's "thought is often recondite and far fetched yet the language is always simple and chaste" and that he demonstrated "the power of exalted thought to melt and bend language." In his essay "The Metaphysical Poets," T. S. Eliot comments, "In the verse of George Herbert … simplicity is carried as far as it can go." Russell Fraser, in an essay titled "George Herbert's Poetry," writes that "among makers of the short poem in English Herbert's peers are Yeats, Frost, Donne and Jonson, and Shakespeare at sonnets." This is high praise.

Criticism of "Virtue" is usually of the exegetical type, as it might be for scripture; exegesis is a type of critical investigation that sets out to clarify and explore the meaning of images of and allusions to objects like "dew" and "seasoned timber." For the general reader, such criticism can tend to be obscure and to make a poem seem more convoluted than it first appears. Nevertheless, when a reader can connect, for example, "dew" with Christ's grace or a "rose" with his simultaneous presence and departure, "Virtue" gains added breadth.