Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson
in the early modern lyric tradition a set of theological treatises with line breaks. Indeed, if theological argument is the goal, poetry offers a circumlocuting and inefficient means to such an end. Instead, I wish to demonstrate that the seventeenth century witnesses the development in English poetry of particular poetic strategies that directly respond to the hermeneutic challenges of sacramental worship and replicate its conflicts. Though I will naturally attend to the arguments of poems, this study’s primary concern involves poetics as opposed to thematic content; for, as Brian Cummings observes, “It is at the surface of discourse that the nexus of grammar and grace is found. It is here that the anxieties and tensions of early modern religion are revealed.”55 The poetry of the period, especially when it addresses devotional concerns, deploys a set of structural and representational tactics that emphasize the objecthood of language, both as material artifact on the page and as representational surface. Seventeenth-century poetry displays a marked unwillingness to allow the word to become a mere transparent conduit to some imperceptible referent, rather asserting the priority of the sign and problematizing its relationship to any signified. The poetry of Donne, Herbert, and other writers of the period exhibits a strange fixation on the physicalizing potentialities of its own language, calling attention to the lineaments of structure, prosody, and sound even as it probes the capacity of language to function symbolically. The effect of these strategies in concert is to arrest readerly absorption—that is, to prevent the dissolution of the sign into the signified, the word into content. The antiabsorptive turn in the post-Reformation lyric asserts the significance of the material in the representational ground, and so conserves in the material a mechanism for presence. To put it another way, by maintaining readerly awareness of the substantiality of words, the post-Reformation lyric provides an event in which reading becomes an encounter with fully present signs.
The substantiality of poetic elements, already crucial to the presencing project of the lyric, are in post-Reformation poetry enlisted into a program of corporealized signification urgently connected to the theological developments of the sixteenth century. By exploring the poetic effects of the materiality of the word, both ontologically and receptionally, the poetics that develops during the early seventeenth century negotiates the same difficulties that animated sacramental reforms. Like the Eucharist itself, such a poetics explores its own capacity to actualize presence, for in the same way that the sacrament is ultimately concerned with reenacting or recalling Christ’s Incarnation by manifesting divinity in the material world, seventeenth-century poetry implements a poetics radically invested in plumbing the representational reach of the Word made flesh. And just as Reformation debates about the operation of the Eucharist seek to resolve the ways in which presence inheres in the representational scheme of the sacrament, the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century proclaims its investment in the incarnational capacity of language to realize presence. The seventeenth-century lyric witnesses the development of a set of poetic strategies provocatively resistant to spiritualized readings—that is, readings that would displace the object for its meaning, the sign for the signified. The eucharistic poetics of the seventeenth century react to the rhetorical implications of sacramental discourse in which the presence of the Word becomes extricable from the presentational capacities of the word.
Made Flesh charts the ways in which seventeenth-century poetic practice negotiates the strange triangulation of body, word, and meaning in the Sacrament of the Altar and effectively reproduces the interpretive challenges of sacramental worship. In the materially invested poetics of the post-Reformation period in England, presence is asserted as a perceptual phenomenon, and the axis of presence is relocated from the signified to the sign itself. In accomplishing such a shift, this poetics ensures the interpretive persistence, the significance, of the material in the face of the precarious sacramentality of the phenomenal world. The material becomes thus a recourse against the perceptual inapprehensibility of sacramental presence, and holds out the promise of holy immanence in the world, of the very kind established by the Incarnation itself. Indeed, it might be tempting to label this poetics as incarnational rather than as eucharistic were it not for the pervasive concern with the activity of representation in both poems and sacrament—a correspondence amplified when the poems address explicitly the manner of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and the mode of its operation. Though that theological commentary may be inconsistent from poem to poem, and though the poetics of a poem often complicates, subverts, or belies its theological assertions, devotional poetry’s thematic awareness of the theological and representational issues in play in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper makes it a lively platform for observing eucharistic poetics at work. These texts provide a richly self-aware sample of peculiar poetic strategies designed to disrupt the transparent action of interpretation and to make of reading a bodily event, one that finally sustains the material as a site of immanent presence.
This study limits the primary field of its survey to the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, though, as my concluding chapter will demonstrate, the poetic developments I trace here ramify into the broader poetic landscape and inform the production of poetry for centuries to come. Chapters 1 and 2 of this book explore one mode of poetic response to the problem of absent presence, in which the communicative properties of poetic structure are marshaled as a means of securing the lyric event to its textual substantiality. As a sensorily apprehensible set of signs that lineament presence, the poetic text has an a priori investment in the ways in which form itself communicates, and in how structure offers a kind of significance that precedes semantics. It is natural that the expressivities of form should become a center of gravity for eucharistic poetics. Exploiting poetic form as a communicative end in itself—that is, as an objective textual feature whose meaning is self-contained rather than referential—the seventeenth-century lyric makes increasing use of the architectural objecthood of the poetic text and, in so doing, relocates significance from the strictly abstract and perceptually unavailable sphere of the signified to the sign.
Chapter 1 of this book examines the aggressively corporeal innovations of George Herbert’s The Temple, a collection of poems characterized by extravagant formal invention, in which the manifestly constructed objecthood of signs secures the material ontology of the incarnate Word. Herbert’s verse constantly asserts its own poetic surfaces, emphasizing the sonic and graphic qualities of language so forcefully that the reader becomes radically aware of the experience of encountering signs. This treatment reflects an approach to eucharistic worship, sometimes articulated in Herbert’s own pastoral writings, in which the physical aspects of sacramental participation serve to recall and celebrate the Incarnation. Herbert’s poetic texts register the incarnational potential of the sign in both language and in sacrament, and I explore the ways in which his assertions of objecthood make of poetry a ritual of material immanence against the absence of the divine.
The signifying properties of form and their implications for the material experience of sacramental worship remain my focus in Chapter 2, which investigates the interventions of poetic structure into eucharistic theology in the poetry of Edward Taylor. Taylor, writing a generation after Herbert and (like so many others) in the shadow of The Temple, redirects his anxiety about the absence of God into a suspicion about his own qualification to participate in sacramental worship. In Taylor’s nonconforming Calvinist view, the Lord’s Supper is a nuptial banquet, effecting a marriage between the soul and God, but even as he in his ministerial position advocates that every worshipper who approaches this “Wedden Feast” should inspect himself to ensure that he is properly regenerate, Taylor necessarily confronts the difficulty of determining regeneracy. For Taylor, the absence of an apprehensible sign from God that the soul is regenerate, which is itself a symptom of God’s ultimate inapprehensibility, redounds to the absence of stable signs for the self’s righteousness. The perceptual lacuna at the heart of Taylor’s sacramental concerns is simultaneously God’s and the soul’s, each eluding the certainty of the senses. Without the assurance of sense-data, Taylor turns to poetic form, using it as a sensorily legible proxy, a kind of body for the intangible soul. In Taylor’s long lyric cycle of Preparatory Meditations, the poetic text comes to embody his own process of regeneracy,