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, demonstrating structurally the poem’s ever-repeating desire to purge sin and prove ready for Christ’s grace. That Taylor models this cyclical project of purgation and desire after the menstrual cycle concords with his view of the “Wedden Feast,” in which the soul must become the Bride of Christ, a gendered construct that again flouts the evidence of the senses. Taylor’s poetic body offers an alternative physicality in which the gendered valences of sacramental worship can be satisfied even as it offers a knowable embodiment of the unknowable soul.
My initial focus on structure and form as instruments for producing an antiabsorptive textual materiality gives way in the latter chapters of this book to an investigation of what happens when such an approach gets absorbed into the system of symbolic signification. Structural innovation produces one kind of hermeneutic arrest; another occurs when symbol itself responds to this same urge toward objecthood. Certainly poetic form and structure are fundamentally invested in the relationship between linguistic surfaces and semantic meanings, and the status of the text as an object in its own right in addition to a referential instrument aligns it interpretively with the eucharistic elements. But this scheme has implications, too, for the symbolic use of language, particularly when symbol is employed to represent the divine. If the Eucharist, that holiest of symbolaries, resists interpretive access and denies absorption through transparent symbols to the heart of their sacred meanings, how might a poetics informed by such a system negotiate the competing demands of the referentiality and the discursive surface of symbol? In the second movement of this book, I concentrate on two poets whose work explores precisely this question. Chapter 3 reveals that while John Donne shares with Taylor an enthusiasm for biblical metaphor, and like Taylor freely appropriates figurative conventions that have been normalized into the general religious lexicon, his treatment of those conventions is complicated by his stake not in the achievement of its primary symbol (as is Taylor’s hope) but in the persistence of unsublimated corporeality such that the referential function of that symbol is obstructed. In other words, Donne’s physicalized embroideries of traditional symbols render them no longer functional as symbols, no longer conducive to revealing the meanings with which they are conventionally associated. For Donne, the particularizing of the sign renders it more opaque, more substantial, and as a consequence more durable than the ephemeral signified. Donne’s recourse to common scriptural tropes upends whatever currency they possess through their familiarity; in Donne’s hands, such theological conventions as the Bride of Christ and the glorious resurrection of the flesh become shockingly unfamiliar precisely because they endure as ends in themselves rather than as transparent symbols referring to abstract spiritual principles. In his refusal to allow tropes to transluce into meaning, Donne locates spiritual significance not in the disembodied and abstract sphere but in the body itself.
I finally examine the work of Richard Crashaw, whose rococo aesthetic tendencies have relegated him to the periphery of critical interest in seventeenth-century literature. Indeed, most critics seem not to know what to do with Crashaw: his work is seen variously as grotesque or as hopelessly primitive because of what is perceived as its indecorous integration of discomfitingly physical language into the devotional depiction of sacred scenes. But Crashaw’s dissonant style is not, I argue, evidence of his poetic immaturity so much as it is a canny replication of the interpretive problems, as Crashaw himself articulates them, of eucharistic worship. Foremost among these problems, as a number of Crashaw’s poems allow, is that the senses are simultaneously activated and defied by the ritual of the Eucharist, a contradiction that prompts in Crashaw a real ambivalence about both the role of the body in sacramental worship and the integrity of sacramental representation. For Crashaw, the material remains vexingly, maddeningly present in a rite that argues against its relevance, and this presence gets recorded in Crashaw’s devotional verse as an obstruction to locating divinity in the Eucharist. Moreover, Crashaw sees clearly how the contradictory demands of the rite impinge upon the system of representation itself. The signature excesses of Crashaw’s style bring to bear an insurmountably corporeal poetics that expels the reader from the symbolic system of the sacrament. And where Donne compromises the sacramental symbolary at the level of the trope, Crashaw undermines the symbolic function of the word itself, foregrounding disjunctions in the representational project of the Eucharist in order to disclose its limited referential capacities.
Form and structure, trope and symbol: in the seventeenth-century lyric each of these materials of poetic techne are subjected to the pressure of a developing aesthetic imperative that would privilege the imperceptible abstract over the perceptible object. This innovation, borne ultimately out of the profound anxiety about reading and the status of the corporeal that attended the semantic revisions of the Reformation, makes of poetry an event that promotes the meaningfulness of the sensual world and argues for the fitness of that world for realizing presence objectively. Though the restoration of meaning to the corporeal transforms the poem into a process in which the sign and signified are estranged, post-Reformation poetics accomplishes what the Eucharist itself, by any confessional definition, cannot: it transforms—we may say transubstantiates—absence into perceptual presence. At issue here are the incarnational possibilities of representation and the capacities of the Word to take fleshly expression, which are the fundamental concerns of eucharistic worship.
More alive than any of his contemporaries to the fleshliness of the poem on the page, Herbert recognizes the sacramental quality of poetic form, and he invests his ingenious art with a sometimes playful self-awareness about its own status as an artifact, as a thing made to be present to a reader. Before continuing in later chapters to trace out subtler manifestations of antiabsorptive
