the poetic medium. And though I begin with what some readers have dismissed as Herbert’s ingenuous curiosities,56 I aim in the end to demonstrate that the impulses that animate Herbert’s ostentatious technique permeate all aspects of poetic craft in the seventeenth-century lyric—and continue to be felt long past the moment of the seventeenth century. For my conviction is that these strategies remain influential far beyond the period of heightened religious fervor that produced them, and my hope is that Made Flesh will suggest the persistence of post-Reformation poetic innovations into the later literary tradition. In short, my slightly immoderate ambition is to suggest that the stable of unsublimable, self-asserting flourishes of technique that we have come, in our enlightened postmodernity, to think of as poetics was effectively developed four hundred years ago by devotional poets.
Chapter 1
“The Bodie and the Letters Both”: Textual Immanence in The Temple
In order to understand the ways in which George Herbert’s elaborate experiments in poetic form are informed by the incarnational investments of sacramental worship, we must first consider the theological landscape in which Herbert produced The Temple. Though Herbert’s era had not fully resolved the controversies of the preceding century, Herbert himself remains irenically reticent on the mechanics of eucharistic presence. Indeed, of the poets whose work is examined in the present study, Herbert is perhaps the least openly engaged in doctrinal and spiritual controversies. Owing to this doctrinal restraint, the good rector of Bemerton has come to be seen as an exemplar of the early seventeenth-century via media, a moderated position that conflated English national identity with the English church’s ecclesiastical distinction both from Rome and from the fraught doctrinal wranglings of continental Protestantism. Accordingly, in the decades concluding the twentieth century, as historical and literary studies have attempted to define the theology of the Stuart church, Herbert studies have registered these skirmishes as conflict over Herbert’s confessional allegiance.1 The English church’s position on the precise mode of Christ’s presence in the sacramental elements had evaded consistent definition since Thomas Cranmer moved to revise the Book of Common Prayer during the short reign of Edward VI. To appreciate the degree to which such efforts to define the mysterious operation of the Eucharist had caused divisions among English divines, we need only review Richard Hooker’s handling of the question: “Let it therefore be sufficient for me presenting my selfe at the Lords Table to know what there I receiue from him, without searching or inquiring of the maner how Christ performeth his promise; let disputes and questions[,] enemies to pietie, abatements of true deuotion, and hitherto in this cause but ouer patiently heard let them take their rest; let curious and sharpe witted men beate their heades about what questions themselues will … what these elements are in themselues it skilleth not, it is enough that to me which take them they are the body & bloud of Christ.”2 Though Hooker’s call for a shift from disputation over “the maner how” to affirmation that the sacrament does in truth perform Christ’s promise to offer his body and blood seems to provide a reasoned response to controversy, it is nevertheless a bit disingenuous because the question of whether the elements “are the body & bloud of Christ” is deeply entwined with the manner in which that mystery occurs. And while Herbert seems never to have explicitly entered into the theological debates surrounding “the maner how” that flourished as suspicions of crypto-popery ran rampant during the 1620s and beyond, he does not scruple to wrestle with “the maner how” in a number of poems that consider the Eucharist directly. On the contrary, Herbert’s concern with the relationship between the material species of bread and wine and the spiritual operation of Holy Communion is evident throughout The Temple as well as in his other writings, both poetry and prose. For Herbert, the sacrament asserts itself in both spiritual and material registers, and their very inextricability both repeats the incarnational model of the Word made flesh and influences the representational strategies of Herbert’s poetic practice.
Herbert’s literary canon would seem to offer a rich field for investigating the ways in which the Eucharist informed and inspired seventeenth-century devotional poetry. The sacrament provides the imaginative center for his lyric collection, governing its organization as well as its subject matter. Whether we consider his stable of images, with its reliance on familiar sacramental topoi like grapes, winepresses, vines, veins, and so forth, or regard The Temple’s overarching narrative of sacramental preparation culminating in the feast of “Love (III),” or examine the poems that explicitly dramatize participation in Communion, C. A. Patrides’s conclusion that “The Eucharist is the marrow of Herbert’s sensibility” feels entirely justified.3 Perhaps the most obvious place to begin a study of Herbert’s engagement with eucharistic theology is the pair of poems each given the title “The H. Communion,” in which Herbert addresses directly the ritual and its operation. In the version of “The H. Communion” that Herbert did not include in The Temple, the poet begins with a survey of theological claims about the mode of christic presence in the sacramental elements:
O gratious Lord how shall I know
Whether in these gifts thou bee so
As thou art evry-where;
Or rather so, as thou alone
Tak’st all ye Lodging, leaving none
ffor thy poore creature there.4
In its first stanza, the poem presents two competing versions of eucharistic operation: Lutheran ubiquitarianism, which holds that Christ is substantially present in all things and by extension also in the bread and wine, and Roman transubstantiation, in which Christ’s substance replaces that of the bread. But after considering these options, the poem adopts a tone of gentle mockery: “ffirst I am sure, whether bread stay / Or whether Bread doe fly away / Concerneth bread not mee” (7–9). Here, Herbert waves off the controversial question of the mode of Christ’s presence, and the poem would seem to continue as if it pursued a poetic version of Hooker’s counsel, letting disputations rest in the face of mystery: “But yt both thou and all thy traine / Bee there, to thy truth, & my gaine / Concerneth mee & Thee” (10–12). The only matter worth addressing, suggests Herbert as if channeling Hooker, is not “the maner how” but that “Christ performeth his promise.”
But Herbert’s confidence about that performance seems to waver in the middle stanzas of the poem:
That fflesh is there, mine eyes deny:
And what shold flesh but flesh discry,
The noblest sence of five.
If glorious bodies pass the sight
Shall they be food & strength, & might
Euen there, where they deceiue? (31–36)
Herbert here identifies explicitly the fundamental interpretive problem of a ritual that proposes to make the divine present to man by means of a set of physical signs: “mine eyes deny.” Herbert’s inability to descry Christ’s presence in the species of Communion leads him to question both the efficacy of the sacramental elements and the credibility of Christ, whose most glorious body remains most imperceptible in the sacrament that represents it. Michael C. Schoenfeldt reads this uncomfortable questioning as Herbert’s discovery of “the wall that divides matter and spirit,” and sees Herbert pursuing the consequences of that discovery into the assertions of his next stanza:5
Into my soule this cannot pass;
fflesh (though exalted) keeps his grass
And cannot turn to soule.
Bodyes & Minds are different Spheres,
Nor
