By calling into question the manner of sacramental presence, the eucharistic debates of the early modern period disclose the ontological disjunction between sacramental signs and their divine referents. And while sixteenth-century exegetes were not unaware of what we would now call the semiotic consequences of their controversy (even this chapter’s cursory survey of Reformation writings on the Eucharist reads like a veritable primer in semiotics!), it is in the poetry of the post-Reformation period that these consequences are most fully registered. For in their fixation on the perceptual absence of Christ’s body and on the mechanisms by which that absence is redressed, and in their reimagining of the Eucharist’s underlying assumptions regarding the capacity of signs to manifest corporeal presence, reformers interrogate the very phenomena that animate lyric poetry.
Lyric poetry in early modern England begins to exhibit a suite of characteristics that can only be understood as a direct response to Reformation controversies over the Eucharist. And while the effects of this reaction can be felt in sacred and secular poetry alike, they are most pointedly evident in the devotional lyric, which not coincidentally emerges in English poetry in an extraordinary efflorescence during the early seventeenth century. Certainly, a number of factors contributed to the development of such a strong tradition of devotional poetry, including the availability of the Bible as both a generic sourcebook and a common storehouse of phrases and stories, and the humanist revitalization of the idea that the poet is a kind of inspired prophet, uniquely qualified to address divine things.53 Such cultural conditions doubtless go some way toward explaining the predominance of devotional writing in the period, but they do not account for the startling development, in the seventeenth-century English lyric, of poetic strategies that simultaneously assert the linguistic sign as an intractable and unsublimable object and the central role of the body as a communicative and a perceptual instrument.54 The persistence of this trend over the course of the seventeenth century and across confessional divides argues against attributing this development to a broadly defined tradition of Protestant poetics; neither can we align it with some generalized nostalgia for the theological certainties of pre-Reformation religion. Rather, the Reformation’s long dispute about the mechanics of sacramental worship catalyzes a poetics that foregrounds the ritual’s inherent tensions between material surface and imperceptible substance, between sign and signified, between flesh and spirit, a poetics remarkably attuned to the complicated interdependence of the body and the word.
The phenomenon I wish to address here is, again, not some preponderance of talk about the body in seventeenth-century poetry, nor am I interested in locating 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
