Sacramental Metaphysicals

Some of the most interesting current work being done on early modern English poetry traces connections between the poetry and the religious, especially the liturgical, conflicts of the Reformation and post-Reformation eras. Conflicts over sacraments put the medieval semiotic imagination in question, and fresh conceptions of image and sign shaped fresh poetics.

Sophie Reed explores these links in Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England.

The TLS reviewer highlights a couple of specific turns in her argument: “On Donne, for instance, Read makes a provocative but persuasive argument that the most eucharistic moments in his poetry are to be found not in his devotional verses, but in his celebrations of sex, where ‘living bodies’ become a ‘form of sacramental embodiment,’ and ‘the physical act’ becomes ‘a sign and seal of divine grace.’”

On Herbert, she highlights Herbert’s attraction to “the paradox of scents where beauty comes from violence . . .  intincture, enfleurage, distillation; crushing, bruising, burning,” which “produces ‘a Christ of orris or of oud,’ his broken yet fragrant body imagined in terms that are both brutal and beautiful. The association of a particular trope with each poet works particularly well for Herbert, where the device discussed is metanoia (self-correction), or a sequence of assertion and retraction.” This permits, Read says, “the error to coexist with its correction,” and offers a more fruitful way to grasp Herbert’s poetic use of the Eucharist: Herbert displays “faith in, than a precise understanding of, the mysteries of the sacrament.”