Poetic Relations: Intimacy and Faith in the English Reformation 9780226434292

Citation preview

Poetic Relations

Poetic Relations Intimacy and Faith in the English Reformation

C o n s ta n c e M . F u r e y

The University of Chicago Press  y  Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­43415-­5 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­43429-­2 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226434292.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Furey, Constance M., author. Title: Poetic relations: intimacy and faith in the English Reformation / Constance M. Furey. Description: Chicago; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2016044003 | isbn 9780226434155 (cloth: alk. paper) | isbn 9780226434292 (e-book) Subjects: lcsh: Protestant poetry, English—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. | Christian poetry, English—History and criticism. | Devotional poetry— History and criticism. | Interpersonal relations in literature. | Authorship in literature. | Marriage in literature. | Love in literature. | Self in literature. | Reformation— England. Classification: lcc pr535.r4 f87 2017 | ddc 821/.309382—dc23 lc record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2016044003 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Jason

Contents Acknowledgments ix On Poetry xiii

Introduction 1 1.

Authorship 21

2.

Friendship 57

3.

Love 87

4.

Marriage 127 Coda 159 Notes 173 References 217 Index 237

Acknowledgments Poetic relations cannot be recounted in a prosaic list of names; I hope all the people thanked here, as well as those I have failed to name, will understand the book itself as my attempt to acknowledge what they have made possible. I embarked on this project during a fellowship year at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard University, where I benefited from Ann Braude’s guidance; an unparalleled group of poetry-­loving students, including Kris Trujillo, Kristin LeMay, and Regina Walton; and long conversations with Stephanie Paulsell and Amy Hollywood. A Faculty Research Fellowship from the College Arts and Humanities Institute at Indiana University, and intellectual collegiality provided by the Master Class in the Humanities, led by Dror Wahrman and Michel Chaouli, gave me time to think, and much to think about. Invitations to speak about the project arrived at crucial junctures from Barbara Pitkin, Susan Harvey, Steve Weitzman, Tom Carlson, M. Gail Hamner, Jeffrey Wheatley, and Clark Gilpin. I am grateful to them and to audiences at Stanford, Brown, Vanderbilt, Syracuse, Northwestern, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Wisdom Project at the University of Chicago, for memorable questions and insights, with ­additional thanks to Re-



x Acknowledgments

gina Schwartz for magically appearing at two of those venues. The final form of the project owes much to Kimberly Johnson’s visionary conference “Illuminating the Word: The Devotional Tradition and the Future of Poetry” at Brigham Young University, where I was especially encouraged by Jason Kerr’s thoughtful responses. Most recently, the opportunity to give a lecture at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, and the range and rigor of questions from students and faculty alike, including Ryan Coyne, Wendy Doniger, Sarah Hammerschlag, Kevin Hector, Charlotte Heltai, Matthew Kapstein, Richard Miller, Willemien Otten, Susan Schreiner, William Schweiker, and Richard Strier, as well as a subsequent conversation with Arnold Davidson, confirmed what I first learned as a graduate student: that the conversation sustained there is unlike any other. For classes that made me believe the writing was worth doing even while giving me many reasons not to do it, thanks to my students, especially Jacob Boss, Anne Brackemyre, Ava Clouden, Olivia DeClark, Joe Dodson, Shelby Everett, Rowena Galavitz, Hannah Garvey, Kory Hinz, Emily Hoefling, Sloka Krishnan, Christine Libby, Brian Maxwell, Elizabeth Molleston, Laura Robinson, Lucas Smalldon, Jonathan Sparks-­Franklin, Sam Stubblefield, Rafal Swiatkowski (who also provided research help), and Kiersten Thaxton. Additional thanks to Rachel Carpenter, Sarah Kissel, Hannah Murray, Jake Huff, and Caleb Adams for braving the thickets of specific chapters and helping me find my way through. I have been buoyed also by former students who are now friends and astute scholars in their own right. Kerilyn Harkaway-­ Krieger and Elise Lonich Ryan provided invaluable editorial assistance, and Sarah Babb, Joy Brennan, Mark Wilson, and Andrew Walker-­Cornetta have more than once responded to urgent requests for help with incisive questions and detailed recommendations about what I might clarify, and how, and why. Many past and present colleagues at Indiana University have been encouraging readers and interlocutors, including Penelope Anderson, Hall Bjørnstad, Heather Blair, David Brakke, Susan

Acknowledgments xi

Gubar, Sarah Imhoff, Michael Ing, Nancy Levene, Kathryn Lofton, Shaul Magid, Richard Nance, Brett Rothstein, Jonathan Sheehan, Aaron Stalnaker, and Mary Jo Weaver. Beyond IU, I have repeatedly had reason to be grateful to Brenna Moore for the quiet grace of her scholarship as well as the flat-­out enthusiasm of her e-mails. The warm welcome offered by Donne Society scholars—­at an annual conference that has to be experienced to be believed—­proved the pleasures of stepping outside disciplinary confines. My thanks especially to Heather Dubrow, Achsah Guibbory, Judith Herz, Abigail Marcus, Yaacov Mascetti, Kirsten Stirling, and Tessie Prakas, for sharing deep learning with a light touch. My writing companions, Anke Pinkert, Eileen Elrod, and Lisa Sideris, can attest that it would have been much less fun, not to mention impossible, to write this book without them. And only those who have offered detailed, encouraging responses to a full manuscript can appreciate the work of those who did just that for me: Robert Orsi, Judith Anderson, Don Gray, Patricia Ingham, Brian Hillman, Winnifred Sullivan, and Sonia Velázquez. Jen Fleissner has inspired me throughout. Judith Brown, she of the magic pen, adds a touch of elegance to everything, including—­ when possible—­my prose. Patty Ingham finds innovation where others would not even think to look, including in the Middle Ages and in much of my work. No one has read more drafts, or been more steadfast in her enthusiasm for this project, than Sonia Velázquez; her poetic sensibility informs every page. Winni Sullivan’s own scholarship as well as her intellectual leadership transformed my sense of what is possible. And conversations with Rebecca Schorsch unfailingly confirm that the things we think about and the lives we lead are inseparable. David Maldonado Rivera helped me prepare the manuscript; Katherine Faydash’s copyediting was as deft as it was thorough; and the final version was improved by perceptive suggestions from Amy Hollywood and another reader for the press. Special thanks to Alan Thomas and Randy Petilos, ideal editors. For happy distractions, delicious meals, and good reasons to

xii Acknowledgments

leave home, I am indebted to Spencer and Arlene Fickel; Felix, Gretchen, and Tasiana Parker; and Jon, Sarah, and Grace Adams-­ Kollitz. Jim Furey would have found this a puzzling project, but that I wrote it is testimony to what he taught me. I am just one of many people whose lives have been changed by Peg Furey’s joyful generosity and sense of adventure. The vision I have of what living life together can mean is inseparable from the person to whom this book is dedicated. And I have daily reason to appreciate my daughter, Veronica, who knows that laughter is the best form of love.

On Poetry Throughout this book, I have silently modernized the poetry, providing original spelling or words when relevant to the analysis or crucial to appreciating the metrics or meaning of the poem. My choice to modernize is in keeping with the broader aims of this project: to invite readers—­regardless of expertise—­to explore their assumptions about selfhood and spirituality today by engaging with poets from the past.

Listen, I have been educated. I have learned about Western Civilization. Do you know what the message of Western Civilization is? I am alone.

—­Eileen Myles, “An American Poem”

What I’m trying to suggest . . . is that the modern situation is predicated upon the illusion of the self ’s isolation—­that business of “I’m alone, you’re alone, we can bullshit each other when we’re fucking or whatever else, but the truth is that we’re alone. Right?” Well, I believe that is fundamentally an illusion. —­David Milch, creator of Deadwood

Introduction The most famous lines from the poet John Donne are not from a poem. “No man is an Island,” a declaration even better known than its author, appears in a prose meditation that Donne composed in 1623, as he was recovering from a serious illness. It is the first clause of a sentence that completes the point: “No man is an Island, entire unto himself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.”1 Like the familiar line that follows—­“never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”—­this is a simple message, easily encapsulated. Isolation is an illusion. Humans are social, not solitary. We are inter­dependent even when we feel alone. This classic repudiation of existential solitude has the appeal of clarity. Yet it lacks the sustaining power of complexity. A more satisfying rendition of our interdependence is to be found in Donne’s lyric verse. His religious sonnet “Batter my heart, three-­person’d God,” for example, neither laments nor celebrates solitude. Nor does it affirm that we are all in this together. The poem instead concentrates on the relationship between the speaker and the Triune God he addresses directly. Asking God to batter his heart, to transform him in dramatic and even violent ways, all within a form defined by meter, rhyme, and a sonnet’s conventional structure, this poem’s



2 Introduction

imagining of the relationship between the speaker and God is simultaneously creative and conventional. No prose summary can replicate what Donne’s poems perform. Rather than envisioning people as either singular or communal, as if islands or part of the main, poetry by Donne and other writers from his time delineates a third possibility; it is this possibility, the intriguing poetic performance of relationality, that I seek to introduce here and to illuminate throughout this book. Poetic relations are easy to acknowledge but more difficult to appreciate. Anyone who reads this sonnet of Donne’s can see that it involves both a speaker and God, and the relationship between them. But what is the reader supposed to make of lines like these? Batter my heart, three-­person’d God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend; That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

(lines 1–­4)2

Does the speaker stand alone, imploring God to do to him what he cannot do to himself ? Or is this a reassuring affirmation of divine presence? Do these lines recount a relationship of domination and submission? Or should the use of traditional, biblical imagery, including God as a potter and the breath of the Holy Spirit, be read as a comforting account of spiritual transformation? The poem frustrates any attempt to choose between these options. A God who can knock, breathe, shine, and mend, all in one line, cannot then simply be characterized as present or absent, controlling or cooperative, biblical or personal. The compacted proliferation of images in this line, as throughout this carefully wrought sonnet, is characteristic of Donne’s poetry. This is why these relations are poetic, because what is described, the content, is inseparable from how it is described, the form. “Poetry” describes language that highlights the symbiosis between the what and the how, an interpenetration of form and content, that contributes to the challenge, and the significance, of poetic relations.

Introduction 3

The full import of relations inscribed in poems by Donne and other early modern English Protestants has not yet been realized, however, in large part because interpretations of selfhood and poetry are so strongly inflected by modern, secular assumptions. Almost all of the sources explored in this book, including psalm paraphrases and sonnets, dedicatory poems, love poems, and devotional meditations, can be classified as lyric poems. Lyric, like the song performance from which the genre emerged, typically features a first-­person speaker recounting personal emotions or feelings rather than epic tales. Modern readers consequently tend to focus first and foremost on the singular speaker rather than relational dynamics; shorn of the narrative arc that structures memoirs or novels, and typically lacking expansive accounts of action, lyric poems encourage speculation about inner lives and personal feelings. The urge to associate poetry with private self-­expression is especially strong when the poets seem to be animated by a newly intense interest in interiority, as in twentieth-­century modernism, late eighteenth-­to early nineteenth-­century Romanticism, or—­as is the case of Donne and my other sources—­ the sixteenth-­to seventeenth-­century English Reformation. Few scholars today would claim, as many once did, that the Renaissance and Reformation discovered the individual. Nevertheless, Donne is a canonical poet because lay readers and specialists alike have the sense that his poetic voice represents the interest of the Renaissance and Reformation era in self-­ examination and the same era’s characteristic mix of emerging self-­confidence and intensified self-­doubt. As is his contemporary George Herbert, Donne is a good guide to poetic interiority. And yet many poems by Donne, Herbert, and other important Protestant writers are actually preoccupied with relationships. This simple observation inspired this book. For these poets, what we now describe as self-­exploration was a relational dynamic. They associate experiences of uncertainty, fear, knowledge, revelation, salvation, love, anger, and certitude with the presence and absence of others. Their poems describe and address God and Christ, friends and lovers, spouses, patrons, and fellow authors.



4 Introduction

The relations these poems enact are important for the same reason they are easy to disregard, because they do not conform to the binaries of individual-­communal or solitary-­social that Donne himself endorses in his famous lines of prose and that modern experiences and theories of selfhood perpetuate. This is why Ernest Hemingway—­a writer who lamented modern existential isolation—­took the title of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls from Donne’s prose affirmation that the death of one affects us all. Donne’s declaration continues to be quoted today because modernity itself can be defined in these terms, as the state of affairs that necessitates this corrective reassurance: we are not alone; we are inescapably linked to others. These are the options secular modernity presumes. As the philosopher Charles Taylor explains, we are modern subjects insofar as we are “buffered subjects” who live “with a much firmer sense of the boundary between self and other” than Europeans did in the past (and, presumably, “non-­ modern” subjects still do today).3 This means that modernity privileges absence, the historian of religion Robert Orsi writes, especially the absence of the gods: those who want to be recognized as modern subjects must prove their fitness by demonstrating their ability to think and act for themselves, unimpeded by relationships with supernatural beings.4 Participation in secular modern societies requires the ability to toggle between a realm of privacy (where intimate relationships and faith in the supernatural can be safely sequestered) and the public (where the significance of social forces are recognized for reasons of self-­interest and survival). These binaries of self and other or presence and absence help explain why Donne’s denial of existential isolation still resonates today. The Protestant Reformation looms large in these accounts, for good reason. Taylor’s Sources of the Self is typical in its claim that modernity’s valorization of autonomy can be linked to Protestantism’s rejection of external mediation: when salvation is no longer facilitated by priests and sacraments, Taylor writes, “the personal commitment of the believer becomes all important.” This marked the clearest contrast between Catholics and Protes-

Introduction 5

tants: where Catholics maintained a sacramental connection to community, Protestants “belonged to the saved” by their “wholehearted personal adhesion.”5 In Orsi’s recent History and Presence, the key is Protestantism’s rejection of traditional notions of real presence, including not only the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in the transubstantiated elements of the Eucharist but also the real presence of the divine in shrines and relics, in images and holy sites, in the bodies of saints and the experiences of believers. In rejecting these experiences of real presence, Orsi says, Protestants confined the gods to “the inner lives of individuals.”6 Like anyone who has experienced Protestant community or Catholic introspection—­phenomena that caricatured versions of these denominational differences deny—­Taylor, Orsi, and other scholars are well aware that it is easy to exaggerate the distinctions between Protestant and Catholic versions of Christianity. They also realize that it is simpler to claim novelty for the Protestant Reformation than to illuminate the manifold continuities between the Reformation and earlier and concurrent forms of Christianity. Still, in the words of the historian John Bossy, “something important happened to Western Christianity in the sixteenth century, and the term ‘Reformation’ is probably as good a guide as any to investigating what it was.”7 The legacy of what we now call the Protestant Reformation can be understood in three ways that are directly relevant to the goals of this study: in a widespread assumption—­shared today not only by many Catholics but also by many who are not Christian or do not consider themselves religious—­that religion is, at its core, a matter of personal conviction or faith; in the idea that the most appropriate and meaningful relationship with God is personal and private; and in the consequent impoverishment of our ways of talking about and imagining relationality.8 To address this problem, I return to some Protestant sources from the English Reformation, to poems not only by Herbert and Donne but also by several important women writers who are still largely unknown outside of English departments. These sources, written between 1560 and 1720, range from work by Anne Lock, a



6 Introduction

Calvinist who sought refuge in Geneva during Queen Mary’s restoration of Catholicism in England, to meditative poems by Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, non-­separatist Puritans living in New England. Also included are dedicatory poems and psalm translations by Mary Sidney Herbert, who completed a poetic psalter begun by her brother, Philip Sidney, and dedicatory poems and a poetic retelling of the Passion narrative by ­Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman to publish a single-­authored collection of poems in England. Differing not only in gender but also in time period, class status, and—­at least as far as we can tell—­theological inclinations and liturgical preferences, these authors collectively represent mainstream English Protestantism, a protean movement loosely defined by the pervasive influence of Calvinist theology, the assumed authority and importance of the vernacular Bible, and the widespread conviction that good Christians should be attending church and listening to the Word, as well as cultivating experiences of inward conversion.9 Poetic Relations argues that these poems enact a relational alternative to the individual-­social binary that constricts our vision of selfhood and religion today. In making this claim, the book demonstrates that the existential implications of the Protestant Reformation have been rightly emphasized but wrongly interpreted. Versions of the relational dynamics explored in this study are on display in the Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart,” discussed earlier, as in a dedicatory poem Aemilia Lanyer published in 1611, the same year that the King James Bible appeared. As a woman at the margins of courtly society, lacking financial resources and status of her own, Lanyer needed the support of aristocratic women to give her poetry the visibility that publication alone could not ensure. Social forces make themselves felt in the patronage poem “To the Lady Lucie,” but the dynamics on display are not simply societal. They are also, in a more nuanced and varied way, interpersonal. Lanyer begins, predictably enough, with flattery: “Me thinks I see fair Virtue ready stand, / To unlock the closet of your lovely breast.” And then she inscribes a tableau that underscores the importance of the poem itself:

Introduction 7

Holding the key of Knowledge in her hand, Key of that Cabin where your self doth rest, To let him in, by whom her youth was blessed.

(lines 3–­5)10

There is not just one relational dynamic here but many: between the author and “Virtue,” who is described “Holding the key of knowledge in her hand”; between “your self ” and the poem that offers to unlock that self; between “him”—­Christ—­who stands outside the reader, ready to gain entry if the poem succeeds; and finally, between the poem and all other readers, who might apprehend for themselves the relationship the poem seeks to facilitate. A similar interest in relational dynamics is apparent in an otherwise very different poem by George Herbert, “Sin’s Round.” Herbert’s poem, which begins and ends by apologizing to God, can all too easily be read as a solipsistic expression of doubt and fear. In the third and final stanza, a poet’s pride at his creation or “inventions” heightens his acute sense of sinfulness and shame: My hands do join to finish the inventions: And so my sins ascend three stories high, As Babel grew, before there were dissensions. Yet ill deeds loiter not: for they supply New thoughts of sinning: wherefore, to my shame, Sorry I am, my God, sorry I am.

(lines 13–­18)

Modern readers might be tempted to interpret Herbert’s poem, with its abject expressions of sorrow, as almost entirely self-­ absorbed. Sin looms three stories high. Regrets fuel self-­doubt. From this perspective, it seems that the writer’s obsessive concern with “ill deeds” is alleviated only by his interest in the new thoughts they have spawned. He is the sinner and the creator. There is good reason to think the most interesting question we encounter in reading this poem is who will prevail: The shameful self, intent on self-­denial? Or the proud poet, intent on displaying his inventions?11



8 Introduction

And yet “Sin’s Round” is addressed to God. The last line of the poem is also its first, and this line—­“Sorry I am, my God, sorry I am”—­is not solipsistic but relational. Rather than presenting himself as one apart from God or conceding that God stands at a distance, Herbert emphasizes their interactivity, visibly encapsulated in the line that alternates between “I,” “God,” and “I.” Human readers, too, are invited to participate because this is not a self-­interpreting text. Like all poems, “Sin’s Round” signals that linguistic intensity is more important than the communication of content; it presents itself as a text dependent on its capacity to evoke sensory and emotional, as well as intellectual, responses. Rather than a simple expression of private emotion, incidentally written down, “Sin’s Round” is confessional text, addressed to God but also designed to involve any human reader who takes the time to listen and respond to its lines.

From Identity to Relationality Between 1560 and 1720, during the first two centuries of the English Reformation, poetry became an important site of relational engagement for social and cultural, as well as theological, reasons.12 In earlier centuries, Christians characteristically equated the self with a persona, or social identity, and devotional texts, including devotional poetry, were enormously popular in ­fourteenth-­and fifteenth-­century England at least in part because they gave their readers ways to grapple with questions of identity. In seeking to reconcile an “inner self ” with “external social codes,” late medieval devotional poetry directed readers to “labor in themselves” by providing them with mirrors for self-­ reflection, identification, and imitation.13 Over the course of the sixteenth century, these assumptions about the value and function of poetry and the nature of social identity were challenged by the convergence of several developments. As the Tudor dynasty succeeded in centralizing political power, courtier poets were increasingly defined by their proximity to political power—­and their vulnerability to a monarch’s whims.

Introduction 9

Humanistically trained wordsmiths like Thomas Wyatt (1503–­ 42), author of the first psalm sonnets in English, knew that power accrued to those who could write eloquent letters, pleasing verse, and instructive treatises. They also knew the limits of language: however eloquent their words, however virtuous and wise their counsel, people still behaved badly, lords seldom followed their advice, and kings remained capricious. Wyatt himself was twice imprisoned in the Tower of London, and twice released. In this context, the humanist emphasis on rhetoric’s “practical efficacy,” as Lorna Hutson describes it, was seriously undermined by the condition of what Greg Walker aptly calls the condition of “writing under tyranny.”14 Even as tyranny curbed poetry’s political ambitions, p ­ oetry’s spiritual value was being challenged by intensified religious disputes. In the wake of Martin Luther’s excommunication, as the many voices calling for reform coalesced into the competing versions of Christianity we now identify as “Protestant” and “Catholic,” the different camps turned “poetry” into a term of insult that each used to condemn the other. William Tyndale, the Protestant translator of the English Bible, accused Catholics of replacing Scripture with poetry, and contemporaries frequently reiterated the claim that poetry encouraged people to neglect the Word of God. Following John Calvin, many reformers expressed doubts about the usefulness of anything but biblical songs.15 Consequently, a distinctive Protestant genre of devotional poetry did not emerge in England until the second half of the sixteenth century. This, then, is where my story begins, with psalm poems composed and presented by women after 1558, in the Elizabethan era. The importance of women to this story cannot be exhausted by the familiar claim that women played the role they did by successfully attributing their writing to God rather than claiming authorship for themselves. The psalm poets studied here—­Anne Lock and Mary Sidney Herbert specifically—­are key to this story of Protestant poetry’s relationality because of the way both they and their texts were simultaneously liminal and central.16 Socially well connected yet politically

10 Introduction

peripheral, and presumed to be naturally pious because of their gender, Lock and Sidney Herbert were positioned, in a way that Wyatt and other male courtier poets were not, to produce work that was neither secretively private nor calculatingly public. It was instead relational, which is to say, not simply dependent on God and male authority figures and also not subversively independent, but instead proactively, creatively interactive.17 Translating, paraphrasing, and in this sense composing psalms, these women spoke together with David, whom readers of the Bible knew as the voice of the biblical psalms. And as they produced and circulated these works, in manuscript and print, they interwove this biblical relationship with social relationships involving patrons, printers, and other collaborators. Like poems by the later writers explored in this book—­in­ cluding Donne, Herbert, Lanyer, Bradstreet, and Taylor—­the work by Lock and Sidney Herbert gave voice to personal self-­ expression within the externally dictated constraints of their poetic forms. In this way, the formal dynamics of their work mirror the dynamics of the Protestant paradox. Protestantism stimulated attention to relations not just by prioritizing personal faith over the intercessory role of priests, sacraments, and saints—­thereby altering assumptions about how humans relate to the divine—­but also, more specifically and more important, by rendering this personal faith inescapably paradoxical. In a basic sense, of course, human selves are always and necessarily relational, born as we are into a web of relationships and dependent on others for everything from food to speech. 18 What changes is how and why relations are construed as important, and the contexts within which relationality is most imaginatively elaborated. The intertwining of social and religious relationships that I explore in this book did not replace Catholicism’s vision of the church as the body of Christ or Protestantism’s appreciation of the importance of collective worship. These relationships were nevertheless imbued with new significance, and more intensively associated with poetry, not only for the cultural reasons described already but also because of the existential pressures exerted by Calvinist theology.19

Introduction 11

The fundamental problem, according to Calvin, is that humans are naturally inclined to self-­reliance and self-­absorption. Unaware of our own limits and abilities, we view ourselves as creators rather than as beings created by another. We make worlds for ourselves, imagine capacities for ourselves, and despair and exult in ourselves. All this reflects the effects of original sin. Calvin taught that faith is transformative because faith shifts the focus from humanity to God, replacing a deluded sense of independence with an awareness of humanity’s total dependence on the Almighty. Human nature, sinfully depraved, ensured the difficulty as well as the necessity of this perspectival shift, Calvin explained. A feeling of certainty was a sure sign of salvation, whereas prideful self-­reliance or despair demonstrated the persistence of sin. Believers consequently needed to cultivate a feeling of dependence without being deluded into thinking they had any control over the dependence they cultivated. Believers were called on to experience the certitude of salvation even as they denied the relevance of experiences they could conjure for themselves. And Calvinism’s proud proclamations about the sufficiency of Scripture did not mean that Scripture was now subject to individual interpretation; on the contrary, it meant that the individual was subject to the Word.20 The Protestant paradox had many effects, among them an intensified interest in poetic relationality. The poetry explored in this book, then, shows how mainstream English Protestantism’s interest in equating belief with a certainty that believers could not impute to themselves inspired a poetic selfhood that was relational in form, content, and modes of production and authorization.

Relational Selves and Religious Studies In keeping with what I have described, this book has three goals. The first is to demonstrate the relevance of Protestantism’s relationality to discussions of selfhood today. Broadly speaking, modern accounts of selfhood presume the binaries of individual and society; more specifically, theoretical texts have grappled with the secular version of the Protestant paradox, that we act

12 Introduction

for ourselves even as others define us. How are we to understand this duality? How do we assess what Yvonne Sherwood has called the “dynamic zone of interhuman living in which we feel ourselves—­and never simply alternatively—­as both subjected subject and sovereign subject (like a god)”?21 The one who creates is also created. The self stands alone and subject to an Other. This is a shared premise for many philosophical accounts of what it is to be a self. Deemed a master-­slave dialectic by G. W. F. Hegel, a process of ideological interpellation by Louis Althusser, an ethic of responsibility to the Other in Emmanuel Levinas’s thought, and the effect and source of social power by Michel Foucault, the paradoxical coexistence of self-­assertion and subjection frequently remains the starting point for many modern theories of selfhood. There are, however, thinkers (including, in some instances, those just named), who argue that this paradox should prompt attention not to dialectics or binaries but to contingent and variable relations. Two of these alternative approaches have been especially influential for my own. The first is Judith Butler’s notion that we are necessarily and inevitably responsive beings because of our shared vulnerability and common sense of being unknown to ourselves. The second is Hannah Arendt’s argument that each person becomes a who rather than a what only through disclosure; a person becomes fully human by speaking and by being heard, by having one’s unique story told by another. For Butler, the irreducibility of exposure reveals the inadequacy of the submission-­dominance dialectic. We have to accept risk, she argues, by affirming that we are “at each other’s mercy”; we must take the “very vulnerability of exposure as the sign, the reminder, of a common vulnerability, a common physicality, and risk. . . . It delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot slip away, which we cannot finally resolve in the name of the subject, but which can provide a way to understand that none of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands.”22 And for Arendt, disclosure offers an alternative to fixed positions of self and other

Introduction 13

and to the all-­encompassing reach of society. What makes us human, according to Arendt, as opposed to just living creatures or socially determined identities, is the “web of human relationships which exists wherever men live together.” This web makes disclosure possible, but it in turn depends on the variability and contingency of this revelatory speech: “together they start a new process which eventually emerges as the unique life story of the newcomer, affecting uniquely the life stories of all those with whom he comes into contact.”23 Poetic Relations, however, finds in early modern poetry an interactive space and a relational self that neither Arendt nor Butler nor other theorists who concern themselves with alternatives to modern notions of autonomy have considered. This relational self is not undone by others (as Judith Butler understands it to be); it is not narrative (as Hannah Arendt argues it should be) but poetic. Instead of being defined by the frailties we share, or the narrative arc of the stories that can be told about us, poetic selfhood imagines us as the crafted fragment of a thought, located less by a beginning and an end or by rupture or continuity than by the process of framing fleeting moments, creating images, inhabiting the multiplicity of metaphor, offering words, and responding to everything that resonates. Bounded, interactive creativity is the form of the poetic self, which in turn reveals that form is the medium of relationality. The book’s second aim is to suggest a new way forward for the study of religion and literature by looking back to sources that scholars of religion regularly ignore.24 Early modern Protestant poetry, in particular, seems an unlikely resource for innovative contributions to the study of religion. Aligned as it is with the version of Christianity that for too long dictated the topics studied and the questions deemed important, Protestant poetry has no obvious claim to represent unexpected or marginalized ways of being in the world. And because it presents itself as personal and devotional, Protestant poetry does not lend itself to the study of power dynamics, ritual action, or embodiment that much of the best work in religious studies seeks to understand. For those

14 Introduction

trained in the study of religion, the field’s long-­standing attempt to shed Protestant biases means that the study of theology, canonical texts, and the phenomenology of personal religious experience no longer claims self-­evident importance. And although scholars of religion might readily acknowledge that the embodied, disciplined, and politically and socially conditioned religious subject is relationally constituted, few regularly study relational dynamics. Personal relationships, whether with gods or with other people, seem either obvious (and in that sense difficult to study) or musty and old-­fashioned (and therefore embarrassing to study).25 This has begun to change: some of the most exciting new work in religious studies affirms that we cannot understand religion without understanding religious relationships. Yet most of this work focuses on non-­Christian or Catholic sources, and on lived religion rather than literature.26 From within religious studies, there is still very little interest in the version of relationality inspired by early Protestantism.27 This is a notable oversight, given that our assumptions today about spirituality have been shaped not just by a Protestant focus on faith but arguably even more so by a Protestant insistence that believers must inwardly cultivate a relationship with God.28 All this looks a bit different from the vantage point of literary studies, where poetry has never been neglected and the turn to religion—­including renewed interest in Protestant theology—­ has inspired significant new work, particularly since the 1980s, when scholars of literature took over the study of religion and literature as that subfield declined within religious studies. With the transition from religion to literature departments came a shift of attention from theology to history and from questions of ultimate concern to a concern with history and alterity. Medi­evalists interested in social power returned to religious texts to assess anti-­Judaism and the way Christ’s body altered social hierarchies.29 Renaissance scholars, reevaluating traditional claims about the modernity of their period, seized on the seeming strangeness of religion as a way to demonstrate how far they were removed from their sources.30 Religious difference became

Introduction 15

an appealing way to study difference itself: the otherness of theology, of place, political institutions, social structures, pedagogies, daily performances, physical surroundings, and material accoutrement. Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-­Fashioning was foundational in part because it was so adamant about how real and imagined Others threatened self-­understanding: “self-­ fashioning,” Greenblatt explained, “is achieved in relation to something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile.”31 In the study of Renaissance poetry, other approaches have superseded Greenblatt’s. For example, scholars of Renaissance literature have directly challenged the modernist assumption that lyric poetry’s singular speaker is autonomous, solitary, and detached from the social. This has been a crucial intervention, ensuring widespread agreement that early modern poetry, even poetry expressing the inner thoughts of a single speaker, does not simply offer an early version of modern individualism.32 Several studies have shown that this poetry is more communal, liturgical, and sacramental than caricatured notions of Protestant individualism allow us to appreciate. In this period, Regina Schwartz explains, “the world manifest by the ritual [of the Eucharist] was now manifest in poetry.”33 And yet appreciation of English Renaissance poetry’s distinctive theology, sociality, and sacramentality has not as yet inspired studies focused on poetry’s distinctive forms of relational selfhood. Those interested in how theological assumptions shaped experiences of selfhood have more often attended to the interplay of self-­denial and self-­assertion or the dialectic of domination and submission, often—­for reasons I explain in chapter 3—­with a focus on eroticism.34 There are exceptions. Theologically sophisticated works by literature scholars trace a range of relational dynamics, but their goal of assessing the interplay of theology and literature means that they do not associate these dynamics, as I do, with relational selfhood.35 The study whose aims dovetail most closely with my own is Nancy Selleck’s work on the “interpersonal idiom” in English Renaissance literature. Selleck rightly points out that Renaissance writers assumed that every self is de-

16 Introduction

pendent on others. Equipped with a humoral understanding of the body, they assumed an utterly penetrable self. Brought up in a culture that presumed the importance of kinship and patronage, they did not equate maturity with autonomy. Above all, steeped in a Christian devotional tradition that encouraged believers to understand themselves as part of the body of Christ, these writers equated isolation with damnation. Selleck, however, remains most interested in how a modern sense of self might be challenged by models that presume the importance of others rather than in how the variable dynamics of relationality might challenge our very assumptions about “self ” and “other.” 36 Finally, work by Heather Dubrow, Ryan Netzley, and Kimberly Johnson, showing how poetry’s form enacts the presence it seeks, focuses, as I do here, on the generativity of poetry’s relational dynamics.37 Poetic Relations complements their formalist arguments not by revealing the implications for poetics, erotics, and reading practices, but by returning to what so many have argued are anachronistic questions of selfhood, finding there a relational imaginary that suggests new questions and approaches for the study of religion and literature today. My third aim is to suggest how attention to poetic relations might revitalize the study of belief. This is a necessary alternative to the project pursued by scholars of religion and literature who accept an updated version of Nathan Scott’s midcentury assertion that literature reveals the enduring centrality of belief. Literary sources, they argue, offer a way to study belief without getting mired in doctrine.38 Echoed recently by the literary critic James Woods, this project appeals to those who presume that belief entails a single person’s inner conviction about a transcendent reality. But as does the anthropologist Talal Asad, I think that we do not really know what belief entails. Given this ambiguity, Asad argues that scholars should suspend the search for belief and focus on the senses instead, on the way religions “build sensibilities and attitudes that are distinct from beliefs.”39 My own proposal differs from Asad’s. Just as I am impatient with all the ways that theorists have found to re-­create the binary of self and other, so

Introduction 17

too I am unwilling to concede the dichotomy between interior and exterior that critics and adherents alike uphold. We can trace this dichotomy to Reformation-­era critiques of ritual and claims about the need to differentiate acts of love from salvific faith. Returning to sources from the Reformation, however, we find that devotional texts breathe life into the reformers’ theological claim that belief is a process of perceiving and responding to God. For them, as for their predecessors, in other words, belief is relational. Everything this project analyzes takes place within the confines of the poem, expressing something internal to the speaker. Yet this is an interiority delineated by relationships—­literally, for the lines of the poems give shape to interactions, revealing a self, and a faith, that is internally as well as externally relational.

Authorship, Friendship, Love, and Marriage The argument that early modern English-­language poetry supports a re-­theorization of relational selfhood unfolds over the course of four chapters, each devoted to a specific relationship that was in flux during the period: authorship, friendship, eroticism, and marriage. Chapter 1, “Authorship,” focuses on poetry attributed to Anne Lock, Mary Sidney Herbert, and Aemilia Lanyer to reveal that the singular speaker in their poems—­identified by modernists as lyric’s lonely “I”—­is actually an assemblage of voices and that the mode of authorship on display in their work is best understood as relational. Chapter 2, “Friendship,” explores George Herbert’s poetic visions of friendship with God, showing how the powers and limits of language mirror the powers and limits of relational selves. The eroticism of poetic interiority is the subject of chapter 3, which turns to John Donne and Aemilia Lanyer to offer Christological and Trinitarian readings of eroticism. And chapter 4, “Marriage,” follows poets to the Americas, where poems on marriage and marriage metaphors by Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor presents covenantal love as an alternative to both sentimental and utilitarian notions of marriage.

18 Introduction

The book ends with a comparative coda, turning from poetry of the English Reformation to a memoir by a modern poet, Christian Wiman. In My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, Wiman recounts a thoroughly modern dilemma in terms Calvin would appreciate.40 What does it mean to be a believer in the modern world? For Wiman, answering this question requires reconciling the creativity he values as a poet with the belief he craves as a man facing death. Like many people today, Wiman associates belief with propositional claims and cognitive assent, as a mirror image of scientific or rational knowledge. The poetics of belief he ultimately affirms, however, redefines belief as a form of poetic relationality.

›››‹‹‹

Throughout this book, the details of analysis are as varied as the poems themselves, including devotional poems, love poems, and dedicatory verse. Nevertheless, there are some consistent themes. What I identify here as poetry’s relational selfhood is akin to what Jean-­Luc Nancy calls the “between” as such: a space of encounter. Like Nancy and others who believe that reimagining the subject is a political project, I am interested in how this alternative might challenge both foundationalism (the idea that subjects come first, preexisting the encounter) and dialectical transcendence (the notion that subjects come after, as products of the encounter). Unlike Nancy and others, however, I do not think the absence of a preordained logic suggests a space of encounter free of social calculations.41 Relationality, like poetry, has the whiff of something apoliti­ cal—­appealing or irrelevant, depending on your perspective—­ because it denotes the real of the personal and intimate, untainted by social calculations, questions of identity, and instrumental needs. Thus the popularity of W. H. Auden’s proclamation that poetry “makes nothing happen,” the allure of Martin Buber’s vision of mutual respect in an I-­Thou encounter, or the notion that our intimate lives stand apart from our political or economic lives.42 Hannah Arendt identifies this as the defining feature of

Introduction 19

modern society: the conviction that the social self inhabits a sphere of necessity while the private self, in intimate relations, escapes instrumentalist logic.43 Those who write about relationality or intimacy, like those who write about poetry, often do so for just this reason, in hopes of identifying something that cannot be reduced to a “use” or “function,” something that evades social determinism and utilitarian calculations. Yet this quest for purity is not shared by the poets studied in this book. When George Herbert announces to God in the poem “Unkindness” that “I would not use a friend as I use Thee” (line 5), he reinterprets the “use” of friendship. When, in “The Ecstasy,” John Donne proclaims that love “controls” loneliness (line 46), he explores how social as well as personal distinctions between lovers persist within the frenzy of erotic love. And when the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet asks of God, “why should I doubt any more when Thou hast given me such assured pledges of thy love?” she questions the link between obligation and love in marriage.44 As these examples suggest, all of the early modern poems I examine readily mingle what we in the modern world often carefully differentiate. Today we are conditioned to imagine that our inner selves are buffered from society, and tempted also to believe that intimate relations claim their own logic, their own significance, wholly apart from practical considerations and strategic calculations. If spiritual poems were written to curry favor with a patron, for example, or solidify a social alliance, are they still, then, spiritually meaningful? Or does this prove that spirituality is a way to mystify the social? If one is contractually obliged to love, is it still love? And can a relationship with God or a friend be “useful” and transformative? Poetic Relations consequently tracks the way that poetry’s ­relational self encompasses what are now often assumed to be incongruous pairs: love and obligation, scarcity and plenitude, extrinsic and intrinsic motivations, intimate affections and social calculations. The relationships established in the poems between the lyric voice and other figures, human and divine, are relation-

20 Introduction

ships in which needs, wants, and desires are framed in terms of gifts, duties, and reciprocity. These poems envision relationality in terms that include conflict as well as peace, hierarchy as well as equality, and love that is both salvific and destructive. These relational poetics do not disavow or ignore social logic but instead demonstrate how this logic can be both assumed and reconfigured. This is where poetic relations reside: not in a space purified of society’s instrumentalism, but in exchanges that dynamically engage social conventions as well as alternative possibilities. The hope for a holier interior or a more godly way of being is thus enacted as everyday relationships are enacted, where pragmatic reckoning merges with the failures, frustrations, and intrinsic pleasures of intimacy. Cumulatively, these sources reveal themselves to be an especially rich resource for those interested in going beyond binaries of self and other, private and public, social and solitary, to explore poetic selfhood’s relational dynamics in satisfying detail.

One1 Authorship What does it mean to describe Anne Lock as the “author” of the poems that secure her place in English literary history? These poems—­including five introductory sonnets and twenty-­one sonnets meditating on just one psalm, Psalm 51—­constitute the first sonnet sequence published in English. They appear in a book of sermons by John Calvin, but neither the sonnets nor their author are mentioned on the title page. The translator is identified only by the initials “A.L.,” at the end of a letter dedicating the translated sermons to a duchess. The sonnets themselves appear after the sermons, where they are introduced by a headnote.1 This note makes the question of authorship especially tricky because, in lieu of an author, it conjures a “friend”: I have added this meditation . . . not as part of master Calvin’s work, but because it follows the same argument, and was given me by my friend with whom I knew I might be so bold to use and publish it as pleased me.2

If Anne Lock wrote the meditative poems that follow, why not attribute them directly to her? Why does the note authorize the poems by talking about their religious purpose and the interaction that led to their publication instead of naming an author? There are several ways to explain Anne Lock’s authorial invisi-

22 Chapter One

bility. In a culture where many thought it was immodest and unnecessary for women to write at all, much less for publication, the note could reflect one of many strategies deployed to deflect or defuse criticism of women writers.3 Class considerations could also be at work: in sixteenth-­century England, genteel writers often confirmed their authority by locating themselves and their texts in a selective social network; writers who publicized their responsibility for a text could seem crass rather than authoritative.4 Or perhaps the headnote was written not by the author but by the publisher, John Day, to explain his decision to include the sonnets in a book of translations, for publishers frequently extended their visible control over the text beyond the title page.5 Regardless of which explanation seems most revealing, the headnote has been treated as a relatively minor barrier to claims for Anne Lock’s authorship. How do we know that Anne Lock wrote these sonnets? Because diligent scholars have cared enough about naming the author to sift through the evidence and make a persuasive case that she did.6 Yet both the question and the answer treat the most obvious evidence as the least relevant. The search for an author, trying to discern faint and even nonexistent tracks, piecing together scant clues in order to solve a mystery, focuses attention on a single person. It thereby fails to linger where the text itself directs our attention. By entwining the figure of the friend with the pleasures and purpose of the text (“given me by my friend with whom I knew I might be so bold to use and publish it as pleased me”), the headnote alerts us to a model of authorship that the poems themselves enact—­a kind of relational authorship. This notion of authorship as a relationship may seem puzzling to those accustomed to thinking about authors as public, private, or social. None of these possibilities connotes quite what relational authorship entails. In most modern societies, a writer’s authority or authorship is linked to assertions of originality and proprietary self-­expression, the sorts of claims that can be regulated by copyright laws. To author a text is to write something no one else could have written while acknowledging ideas

Authorship 23

and phrases “authored” by someone else. This means that authorship is currently associated not only, and not even necessarily, with Romantic ideals of individual creativity but also with modern notions of agency: the author is one who is responsible for the text.7 Premodern models, by contrast, were more often explicit about the importance of collaborative production and social influences. Communal authorization—­awarded throughout the Middle Ages by monastic and scholastic communities and, increasingly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, by circles of pious laypeople, often predominantly women, and then by secular coteries—­could be more important than one person’s claim to have composed the work.8 Individual authorship was not unknown in earlier periods of European history, but even in medieval Christianity, as the model of authorship, associated primarily with men, was increasingly based on the author’s personality rather than the intent of his work, authorship remained social in the sense that a writer’s authority depended on his ability to present himself as known or “familiar” to readers.9 And although more possessive notions of authorship emerged in the early modern period, printed books, like manuscripts, continued to rely on social circles for dissemination and status.10 Relational authorship, however, maintains a different kind of authority than these modern and premodern categories and debates assume; instead of questions of public influence, private self-­expression, familiarity, ownership, or social networks, this model of authorship depends on the relationships it can claim and create. In the sonnet sequence attributed to Anne Lock—­as in the other works explored in this chapter—­authorship is a relationship not only in the sense that the poems are authorized by relationships declared and assumed (between writers, patrons, and readers) but also at the level of the line, in the diverse relations scripted in the poem, by the poem.11 To illustrate what this relational authorship entails, the current chapter focuses on three different examples: the first, the anonymous printed sonnet sequence described already; the second, a manuscript copy of the Sidney Psalter, presented to Queen

24 Chapter One

Elizabeth; and the third, the first single-­authored book of poems printed in English, written and dedicated by Aemilia Lanyer to numerous patrons. Each stands in a different relationship to the three most unsettling forces of the age: Protestantism, patronage, and print.12 Lock’s work, likely composed during Queen Mary’s restoration of Catholicism in England while she herself was in exile with other Calvinists in Geneva, was published in 1560, early in Elizabeth’s reign. Mary Sidney Herbert prepared and presented her manuscript to her established sovereign nearly forty years later, at the zenith of the Protestant nation’s power. And Lanyer’s printed text, prepared by a marginal member of court and prefaced with numerous dedicatory poems appealing to powerful female patrons, appeared the same year as the Bible commissioned by Elizabeth’s successor, King James, to ameliorate differences between dissatisfied purists and worried moderates in the Church of England. All three of these examples work against secular assumptions of authorial autonomy, private creativity, and the power of print. They oppose the modern vision of an author as one who sits alone at a desk, expressing singular thoughts in a unique voice. They refuse to draw a clear distinction between private meditation and public communication. They confirm what one famous historian of early Protestantism proclaims, that even after the advent of print, texts were “carriers of relationships.”13 In their relational modes of presentation as in the relational dynamics of the poems themselves, they entwine matters of God and matters of court, public distribution and private meditation, patronage, friendship and spiritual utility. As we have seen, in the published book now attributed to Lock, for instance, the unnamed writer of the headnote claims the right to “use and publish” it; so too “A.L.,” the composer of the dedicatory letter, explains that the book serves as medicine for the soul if the reader will trust in what it can do; and the psalm poems themselves combine voices past and present to facilitate a relationship with God. Here, as in the other texts considered, social calculations frequently merge with claims of spiritual “use,” in ways that might seem corrupt

Authorship 25

or cynical to those who believe secular and religious motivations can be cleanly divided. The gender of the authors and the genre of the texts are relevant here, although not for the reasons usually assumed. When women writers aligned themselves with other voices, as they so often did, this does not mean simply that they were appealing to external authorities, in contrast to men, who could claim authority for themselves. Nor does it mean that women writers succeeded insofar as they successfully presented themselves as vessels for God or translators of words composed by another, whereas male authors had to claim to write for themselves. The point is subtler, although still easiest to track in writings by women and in religious writings in particular. Men authorized their writing by conforming to existing models, Susanne Woods and Margaret Hannay explain, as “Virgilians who styled their lives from low to high,” as “Horatians who taught by delighting,” or as “self-­crowned laureates.” Women, by contrast, “wrote because they claimed a special authority (from God, sororial devotion, or social class).”14 This contrast is significant, suggesting as it does that men could ground their authorship on the claim that they had the capacity to conform to a model, that they could presume likeness and thus aspire to do what great men before them had already done, whereas women’s authorship, starting from a presumption of difference, was grounded in their ability to successfully establish a relationship to a venerable authority. It is inadequate to say, however, as a too-­quick summary of this contrast might tempt us to do, that men could thereby claim authority for themselves while women had to attribute authority to others. Instead, it means that men could identify or imitate while women needed to relate.15 While both men and women, then, authorize their writing through their connections to others, the liminality of women writers and of religious poetry in this period encouraged a generative interest in relationality.16 As mediators, often providing material as well as dialogic support, as objects to be exchanged in and through texts, and as figures of authorial ambivalence,

26 Chapter One

women were well positioned to deflect or absorb Protestant fears that poetry represented human hubris rather than devotion.17 Their poem collections were liminal in the sense that they stood at the threshold of the Bible: neither Scripture themselves nor nonbiblical works, but instead paraphrases and poetic translations of the psalms and, in the case of our third example, of the story of Christ’s Passion. As authors, too, these women presented themselves, or were presented by their works, as standing at some distance from the poems now attributed to them: the psalm sonnet sequence attributed to Anne Lock was printed without an author’s name; Mary Sidney Herbert’s Psalter was begun and partially completed by her famous brother Philip; and Aemilia Lanyer’s numerous dedicatory poems insisted that the published book was entirely dependent on patrons. Collectively, these factors highlight what might otherwise escape notice: every author’s need to locate him-­or herself in relation to the text, to readers, and to traditions that made what he or she writes recognizable and authoritative. More specifically, this heightened concern with relationality converged with Protestant preoccupations. In a study of Protestant poetics, Nandra Perry argues that early modern Protestants reimagined the imitation of Christ by shifting it from a focus on devotional practices based on a monastic model of life to a “dialogic relationship with the Living Word.”18 The examples explored in this chapter reveal an analogous shift in authorship, from a mode of authorizing the writer through imitation or identification to a mode that conflated the authority of the writer with the spiritual usefulness of the text’s poetic relations.

Self-­Participant: Psalm Sonnets and Relational Authorship Relational authorship unfurls in forms both material and thematic in Lock’s sonnets as in her life. Daughter and wife of merchants, Lock grew up during the years when King Edward VI’s short reign inspired a widespread campaign to rid England of

Authorship 27

what committed Protestant reformers perceived as Catholic ritualism and superstition. She was married and the mother of two small children when the young king died and his Catholic sister Mary became Queen of England. Lock, who was by then a close confidant of the Scottish Protestant leader John Knox, joined Knox and other exiles in Geneva, Switzerland, where John Calvin’s theology was galvanizing efforts to create a theocracy. All of the elements of this journey—­her friendship with Knox, that her husband stayed behind in London and she rejoined him after her two-­year sojourn abroad, and the explicit discussions about Christian community that pervaded Geneva—­show clearly how religious commitments could enable new contexts and possibilities for relationships, for women as well as men, even within an enduringly patriarchal society.19 Similarly, the writing Lock did while in exile in Geneva and after her return to England confirms this entwining of theological commitments and relationships. In addition to translating Calvin’s sermons and composing psalm sonnets, she and Knox exchanged letters of advice and counsel, and it seems that she was in possession of many of Knox’s written works after his death.20 A line from one of the letters Knox addressed to Lock encapsulates the relational dynamic that motivated the psalm sonnets attributed to her: “God,” he wrote, “will make yourself a participant of the same comfort which you write unto me.”21 Here Knox, presenting himself as a prospective reader, solicits Lock’s authorship by explaining that what she writes will enable them both to participate in an interactive exchange of reassurance and consolation. God may be the source, but the comfort God provides is experienced through the texts these writers compose. The “use” that authorized relational authorship was a form of spiritual utility, translated into a form of Protestant poetics through Protestant poets’ “use” of the psalms. Psalms had long been understood as useful in the sense of didactic, providing ethical instruction, and what Michael Kuczynski describes as a “powerful form of self-­investigation and social action.”22 This

28 Chapter One

didacticism presumed that the texts had emotional appeal, but not that relationality per se was essential. The psalms were often described as a tool for examining the conscience and one’s own heart rather than a communal work. A quote from Basil the Great, in the Bishop’s Bible (1568), reminded readers that the book of Psalms was “a book of contemplations or secret meditations, whereby the godly speak solitarily and alone to almighty God.”23 So when the psalm sonnets in Anne Lock’s volume of translation are described as a “meditation written in the manner of a paraphrase,” the emphasis appears to be on the interiority intrinsic to the psalms.24 These psalm sonnets seem, in other words, to offer a gateway into an ever more privatized sense of self, where the soul communes alone with the Almighty. Countering this possibility is the fact that psalms were indisputably public, for they remained central to liturgy or public worship both before and after Henry VIII’s Reformation. Psalms were regularly prayed collectively throughout all the Calvinist reforms introduced during Edward VI’s short reign; during the reintroduction of Catholicism by Henry’s oldest daughter, Mary; as Anglicanism was consolidated and debated during Elizabeth I’s fifty years; and amid the high church–­low church disputes under James I. The number of hymns and other prayers varied between the Edwardian Primer issued in 1553, for example, and the Elizabethan Primer of 1559, but just as the psalms had been prayed daily in Christian monasteries throughout the Middle Ages, so they were recited regularly in Protestant churches. And yet questions about whether psalms were more significantly associated with private worship or public devotion threaten to distract from the way the psalm sonnet sequence attributed to Lock draws us into the dynamics of relational authorship. Anyone who spoke or wrote the psalms embarked on a relationship with God and the original psalmist as well as other readers.25 In this meditative sonnet, for example, written to express “the passioned [sorrowful] mind of the penitent sinner,” what we encounter is the speaker’s expression of a preexisting script:

Authorship 29

And then not daring with presuming eye Once to behold the angry heaven’s face, From troubled spirit I send confused cry, To crave the crumbs of all sufficing grace. With faltering knee I falling to the ground, Bending my yielding hands to heavens throne, Pour forth my piteous plaint with woeful sound, With smoking sighs, and oft repeated groan, Before the Lord, the Lord, whom sinner I, I cursed wretch, I have offended so, That dreading, in his wreckful wrath to die, And damned down to depth of hell to go, Thus tossed with pangs and passions of despair, Thus crave I mercy with repentant cheer. (lines 70–­84, pp. 63–­64)

Crying and craving but not daring to look, this speaker seems more interested in expressive despair than the dialectic of self-­ abnegation and self-­assertion some scholars of Renaissance literature would nominate as the defining characteristic of authorship then and now.26 In a culture where the question of how limited humans relate to an omnipotent God mirrored the problem that courtiers faced in the halls of court, many Renaissance authors presented themselves as all-­powerful creators, writing their own worlds into being, but also as ambivalent subjects, exposed to forces beyond their control.27 This was true of English Renaissance sonneteers in particular: the Petrarchan Philip Sidney and the lovelorn William Shakespeare became prototypes of the modern author because they presented themselves as creators at the mercy of the (male or female) beloved they described. As Elizabeth Heale puts it, this authorial “I” is both “self-­assertive” and “dispossessed,” a combination that proved a “deeply seductive invitation to future writers.”28 In the meditative sonnet we have just read, however, the speaker’s artful, distinctive descriptions of confusion, faltering, and sorrow offer instead a self-­understanding that comes to frui-

30 Chapter One

tion by being carefully composed in a form that presumes a listener and presents the function of the sonnet as a collaborative form of spiritual engagement. In keeping with the emphasis on interaction rather than identity, the speaker’s voice is genderless, and remains so throughout the psalm paraphrases (by contrast, for example, with Thomas Wyatt’s earlier psalm sonnets, in which the speaker, imagined as David, is referred to as “he”). Speaking in the first person, lamenting personal failures, the lyric voice also keeps attention trained on others: So I blind wretch, whom God’s inflamed ire With piercing stroke hath thrown unto the ground, Amid my sins still groveling in the mire Find not the way that other oft have found (lines 1–­4, p. 62)

In this poem, the speaker who describes herself in a state of total blindness and confusion, “groveling in the mire,” is nevertheless able to articulate an alternative by eloquently recounting what others have found: Whom cheerful glimpse of gods abounding grace Hath oft relieved and oft with shining light Hath brought to joy out of the ugly place

(lines 5–­7, p. 62)

In this way, the first half of the sonnet creates a balance, counterpoising initial hopelessness with evocations of shining light, joy, and release. In the second half of the sonnet, the speaker continues to bewail her blindness but hints of the “shining light” (line 6) that others have found; the possibility of bringing joy out of the “ugly place” (line 8) of a sinner’s dark soul glimmers still when the speaker describes how “blind, alas, I grope about for grace” (line 11). These prefatory sonnets thereby set the stage for a sinner who does not in fact have to face God alone, suspecting as she does that God alone offers no mercy or hope. The wretched penitent

Authorship 31

instead writes the self into a place also inhabited by others. If, then, “my chaos and my heap of sin doth lie, / between me and thy mercies shining light” (lines 11–­12, p. 65), as the speaker puts it in the fourth psalm sonnet, readers who apprehend these words share not only in the chaos and the sin but also in the fact that these states of being can be communicated. In this sense, the reader and poem alike stand between the speaker and God. And by imbuing words with the capacity to express emotion, these prefatory sonnets enact an affective bond: “Pour forth my piteous plaint with woeful sound,” the speaker demands in the fifth prefatory sonnet. “With smoking sighs, and oft repeated groan” (lines 7–­8, pp. 63–­64). With woeful sounds and sighs and groans, artful verse becomes emotional communication, underscoring that the speaker writes to be heard. The twenty-­one sonnets that follow the five prefatory meditations each “paraphrase” Psalm 51, a repetition that underscores the authorial sense that intimate engagement with a single biblical passage or poem is generative rather than monotonous. As Anne Lake Prescott observes, “To write divine poetry by following David is to entangle oneself in a knot of identities, voices, selves, for which we have no adequate vocabulary.”29 But in Lock’s own day the psalmist’s voice would have been deeply familiar and appealingly recognizable as the voice of David, known well even to illiterate Christians from church services at which the psalms were sung.30 Devout poets, in other words, entered into a relationship with the psalms’ many voices. Prescott’s observation that we have no “adequate vocabulary” to describe this relational dynamic underscores the difficulty we now have in recognizing what the text presumes. Re-­creating the psalms, whether through translation, meditation, or paraphrase, could not simply entail mimicking the psalmist’s interior voice. By recasting the psalms in a new language, a new metrics, and a new textual context, Lock’s sonnets meditating on Psalm 51 treated the psalmist’s personal appeal to God as words that could be appropriated in another place and time, spoken anew, in the first person, by another person entirely.

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In the sonnet sequence, these dynamics are made visible even in the layout of the page, for each of the twenty-­one sonnets appears with a translated line from the psalm at the right margin, in italics. The sonnets themselves are not directly paraphrasing, or even in any direct or obvious way dilating on key words or themes from the quoted line of the original psalm. Rather, the line from the psalm appears as a kind of visible reminder that the sonnets enact a call-­and-­response, with scriptural words echoing and interacting with the “meditations” of a “penitent sinner.” Psalm 51, the fourth and most famous of the seven penitential psalms, is also known as “Miserere” from its first word in the Latin version. Lock’s first sonnet begins by reiterating that plea for mercy before expanding, as the psalm itself does not, on the speaker’s hesitation to speak directly to God. Have mercy, God, for thy great mercies sake. O God: my God, unto my shame I say, Being fled from thee, so as I dread to take Thy name in wretched mouth, and fear to pray Or ask the mercy that I have abused. But, God of mercy, let me come to thee: Nor for justice, that justly am accused: Which self word Justice so amazes me, That scarce I dare thy mercy sound again. But mercy, Lord, yet suffer me to crave. Mercy is thine: Let me not cry in vain, Thy great mercy for my great fault to have. Have mercy, God, pity my penitence With greater mercy than my great offence.

Have mercy upon me (o God) after thy great mercy

(lines 1–­14, p. 64)

Where the psalm that inspired this sonnet moves from the request for mercy, as in the marginal line, to the request for aid and repeated confessions of the sinner’s transgression, Lock’s sonnet meditation instead questions the very possibility of dialogue it seeks. The speaker who says she “dreads” to “take thy

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name” (lines 3–­4) nevertheless asks that she might “come to thee” (line 6). She reiterates the admission that she is presumptuous to “dare” to seek mercy (line 9), then again speaks directly to God: “But mercy, Lord, yet suffer me to crave” (line 10). This written request, asking the recipient to provide the craving for mercy that the sonnet itself expresses, is but one example of the sonnet’s relational authorship. The interactivity is literally inked onto the page, where the fragments of a translated psalm, visibly distinct but spatially proximate, stage the interaction between the biblical author and the sonnet’s speaker. The content of the sonnet also stages this interaction by echoing, answering, and deviating from the scriptural text and by explicitly raising questions about the difficulties and necessity of speaking to God. The reader who is caught up in these intimate expressions of fear and desire for contact thereby participates in the sonnets’ relational authorship. Instead of articulating a single, vertical bond between petitioner and God, the translated psalms create horizontal as well as vertical relationships: just as the psalmist gives the speaker words to express his or her own interiority, the speaker who translates and poeticizes the psalms makes the words of Scripture available to the reader. Psalm sonnets introduced as a private “meditation” of a singular “sinner” thereby claim singularity and collectivity simultaneously. The written work of reflection by one wayward soul is simultaneously performed to others, for others, for all are wayward, and all should be penitent.31 In this way, the psalmist’s own voice enables the poet to speak differently to and about God. The poet does not so much mimic or echo the psalmist but enters into a relationship with the psalmist, inspired by an initial harmonization to sing a relational song. In analyzing these psalm sonnets, Christopher Warley argues that the sonnet sequence commodifies sin, turning personal confession into an exchangeable object of value. Like the sonnets in Tottel’s Miscellany, arguably the most influential poem collection of the era, he argues, Lock’s psalm sonnets participated in the “relocation of authority out of social institutions and into

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commodity ownership.”32 These printed psalm sonnets authorize themselves internally rather than externally, Warley explains, by demonstrating the malleability and transferability of the sonnet form rather than by appealing to the status of the writer or the authority of his coterie. Warley consequently concludes that the printed psalm sonnets are proto-­modern, because they offer an early example of how commodified exchange came to define the modern subject—­and, by extension, the modern author.33 Warley is right to argue that the texts were internally rather than externally authorized. But by equating their dynamics of exchange with commodification, he misses an opportunity to explore the most interesting feature of these textual dynamics: the presentation and content of Lock’s psalm sonnets reveal that their use value was not calculable but relational. Rather than commodifying sin—­as though it had equivalent value in a different register, like an object that could be purchased with money or traded for something of equal worth—­these poems were written, packaged, and published to communicate sin, making poetic confession a relational act. Published as meditations, the psalm sonnets were presented as simultaneously private and interactive, as texts that authorized themselves by being useful to speaker and reader alike. Pulling out of the merchant economy does not mean a lyric “I” that is solitary and individual. Instead, in Lock’s meditations and psalm paraphrases, the lyric voice presents itself as a participant more than a merchant or retailer, enabling the comfort it seeks not through commanded, commodified exchange but instead through relational dynamics.

“By thy Spirit One”: Textual Circulation and Relational Authority in the Sidney Psalter Whether this relational authorship might still be relevant to readers preoccupied with political problems is a question that Mary Sidney Herbert poses explicitly in “Even now that Care,” a poem she wrote for her monarch, Queen Elizabeth. Together with “To the Angel Spirit,” a poetic eulogy for her brother, Sid-

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ney Herbert’s poem addressed to Elizabeth appears in a manuscript copy of the Sidney Psalter, the metrical English translation of the book of Psalms begun by Philip Sidney and completed by Sidney Herbert after his death.34 “Even now that Care,” like the manuscript in which it appears—­probably prepared to present to the Queen on an official visit to the Sidney Herbert estate—­ reflects Sidney Herbert’s astute appreciation of how political and personal relationships entwined in her own life as in her society. Sidney Herbert married into one of the most powerful families in England, and although little was seen or heard from her for two years after her brother’s death in 1586, her dramatic public reappearance in 1588 proclaimed the importance not only of her family but also of her own role within it: surrounded by a retinue of nearly one hundred servants dressed in blue and gold, she returned to London in time for Accession Day, celebrating the anniversary of the Queen’s accession to the throne and England’s then-­recent defeat of the Spanish Armada.35 In the psalms, as in her dedicatory poem and eulogy, Sidney Herbert similarly appears on the page as subject, adviser, and participant in a relational network that depended as much on emotional bonds—­on bonds created in and through the poems—­as on public displays of fidelity. Sidney Herbert thereby positioned her poems in a place that was neither wholly private nor avowedly public and authorized them not simply as expressions of emotion or as commodities affirming the primacy of possession. Scholars reading these dedicatory poems and the Sidney Psalter they introduce have noted models of authorship in excess of the solitary writer. Yet they have not yet made explicit the central claim made here: that Sidney Herbert’s model of authorship was poetically relational. In her work on the public nature of the English Reformation’s seemingly private religious poetry, Ramie Targoff astutely argues, for example, that the Sidney Psalter demonstrated that poetry could be a form of prayer. This psalter’s model of devotion was, she explains, “simultaneously personal and liturgical,” for the poems in this collection read more like a “congregational hymn”

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than a “personal meditation.” 36 By contrast with other scholars who have emphasized the collection’s poetic virtuosity and the creation of what many scholars identify as a distinctively introspective “I,” Targoff rightly emphasizes the importance of the public worship. If the poetry is creative and distinctive, as the psalm translations and other poems by Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert were, we tend to assume that they must be the expression of an individual voice and the means of affirming the importance of individual voices. Communal and personal, like public and private, are not exhaustive options, however. Prayer itself is interactive, both collectively and personally.37 What Sidney Herbert’s dedicatory poems highlight, her psalm translations also reveal: that the poems were authorized by the relations they enacted. Where Philip Sidney defended poetry by arguing that it “deserves not to be scourged out of the Church of God,” as Targoff notes, and so with Mary Sidney Herbert created a collection that could contribute to the Protestant project of liturgical reform,38 his sister’s dedicatory poems emphasized that poetry was valuable insofar as it enacted relationships. Others have argued that what Wendy Wall calls Sidney Herbert’s “ideology of authorship” was distinctive in its ability to make space for the political claims of a woman’s voice or the public presentation of private feelings.39 My claim, by contrast, is that Sidney Herbert’s ideology of authorship was distinctive in presenting poetry as a relational offering that could pay “infinite debts” by linking people to one another and to God, in and through the interactions the poetry inscribes.40

“Even now that Care”: The Utility of Relational Authorship What good will it do the Queen, Sidney Herbert’s dedicatory poem asks at the outset, to receive “Rhymes”?41 The Queen is great, but so are her worries. It seems presumptive to detain a monarch with poetry when the cares of state demand her attention. Describing Elizabeth as one who must deal with Europe in “these most active times,” Sidney Herbert shows she is well aware that her sovereign confronts military threats, shifting alle-

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giances, and religious conflicts. She makes no promise her poetry will help with any of this.42 What use, then, is the poem? What authority can its speaker claim? The answer Sidney Herbert gives is not exactly what a reader then or now might expect. “Even now that Care” does not dwell on how an overworked monarch needs distraction. It does not insist that a pious queen benefits from scriptural reading. And the speaker does not contend that the Queen, as a savvy political actor, might learn something about tyrants and divine justice from the book of Psalms that Sidney Herbert and her brother have translated. Over the course of twelve stanzas, these possibilities are all alluded to but not presented as a satisfying account of this dedicatory poem—­or of the psalm translations that “Even now that Care” commends to Elizabeth.43 Instead, Sidney Herbert’s dedicatory poem presents itself as useful by modeling a relational selfhood and offering that relational selfhood to the Queen. The poem claims to authorize itself, in other words, by presenting the love between Sidney Herbert and her brother as the source of the poem that in turn reveals Elizabeth’s internal relationship with King David, biblical author of the psalms. The poem’s dependence on the relationship between Mary and Philip is introduced in the third stanza, when the speaker talks about what the “Senders” of the poem owe to their recipient: Then these the Posts of Duty and Goodwill shall press to offer what their Senders owe; Which once in two, now in one Subject go, the poorer left, the richer wrest away: Who better might (O might ah word of woe.) have giv’n for me what I for him defray.

(lines 19–­24)

The poem stakes out the parameters of a relationship defined by both “Duty” and “Goodwill,” by calculations of obligation and compensation as well as expressions of love and longing. Sidney Herbert’s predictable expression of humility, her lament that she, the “poorer” is left behind to do what her “richer” brother would

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have done better, also underscores that the love and sorrow that binds them enables her to give what “once in two” they together created. Love and grief thus make possible the mutual work Sidney Herbert now offers to the Queen: How can I name whom sighing sighs extend, and not unstop my tears’ eternal spring? But he did warp, I weav’d this web to end.

(lines 25–­27)

Sadness prevents the speaker from naming the one she mourns. Yet she can describe their collaboration: rather than a woman weeping alone at her loom, she is an interactive weaver, completing the work her brother started.44 According to Wendy Wall, Sidney Herbert’s use of the metaphor of weaving makes her own role “perfunctory” while her brother’s is “imaginative.”45 But the notion of textuality as weaving—­a notion that goes back to Ovid’s Philomela—­makes the shuttle itself the “voice” of the text. By envisioning the creation of the poem as a shared process of warping and weaving, Sidney Herbert shifts attention away from herself and Philip to their collaborative work. The next line of the poem underscores this importance of collaboration, declaring that the “stuff ” Mary and Philip created together was “not ours” but instead a shared creation that made the “Psalmist King” present to an English queen. Sidney Herbert’s poems create the time and space necessary for relationships to come into relief. The poignant emphasis on the word “might” in the previous stanza’s lament for her brother—­“ Who better might (O might ah word of woe.)”—­points up the unavailability of an alternative time or a counterfactual history.46 So the history inscribed in the poem—­the present—­is one in which Philip and Mary, King David and Queen Elizabeth, are both imaginatively and actually aligned through this poetic present: the stuff not ours, our work no curious thing, Wherein yet well we thought the Psalmist King Now English denizened, though Hebrew born,

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Would to thy music undispleased sing, Oft having worse, without repining worn;

(lines 28–­32)

Words originally composed by the Psalmist King, now translated and poeticized by Mary and Philip, join with the Queen’s own contribution (“thy music”). The psalms become a living song newly present to the English queen who can now sing together with the Hebrew-­speaking king. Possession merges with presence, as the poem integrates possessive claims about words that are “not ours” and music that belongs to the Queen into the poem’s collaborative song. “Even now that Care” repeatedly enacts this oscillation be­ tween assertions of ownership and avowals that the poem weaves all the participants into relationship with one another. Describing “our work” as “thine own” (line 41), Sidney Herbert affirms that it all belongs to Elizabeth. “What English is, by many names is thine,” (line 42), she writes. Inspiration, too, should be attributed to Elizabeth: thy seat the shrine, where Muses hang their vowed memories: where Wit, where Art, where all that is divine conceived best, and best defended lies.

(lines 45–­48)

Everything here is attributed to the Queen, as though the poem is envisioning a vortex of sovereign possession. And yet the subsequent stanza names the psalmist king a beloved consort, as questions of possession alternate with affirmations of love: Yet here who minds so fit a Patroness For Authors state or writings argument? A King should only to a Queen be sent. God’s beloved choice unto his chosen love:

(lines 51–­56)

The Queen is a “Patroness,” and rightly so. Here a subservient subject predictably exalts her sovereign, justifying what might otherwise seem a woman’s inappropriate role as patron of a bib-

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lical author. In one sense, these lines simply expand Elizabeth’s dominion, to give her ownership of the biblical text. Just as important, however, is that these lines establish the preeminence and authority of the poem. The poem itself is figured as the king, beloved by God and united to one God loves. The poem itself makes this union possible. In subsequent stanzas, these monarchs appear as both powerful and loving. Elizabeth is united with David, ruling as he ruled, like him confronting enemies but sanctioned by God, “for even thy Rule is painted in his Reign: / both clear in right: both near by wrong oppressed” (lines 65–­66). But then the lofty reach of monarchical power gives way to an image of intimate companionship: “Thus hand in hand with him thy glories walk: / but who can trace them where alone they go?” (lines 73–­74). By inscribing a tableau that exceeds the poet’s authority, the poem enacts a relational model that the monarchs inhabit, alone together. The poem does not present itself as all knowing or voyeuristic. The speaker’s authority is not attributed to her superior ability to see into her character’s lives or to know about them what they cannot know about themselves, but instead to her poem’s capacity to create relationships. The final resounding line of this dedicatory poem affirms that questions of possession have given way to interactive engagement: “Sing what God does, and do what men may sing” (line 96). Heaven and earth come together in this conclusion, not to claim the divine stature of an earthly queen or the sacred nature of the poem itself but to declare that a reader might be guided by a poet’s song to sing together with God. The two bonds the poem has emphasized throughout, between Philip and Mary and Elizabeth and David, thereby culminate in a line where the speaker’s relationship with God encompasses her readers as well. In this way the poem answers its own question—­what use are poems in these “most active times”?—­by suggesting that poems are useful because of the relationships they create.

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“To the Angel Spirit”: Doubled Interest and Coupled Work Mary Sidney Herbert similarly draws the reader into a relational web in “To the Angel Spirit of the most excellent Sir Philip Sidney,” the elegiac poem bound together in a presentation copy of the psalms alongside “Even now that Care.” The first line of “Angel Spirit” may seem to restrict the readership to the beloved brother Mary Sidney Herbert’s speaker addresses directly: “To thee pure spirit, to thee alone addressed.” And the second line may seem to reiterate the importance of possessive claims by asserting that what they together have created belongs wholly and only to Philip: “This coupled work, by double interest thine.” Yet the emotional intensity of the first line puts the second line’s claims about interest and possession in a different light. Instead of simply claiming proprietary ownership, the poem pairs coupling and possession, basing its value (“double interest”) on the relationship that enabled it, even as this relationship licenses the speaker to write poetry of her own: so “dared my Muse with thine it self combine / as mortal stuff with that which is divine” (lines 5–­6). No longer just an inadequate human author, she has become part of a spiritually inspired partnership. This emphasis on the difference between human and divine means that the speaker—­like the text—­does not aspire to undifferentiated union, as the second stanza explains: That heaven’s King may deign his own transformed in substance no, but superficial attire by thee put on; to praise, not to aspire To those high Tones, so in themselves adorned, which angels sing in their celestial Choir, and all of tongues with soul and voice admire These sacred Hymns thy Kingly Prophet [David] formed. (lines 8–­14)

Rather than perfect unity, what the speaker and text alike seek instead is connection. By asserting that the goal of the psalm translation was to change only the appearance of sacred hymns

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sung by a celestial choir, “to praise, not to aspire,” the speaker presents this poem as engaging with what another has done rather than creating something wholly new or different. These poetic relations are not just thematic but also formally enacted. The care taken with rhyme patterns and meter mirrors the speaker’s interest in hierarchy and distinctions. Spatially, lines stand at some distance from one another, varying in length, with extra space between stanzas and intermittent capitalization promoting some words over others. All this serves as the medium not only for a connection of kinship between Sidney Herbert and her brother but also for relationships that span the distance between heaven and earth. The layout and typography reinforce the hierarchy affirmed in the content: just as “King” is capitalized in the first line, the references to the Almighty’s work (“high Tones” and “sacred Hymns” of a “Kingly Prophet”) are similarly emphasized. The prominence of these three lines is further established with initial capitalization and the low bass of their end rhymes (“transformed,” “adorned,” “formed”) contrasting with the sharper higher sound of the subservient lines (“tire,” “aspire,” “Choir,” “admire”). The divine literally looms large here, relative to human actors. And yet the same structure also demonstrates that the one balances the other; that just as the structure of the poem requires the alternating rhymes, so too God’s words are given voice by human poets. The poem thereby situates the speaker not only in relation to Philip but also, through use of the second-­person “thee,” any reader, as well as two other figures: the “Kingly Prophet” and “heaven’s King.” In this eulogy to her brother, Sidney Herbert also speaks of vulnerability and imperfection by emphasizing the poem’s failures and the pain caused by the distances she seeks to span. With imagery evocative of the gangrenous wounds Philip Sidney sustained, she describes their finished work as a “half maimed piece,” with “deep wounds enlarged, long festered in their gall.” The pain is acute, leaving the heart to weep even when the eyes are dry. “Fresh bleeding smart,” she writes, “not eye but heart tears fall” (lines 18–­20). But in this context, such imperfections and painful

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separations become the basis not of alienation but of collaboration. Insistently reminding both the reader and herself that she and Philip are not the same, not united and not even together, Sidney Herbert nonetheless advances a vision of joint work. The poem as a work belongs to her because it belongs so thoroughly to him. This work thus simultaneously marks her distance from and her access to her brother: “Yet here behold, (oh wert thou to behold!)” (line 22), the speaker exclaims, a paradoxical imperative that turns a lamented absence into a form of presence. The parenthetical, “(oh wert thou to behold!),” echoes the parenthetical in the dedicatory poem to Elizabeth, “(O might ah word of woe.).” Set apart this way, these sighs of regret suggest that emotions are distinct from words even as the medium—­a carefully crafted poem presented as an act of love—­weaves words and emotions together. Words alone are not enough, but neither is love, for what inspires the poem, and what the poem seeks to express, “ ’tis zealous love, love which hath never done, / Nor can enough in world of words unfold” (lines 27–­28). What can the world of words unfold? In these last two lines of the stanza, the overlapping claims about what love has not done, and cannot do, give way to the alliterative force of this concluding phrase. A disclaimer about the power of the “world of words” thereby encapsulates what the poem conveys, that love and words are both at stake, their powers entwined. The alliterative phrase also separates the verb “unfold” from its subject, “love.” A simpler grammatical structure, placing the subject and verb together without an intervening phrase, would more clearly convey the basic meaning: Mary Sidney Herbert’s love for her brother cannot ensure the success of her poetry. Stranded at the end of the stanza, however, “unfold” is recast from a verb describing what love cannot do (love cannot unfold enough) to a concluding imperative, directing the reader to participate in the world of words: “in world of words unfold.” In this way, through unfolding words, poetry inspired by love might span the distance between “mortal stuff ” and “that which is divine.” Having made clear that love and words are both at stake, the

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next stanza of “Angel Spirit” recalibrates poetry’s capacity to pay debts: And since it has no further scope to go, nor other purpose but to honor thee, Thee in thy works, where all the Graces be, As little streams with all their all do flow to their great sea, due tribute’s grateful fee; so press my thoughts, my burdened thoughts in me, To pay the debt of Infinites I owe

(lines 29–­35)

An infinite debt cannot be paid. A tribute might serve, nevertheless, not as a form of compensation but as a show of love. This recalls a late medieval theological debate, intensified by the Reformation, about whether finite humans have the ability to do anything that deserves acknowledgment from an infinite God. Where some forms of theology and devotion affirmed that created humans could freely perform works of charity and love that would make them worthy of salvation (and in that sense pay the debt they owed to the Creator), others viewed this as unduly optimistic, insisting that the best humans could do fell far short of what was required. Some late medieval theologians created a kind of compromise position, suggesting that God had decreed he would reward good effort: those who did the best that naturally created humans were capable of would be rewarded with grace, even though the reward was infinitely greater than the work.47 Mainstream Protestant theologians such as Martin Luther considered this calculation of relative merit a violation of Christ’s all-­sufficient gift: only Christ could do what was required, and that is why salvation came through faith in Christ rather than the amassing of good works. Sidney Herbert upholds this Protestant premise, condensing Philip and God as she confirms that the works and grace belong to him alone. With this same imagery, however, she also envisions a partnership, the possibility that the tribute she offers serves as a tributary—­ supplying and aiding that to which it contributes.

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The goal of paying a debt thereby sets the stage for Sidney Herbert’s claims that her written work, however limited, enables the poet—­and the poem—­to contribute to a greater whole as God’s work, Philip’s work, and her own all flow together, like streams feeding into a great sea. She admits the limits of her contribution, “since it has no further scope to go.” She claims to be motivated by a relationship rather than an individual search for glory, for the poem has “Nor other purpose but to honor thee.” And she observes parenthetically that great gifts reside in written work (“in thy works where all the Graces be”). All of these lines serve together as the “little streams” that audaciously, “with all their all,” become part of something much larger. The participatory work of the text enacts the authorial relationship. Combining a keen sense of poetry’s shortcomings with an expansive sense of its gratuitous power, Mary Sidney Herbert thereby hones in on a Protestant dilemma present also in the psalms: words are necessary but not sufficient. “The sacrifice that god will hold respected,” as Sidney Herbert puts it in her translation of Psalm 51, “is the heart-­broken soul, the spirit dejected” (lines 48–­49). If God will “unlock my lips,” the psalmist affirms in Sidney Herbert’s version, “then shall my mouth oh lord thy honor sing” (my emphasis). Divine aid or grace is required even to say what needs to be said, and even so the words suffice only if they express the longing of a broken heart. In her poem addressed to Philip, Sidney Herbert echoes these moments from Psalm 51, describing her work as the “dearest offerings of my heart” while lamenting that what she offers from the heart must be reduced to written form. How can words suffice? And yet they are what the poet, like the psalmist, has to give, as she declares in the penultimate stanza: To which these dearest offerings of my heart dissolved to Ink, while pens’ impressions move the bleeding veins of never dying love: I render here: these wounding lines of smart sad Characters indeed of simple love

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not Art nor skill which abler wits do prove, Of my full soul receive the meanest part.

(lines 78–­84)

Writing is inadequate if offerings of the heart are “dissolved to ink.” Writing nevertheless keeps love alive and vital, as the pen moves “The bleeding veins of never dying love.” And writing is, moreover, the medium of the psalms, the “wounding lines” that, as the ambiguous preposition “of ” suggests, both express and belong to “smart / sad Characters” and “simple love.” The poem is thereby something received and something given. The words “I render here” echo the composition of another and serve as an offering to the original composer. At the time that Sidney Herbert wrote this poem, probably in 1595, a primary meaning of “render” was to “repeat” or “return thanks.” This was the definition assumed in the Book of Common Prayer, for example. A new meaning was coming into use, however, for already in 1599, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, “to render” meant “to create or depict in an artistic sense.”48 As Sidney Herbert presents her “wounding lines” and “simple love” as an offering, she gestures also at a partnership of shared creativity; echoing the psalmist’s offering of a “heart-­broken soul,” she also creates collectively.49 Moreover, by crowding a striking series of adjectives to modify “lines” (“wounding,” “smart,” “sad,” “simple”), Sidney Herbert underscores that she has collaborated with the psalmist. Together, through her modified descriptions of his original lines, they have articulated an array of experiences and emotions that make the unembellished notions of art or skill possessed by “abler wits” seem impoverished by contrast. When Sidney Herbert claims that her lines are deficient, she is not simply being modest. Instead, she is making an epistemological claim about the limits of love’s knowledge. The function of words, she says, is to express what the heart feels. And love can become an offering only by being expressed in words. It follows, therefore, that the interchange of words—­written, read, and co-­ created, by the psalmist—­is love’s offering.

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The end of “Angel Spirit” emphasizes the consequent imperative on the reader to take what the poem offers. Sidney Herbert emphasizes the importance of the reader’s participation by commanding just this at the beginning and end of the first line of the final stanza: “Receive these hymns, these obsequies [psalms or funeral rites] receive” (my emphasis). The mandate is not passive receptivity, but an exchange, as the speaker makes clear in the two lines that follow, when she explains that her offering will be “well borne” if some “mark” of “thy sweet spirit” appears. Although the direct addressee is Philip Sidney, he is not the only reader noted here. Mary Sidney Herbert underscores that she is also addressing a wider readership with her signatory line, in which she identifies herself not as “your beloved sister,” but more impersonally: “By the Sister of that Incomparable Sidney.” Thus, not only the (dead) brother or the Queen addressed in the other dedicatory poem, but all who might read the poem, are invited to collaborate with Sidney Herbert and the psalmist in “marking” the text with a spiritual reading. The poem functions as a “payment” in this manner, but only insofar as it creates what it offers, collaboratively. Questions of possession thereby merge with accounts of participation. The authorship of these poems written in the voice of a single speaker, like the translated psalms they introduce, serves as payment because it is relational work.

“Unto Others They Might Comfort Give”: Aemilia Lanyer’s Patronage Poems The strength of Mary Sidney Herbert’s reputation and prominence not only as a writer but also as a patroness is reflected in the fact that she was one of several women Aemilia Lanyer addressed in the dedicatory poems that prefaced Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, the volume of poetry published under Lanyer’s name in 1611.50 The title of the poem dedicated to Sidney Herbert conveys something of the relational dynamics elaborated in the poem itself: “The Author’s Dream to the Lady Marie, the Countess Dowager of Pembroke.” Evoking a singular author as the

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source of the dream, the title’s ambiguous “to” locates not only the dream itself but also the poem it inspired between the “author” and “Lady Marie.” Locating the poem this way, between writer and reader, the title suggests that the author’s dream is a shared creation. Because Lanyer was a woman who had many contacts with rich and powerful people, but few claims to social status herself, it is easy to understand her pragmatic reasons for writing patronage poems. Her father was a court musician, probably from a Jewish family, who had immigrated to England from Italy. For several years, Lanyer was the mistress of Queen Elizabeth’s lord chamberlain. That relationship ended when she became pregnant, and she subsequently married another court musician. Lanyer and her husband were often financially strapped; after his death she fought a long and unsuccessful court battle with her husband’s family for the rights to a patent he had been awarded, all the while supporting herself and her son by working as a teacher. Lanyer’s interest in relations thus reflects her concern with the problem of efficacy. What might compel one of the noblewomen she addresses, someone with no economic or social motive for reading poems by a social inferior, to pick them up, to pay attention, to interact, as it were, with the text, with the writer, with the subjects of her poems? What inspires someone to try to emulate virtuous people? To love Christ? Lanyer’s poems promised to give her readers something, to bring them closer to Christ, to enable them to reach out beyond themselves, to traverse some of the distance between human beings and between humanity and divinity. In that sense, the success of the poems hinged on Lan­ yer’s claim that these texts transformed their readers by creating and nurturing relationships. To judge by the historical record, they failed to convince a wide readership that the relationships they enacted were important. Only nine copies of the published volume survive, and there is no evidence that Lanyer received any financial or social benefits from her writing. Sociologically speaking, it is no surprise that the rich and powerful did not embrace the poems of the wife

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of a court musician. In the poems themselves, however, Lanyer’s appeals to the status and power of the women she addresses intertwine with lines insisting that the very act of writing is relational. In this way, the poems represent a model of relational authorship that is not easily categorized as pragmatic or spiritual. Lanyer did not reach an audience in the ways that we typically recognize. But just as the fifteenth-­century French writer Christine de Pizan created a community for herself by composing The Book of the City of Ladies, even as her work attests to the loneliness of exclusion, and the ways she felt cut off from a community of writers, past and present, so too in Lanyer’s case a focus on relationality offers another way to evaluate the efficacy of her poems.51 In these dedicatory poems, Lanyer emphasizes that the meaning of the text is informed by its readers; that she writes it for readers who have inspired her, for women whose exemplary piety and virtue make it possible for her to write about virtue; and that reading her work can in turn make them better people and increase their love for Christ. Thus Lanyer infuses the pragmatics of patronage (the need for the socially inferior to flatter their superiors in order to curry money or favor) with devotional significance (the need to inspire and cultivate love of Christ and one’s neighbor). The dedicatory poem to Sidney Herbert enacts this by equating reading with sacramental reception. If Mary Sidney Herbert deigns to grace the text with her attention, she will see Christ, Lanyer explains. Not only that, she will receive Christ, as from a priest: Receive him here by my unworthy hand, And read his paths of fair humility.

(lines 221–­22)

In these two compact lines, Lanyer evokes a Protestant version of the Eucharist: real reception through textual apprehension.52 She herself acts as the priest, the one with the power to give Christ, not because of her worthiness but because of the worthiness of the one she gives. Thus, like priests and recipients in the

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Catholic mass, Lanyer both asserts and displaces herself. According to Catholic theology, it is not the person of the priest but his office that enables him to offer the sacrifice. And according to Catholic theology, the effect of the sacrifice is not dependent on the recipient who receives the grace it imparts. In this textual scenario, Lanyer presumes to imagine that her poem—­not just the inspiration or vision she writes about, but the writing itself—­ means she can give her readers what Christ has given them all. Lanyer thereby identifies herself with Christ himself, inviting others to Christ’s supper: And therefore, first I here present my Dream, And next, invite her Honour to my feast

(lines 205–­6)

The feast is simultaneously Christ’s Passion and Lanyer’s poem about it. And Lanyer and Mary Sidney Herbert alike, or so this poem seeks to claim, work together as writers to place themselves together with Christ, to fill the eyes, the hearts, the tongues, the ears . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Of after-­coming ages, which shall read Her love, her zeal, her faith, and piety.

(lines 160–­62)

The text imparts a visceral presence. The reader of the poem can see, feel, taste, and hear the goodness it describes. As Christ comes to the speaker, he is thereby imparted to Sidney Herbert, the addressee and subject of the poem, who in turn makes the goodness of Christ manifest to the reader.53 This relationship with Christ is the premise—­and the offering—­of the relationships in other dedicatory poems as well. In a poem to Lady Anne Clifford, for example, Lanyer asserts that their relationship (the relationship created in and through the text) is dynamic and contingent upon their actions. Thus she announces that her gift is conditional:

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Therefore to you (good Madam) I present His lovely love, more worth than purest gold, Who for your sake his precious blood hath spent, His death and passion here you may behold, And view this Lamb, that to the world was sent, Whom your fair soul may in her arms enfold.

(lines 113–­18)

What the speaker offers is not a mirror, a self-­reflection, or favors exchanged between author and reader, but Christ. Yet this is not Christ as a static image or a self-­contained figure of suffering. Here instead the poem presents “His lovely love.” Christ is love itself. Lanyer hereby insists that social place is not as important as relationships. One may act because of the role one inhabits, but one should act because of who and how one loves: For well you know, this world is but a Stage Where all do play their parts, and must be gone; Here’s no respect of persons, youth, nor age, Death seizes all, he never spareth one, None can prevent or stay that tyrant’s rage, But Jesus Christ the Just . . . He is the stone the builders did refuse, Which you, sweet Lady, are to build upon.

(lines 121–­26, 129–­30)

Invoking the Elizabethan commonplace that life is fleeting, Lanyer then overlays the claim that her reader might act out Christ’s role (“All worldly blessings he vouchsafes to you, / That to the poor you may return his due”) in wording that works both to affirm Lanyer’s claim on Anne Clifford’s attention and her religious message that her needs are akin to Christ’s needs, and that what she offers is Christ’s love. In a poem to the most powerful of her desired patrons, Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of James I and generous supporter of writers and musicians, Lanyer positions herself not only as a

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humble supplicant but also—­and more intriguing—­as a participant in the scene she scripts. Writing in the first person, Lanyer confidently directs the Queen to read, and to be transformed by, the poem: Look in this Mirror of a worthy Mind, Where some of your fair Virtues will appear; Though all it is impossible to find, Unless my Glass were crystal, or more clear: Which is dim steel, yet full of spotless truth, And for one look from your fair eyes it su’th.

(lines 37–­42)

The first-­person speaker hereby invites the Queen to embark on a mutual process of change. Describing the poem as a mirror through which the Queen might see herself in the best possible light, Lanyer also suggests that the poem itself will not be the clear, reflective surface that makes this perception possible unless the Queen gazes upon it. It is difficult to fully appreciate the dynamic process described in this verse; it is far easier to envision texts and mirrors alike as static objects.54 Yet just as mirroring is interactive in the sense that it depends on the relative position of the glass and the viewer, so too the text’s capacity to communicate involves engagement from the reader as well as the writer. What others have treated as a complicated theoretical point, Lanyer conveys with a simple metaphor. Her text is changed by those who read it, and those who read it are changed by the text. If not a claim that Aemilia Lanyer, humble writer, and Anne of Denmark, exalted queen and patron, are friends, it is nevertheless a claim that they might encounter each other in and through a written text, and that the encounter might have real effects on how they perceive themselves and understand the world. If the Queen can see herself in the text, Lanyer continues, she can, then, see Christ in the text: “Here may your sacred Majesty behold / That mighty Monarch both of heav’n and earth” (lines 43–­44). Lanyer’s claim about her poem makes sense only when we ac-

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cept the conflation of mirror and vessel. The poem contains truth, but its truth is a reflection of the Queen—­not the Queen in all her imperfections, but the Queen as she sees herself in the mirror of the poem, as one who gazes upon Christ, perfection itself and thus the source of salvation. This vision of the devotional necessity of relationships does not mean that Lanyer is blind to the dark side of relationships. In the prose piece addressed “To the Virtuous Reader,” which appears after the dedicatory poems and immediately before the title poem, she acknowledges that models can cause problems because emulation often breeds competition: “Often have I heard, that it is the property of some women, not only to emulate the virtues and perfections of the rest, but also by all their powers of ill speaking, to eclipse the brightness of their deserved fame” (lines 1–­4). Lanyer identifies this impulse to denigrate others as the root of the problem for women. To counter it, she proposes to hold up models without any equivocation, to demonstrate that examples are transformative, that virtue inspires virtue. This demonstration comes to a climax in her list of wise and good women from the Bible, which describes how Christ affirmed the worth of women in every possible way, for he was “begotten of a woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman . . . he healed woman [sic], pardoned women, comforted women: . . . [and] after his resurrection, appeared first to a woman, sent a woman to declare his most glorious resurrection to the rest of his Disciples” (lines 43–­50). When grouped all together in this way, the evidence of good women should be “sufficient to enforce all good Christians and honourable minded men” (lines 54–­55) to leave off disparaging women and praise them instead. Yet in a time-­honored rhetorical maneuver, Lanyer states as fact what she actually hopes to achieve. As she acknowledges in her closing lines, good examples in and of themselves will not catalyze change. Examples become effective only through an interactive, relational process of identification and inspiration. And Lanyer explicitly expands the patronage relationship beyond its normal confines in a dedicatory poem addressed “To

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all virtuous Ladies in general.” Here she claims a warrant for identifications that are not class or status dependent. This dedi­ catory poem locates all readers (all those, that is, who would recognize themselves addressed by the general appellation “to all virtuous Ladies”) in a three-­dimensional grid of temporal and ontological axes. Contemporaneously, the axis allows movement along the social scale, as a gentry woman who claims virtue can identify herself with a noblewoman; a second, temporal axis allows movement between past and present, as Lanyer instructs her readers to enter into a biblical moment to be with Christ, to fill their lamps as the wise virgins did, and to dress in wedding garments to welcome the bridegroom, Christ (Isa. 62:5, as interpreted by Matt. 25:1–­13); and a third, ontological axis, locates the readers in a salvific dimension, suggesting metaphorically (as a marginal note in the text says explicitly) that they might wear the robes Christ wore before his death and thus identify with the Savior himself: “Let all your robes be purple scarlet white, Those perfect colors purest Virtue wore” (line 12). Lanyer seeks to relocate her readers through a series of exhortations to identify with an undifferentiated array of biblical and classical figures. The goal is transfiguration, whereby they will “fly from dull and sensual earth” to be immortal, “subject to no death” and, at the same time, situated in this world like the powerful female patrons who can bestow favors upon an unknown author’s book: “Where worthy Ladies I will leave you all, Desiring you to grace this little Book” (line 15). Lanyer interweaves patronage and salvation, in a manner clearly designed not only to garner recognition, protection, and perhaps material rewards for herself through her book but also to envision salvation in and through the participatory act of authorship.

Conclusion Declaring that poetry stands as the “highest point of mans wit,” animated “with the force of a divine breath” to produce things that surpass nature,” Philip Sidney implies that the poet and his art have somehow escaped the effects of the fall. Sidney insists

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on the unique efficacy of poetic style. Philosophers, Sidney observed, deal in “thorny argument” and cannot be understood; the historian is so committed to the particular case that he cannot draw general lessons; the poet alone teaches persuasively, for he alone “couples the general notion with the particular example” in a way that will “strike,” “pierce,” and “possess” the heart.55 The Art of English Poesy, published in 1589, probably just about the time when Sidney was writing the Apology, makes similarly exalted claims for the poet, even though the anonymous author (now identified as George Puttenham) did not claim that title for himself by name but instead on his monarch’s behalf: naming Elizabeth as the “most excellent poet” of her day, the text praises the poet as one who can “refresh the mind by the ear’s delight.”56 Much later, in the eighteenth century, this emphasis on delight would contribute to a hard-­and-­fast distinction between fact and fiction that disengaged literature from claims to truth in the academy. But in sixteenth-­century England, truth was not defined as fact against fiction. Poetry was critiqued not because it was fictional, but because it was a dissolute and distracting fiction. And defenders proudly claimed that the poet created alluring worlds and enticed the reader to enter, for poetry was the form of writing defined by its capacity to persuade and improve the reader through pleasure. The question for the authority of the poet was, then, about the presumption of this claim and the purpose of this pleasure. Echoing Philip Sidney, Jonathan Crewe argues that Renaissance authors sought “the ultimate triumph in language of the erected wit over the infected will.” This is a Protestant poetics that manifests the Protestant paradox: it inspires a textual aspiration its own assumptions about human nature disallow. The authorial persona, Crewe contends, was consequently marked by the collision of this ambition and its frustration, and a consequent sense of “loss and victimization.”57 But not for all authors. In the works surveyed in this chapter, we can see an alternative: Renaissance Protestantism and the system of patronage alike might also encourage writers to conflate authority with relationality; to emphasize relationships as they navigate conflicting claims about

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the need for passivity and the importance of activity and the seeming contradiction between the aspiration to create words worthy of God and the mandate to rely solely on God’s Word. Not incidentally, the relational nature of authorship comes to the fore in scripturally inflected poetry associated with women writers—­in a genre challenged and praised in equal measure in this period and in work by writers who had the resources to claim authority but whose gender kept them from assuming that authority (or authorship) would be imputed to them by dint of their status or accomplishments. For these writers, situated to participate in all the trends of the time without being front and center, the acute questions of authority, certainty, and grace (in both its theological and its courtly senses), produced works that highlight the relational nature of authorship. What is apparent in poetry by Lock, Sidney Herbert, and Lanyer is a sense that the authority of the writer depends on the text’s ability to inscribe relationships with and for the reader.58 Modern theorists have not entirely ignored the relational nature of authorship, although they have often understood it as a predicament, with writers caught between the impulse to look inward and to communicate outwardly, or with writer and reader each vying for control. The most extreme critical interventions have severed this connection, declaring with Roland Barthes that the author must die for the reader to live. My argument here is that Renaissance authorship did not presume this polarity; instead, the dynamic relations between writer, text, and reader were in some cases the very essence of authorship. The threat came not from the battle to the death between author and reader but from uncertainty about how to authorize the text. The psalm lyric collections associated with Lock and Sidney, circulated as the Elizabethan period enabled unsettling new claims for Protestant poetics, like Lanyer’s volume, published during the reign of Elizabeth’s successor, registered a minority response. In lieu of secrecy, self-­alienation, social strategizing, or exalted claims for the transcendent value of poets and poetry, these texts are masterpieces of intimate utility and the utility of intimacy, a triumph of relationality.59

Two2 Friendship Few poets have tried harder to befriend God than George Herbert. He did not find this easy to do. If the Protestant women we encountered in the previous chapter authorized devotional poetry as a relational genre, Herbert, by contrast, could assume authorship; his work instead focuses attention on the relational aims of devotional poetry. The poet himself reportedly described his poems—­posthumously published in a collection titled The Temple, and perhaps the most influential collection of devotional poems in the English language—­as a record of the “many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul.”1 The aim of this struggle was intimacy. “Lord, thou art mine, and I am thine,” he wrote in “Clasping of Hands.” And Herbert’s poems enacted the closeness he craved. “My music shall find thee,” he sang in one lilting line, “and ev’ry string / Shall have his attribute to sing” (“The Thanksgiving,” lines 39–­40).2 The poet’s belief in his own verse spills over from one line to the next, with the re­ iteration of “shall.” The rhyme of “string” and “sing” at the end of these two lines also resounds with confidence. Here, as elsewhere, the poet speaks directly to God in the plain style he is known for, open and searching. This is the voice that explains why so many Herbert critics have echoed the claim that, as Louis Martz puts it, Herbert

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wanted above all to be “in the presence of a friend.”3 These critics presume the familiarity of friendship. And well they might. When Herbert writes “thou took’st away my life, / And more; for my friends die” (“Affliction,” lines 31–­32), it seems fair to assume that many share his sense that losing friends can be worse than losing life itself. And when he likens the soul receptive to divine grace to those who “at door attend / Dispatches from their friend” (“Holy Communion,” lines 23–­24), readers from Herbert’s time to our own can readily imagine a friend as one eagerly awaited, trusted and welcome whether bearing good news or bad. The holiness of Sunday, “Th’ endorsement of supreme delight” is enhanced when described as “writ by a friend” (“Sunday,” lines 3–­4), and the opening line of “Love Unknown” is nearly irresistible: “Dear Friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad.” Even sad tales are bearable when one has a friend to tell. Herbert, however, does not just assume the appeal of friendship; he also directly challenges this relationship’s relevance to his spirituality. This ambivalence about friendship mirrors Herbert’s concern with the limits of poetry. The same poem where he proclaims that the music of his words will find God ends with a telling expression of futility: “Then for thy passion—­I will do for that—­ / Alas, my God, I know not what” (“The Thanksgiving,” lines 49–­50). The poet’s confidence falters when he considers Christ’s passion. Words fail. So too friendship can fail when confronted by sacrifice. What can you give a friend who has given his life for you? Can a relationship based on sacrifice or self-­giving also yield the satisfactions of shared care and the intimacies of an everyday give-­and-­take? Unlike many of his readers, Herbert does not assume friendship’s appeal. What we encounter in Herbert is a poet’s distinctive attempt to understand himself—­a soul seeking transformation—­in relation to another whose redemptive gift makes that transformation moot. Friendship is important in Herbert’s poems because Herbert’s poems question the importance of friendship. This questioning of friendship cannot simply be attributed to Herbert’s biography or cultural context. Born into an aristo-

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cratic family on the border between England and Wales, where his grandfather had laid claim to a castle on the hill, Herbert was raised in the orbit of his mother’s family after his father’s death in 1596, when Herbert himself was just three years old. The wit and piety of Herbert’s mother, Magdalen Herbert, was praised in more than one source, including letters, a sonnet, and a sermon commemorating her life by her friend John Donne, who hailed not only her efforts to ensure that her sons were “brought up in learning” but also her ability to make friends and sustain interesting conversations.4 George Herbert was educated in the Bible and the classics, first at home, with tutors, then at Westminster School in London and Trinity College in Cambridge. He became one of the best Latinists of his day, writing poetry in both Latin and Greek, and well prepared both for “divinity”—­ his eventual profession—­and a career at court. Herbert’s friends included Lancelot Andrewes, dean of the school at Westminster when Herbert was a student and a polyglot preacher who became one of the chief translators of the King James Bible; Francis Bacon, a philosopher and lawyer who became lord chancellor and wrote The Advancement of Learning, advocating a renewal of the human sciences; other “Court-­f riends”; and men across the religious spectrum encompassed by the Church of England under James I, who reigned from 1603 to 1625. This religious spectrum ranged from ceremonialists associated with Bishop Laud to Puritans who opposed anything that might distract from the preaching of the Word to pious ascetics like Nicholas Ferrar, who together with his extended family established a neo-­monastic community at Little Gidding.5 Of the 164 poems that constitute The Temple, almost half were originally composed while Herbert was a scholar and, for a time, orator at the University of Cambridge, probably before his brief stint as a member of Parliament in 1624. The rest of the poems were likely written during the last three years of his life, after he became a priest in the Church of England and rector of two villages in Wiltshire. Herbert’s parish was rural but not entirely isolated. The river running through it also passed by

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Wilton, the mansion belonging to the Earls of Pembroke, where Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, held court in the 1580s. And his church was only a few miles from Little Gidding and Nicholas Ferrar, the friend who, entrusted with Herbert’s poems after the poet’s death, entitled and published the collection. It was an immediate success, inspiring many imitators and reprinted ten times already by 1670, when Izaak Walton’s pious account of Herbert’s life appeared.6 Because of this clear change of venue, from the prestigious halls of Cambridge to a modest country church, it is tempting to see Herbert’s life and work divided in two, with careerist ambition replaced in the final years of his life with devotional intensity, and interest in human relationships replaced by concentration on a relationship with God. In the poems themselves, however, the drama of this tale of shifting allegiances gives way to recurring questions about what a relationship with God entails. How could one imagine oneself as intimately related to the self-­sacrificial Savior? The enormity of Christ’s redemptive death seemed to stand in stark contrast with the everyday exchanges, the favors offered and received, and the sense of trust and immediacy Herbert associated with friendship. Could he have both? Could a relationship with God encompass both the extremes of sacrifice and the pleasures of familiarity? Could the devout Christian appropriately acknowledge the distance between himself and the Almighty while experiencing a devotional intimacy? Uncertainty about how to answer these questions, together with the conviction that they must be answered, animates much of Herbert’s poetry.

The Unkindness of Friendship The reasons for Herbert’s uncertainty are encapsulated in “Unkindness,” a poem about the difference between human friendships and a relationship with the Divine. “But can a friend what thou hast done fulfill?” the speaker asks his sacrificial lord, who suffered and died on the speaker’s behalf. The presumed answer is

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no. A friend cannot do what God has done. The speaker, in turn, does not seem able to be a good friend to God: Lord, make me coy and tender to offend: In friendship, first I think, if that agree, Which I intend, Unto my friends intent and end. I would not use a friend, as I use Thee. If any touch my friend, or his good name; It is my honour and my love to free His blasted fame From the least spot or thought of blame. I could not use a friend, as I use Thee. My friend may spit upon my curious floor: Would he have gold? I lend it instantly; But let the poor, And thou within them starve at door. I cannot use a friend, as I use Thee. When that my friend pretendeth to a place, I quit my interest, and leave it free: But when thy grace Sues for my heart, I thee displace, Nor would I use a friend, as I use Thee. Yet can a friend what thou has done fulfill? O write in brass, My God upon a tree His blood did spill Only to purchase my good-­will: Yet use I not my foes, as I use thee.

The speaker is kind, considerate, and generous to a fault—­except when it comes to God. The contrast appears to be clear: human friendships entail reciprocity, a give-­and-­take, and there is no way to respond in kind—­with kindness—­to someone who has given you everything. This is Richard Strier’s conclusion, in a study about the theological basis of Herbert’s poetry. Strier argues that “Unkindness”

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shows the limitations of the classical ideal of philia, or disinterested friendship, as well as medieval Christianity’s devotional emphasis on friendship with God, because the speaker’s acts of friendship betray some persistent self-­satisfaction rather than self-­transcendence (“I quit my interest, and leave it free,” for example, focuses attention on his generosity rather than presenting him as someone who no longer thinks of himself ). The last stanza, according to Strier, proves the very idea of friendship with God ridiculous by underscoring the greatness of God’s gift and the enormity of human failure. The speaker who is, as Strier says, “puzzled” by the “lack of continuity between his relations to God and his relations with men” learns that this difference should be embraced. The message here, as throughout The Temple, according to Strier, is Luther’s insight: sinful humans cannot reciprocate Christ’s all-­sufficient sacrifice. Because redemption is totally reliant on divine grace, people no longer need to calculate what they owe to God—­and love is no longer impeded by self-­interest.7 In an equally plausible interpretation, Michael Schoenfeldt draws a different lesson from “Unkindness.” Schoenfeldt’s reading appears in Prayer and Power, a book that—­as its title suggests—­argues that Herbert’s poetry entwines rather than separates theological aspirations and social conventions. In early modern England, Schoenfeldt points out, the classical model of philia, hailed by humanists as perfect friendship’s ideal of equality, was less important than the social model of friendship that prioritized kinship and reciprocity. Herbert was presuming the social model, Schoenfeldt suggests, when recounting all that he had done for his friends and all that they had failed to do for him in return. “Unkindness” consequently highlights the disparity between good friends and bad, between a friend who gives what is needed and one who selfishly takes—­and spits on the floor besides. For Schoenfeldt, the lesson of the poem is that the divine friend succeeds where human friends have failed. Rather than drawing what Strier describes as a clear contrast between friendship and the speaker’s relationship with God, Schoenfeldt concludes that “Unkindness” instead affirms that God is the best of all possible friends.8

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Both interpretations can be defended because the poem itself vacillates: Is God an exemplary friend? Or is God far greater than a friend? This vacillation is significant because it exposes Herbert’s attempt to figure out whether intimacy necessarily entails reciprocity. What sort of relationship is possible when one party gives so much more than the other? Does sacrifice preclude or invite other sorts of interactions? Schoenfeldt and Strier both minimize Herbert’s hesitation—­the reason for his fixation on friendship—­because both privilege the poem’s conclusion. “Unkindness” is, however, most revealing in its entirety, and the terms of the poem’s query are established in the first stanza: Lord, make me coy and tender to offend: In friendship first I think if that agree, Which I intend, Unto my friend’s intent and end. I would not use a friend, as I use Thee.

(lines 1–­5)

These first five lines frame all that follows as simultaneously exploring friendship and the speaker’s relationship with God. The speaker’s initial request—­“Lord, make me coy and tender to offend”—­declares his hope that God will help him cultivate a quality he already exhibits in relation to his human friends (“coy” means “reluctant,” and “tender” here denotes “solicitous” or “careful to avoid”). The parallel placement of “Lord” and “In friendship” standing alongside each other at the beginning of the first two lines establishes a correspondence between the two relationships. This impression of equivalence is punctuated by the colon that ends the first line. Cutting across this parallelism, however, is the line connecting “Lord” at the beginning of the stanza and “Thee,” at the end. This diagonal is visible only against the backdrop of friendship, even as it confirms the primacy of the relationship with God. In these ways, the structure of the poem fails to support a singular claim about how friendship compares to the speaker’s relationship with God. This mixed message is compounded by the poem’s content. Indeed, the first stanza, which, like the sec-

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ond, presents the speaker as a generous and considerate friend, does not necessarily cast friendship itself in a positive light. The description of how the speaker avoids offense (“first I think if that agree / Which I intend / Unto my friend’s intent and end”) conveys a whiff of obsequious self-­protection. Subsequent stanzas, recounting the speaker’s willingness to do anything for his friends regardless of whether they do anything for him in return, deepen the impression that the speaker’s desire to “avoid offense” increases rather than alleviates his isolation. He eagerly defends his friend’s safety and reputation; he overlooks offenses and readily (“instantly”) lends money; and he gives way (“I quit my interest, and leave it free”) if he has something his friend wants. This selfless devotion excludes God (for the speaker will “let the poor, / And thou within them starve at door”—­and “when thy grace / Sues for my heart, I thee displace”). The speaker’s selfless giving is not dependent on what he is given. All this casts doubt on the meaning of the speaker’s insistence that he would not, could not, cannot “use” his friends. What does he deny when he denies that he “uses” his friends? And what does he admit when he declares he “uses” God? I would not use a friend, as I use Thee. I could not use a friend, as I use Thee. I cannot use a friend, as I use Thee. Nor would I use a friend, as I use Thee. Yet use I not my foes, as I use Thee.

(lines 5, 10, 15, 20, 25)

“Use” in Herbert’s time meant also partaking of the Eucharist (a meaning listed in the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary).9 During Herbert’s life, before the English Civil War and successful Puritan challenges to the Church of England’s episcopacy (governance by bishops, with accompanying pomp and circumstance), theological diversity within the church was somewhat contained by liturgical uniformity. The Eucharistic

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debates, launched by reformers who—­among other things—­ denied the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation only to find themselves unable to agree on the alternative, did not disrupt most people’s experience of Holy Communion. There may have been widespread uncertainty about what it meant to say that the consecrated bread and wine were “the spiritual food of the most precious body and blood of thy son our savior Jesus Christ,” but the Calvinists who authored the Book of Common Prayer were united with other Protestants in rejecting the Catholic belief that the bread and wine were themselves a sacrifice.10 One of the Thirty-­Nine Articles, finalized during the reign of Elizabeth I to define the doctrine of the Church of England, was explicit on this point: the Mass was not a sacrifice, the priest did not “offer” Christ on behalf of the living and the dead, and any teachings to the contrary were “blasphemous fables” and “dangerous deceits.” 11 In this sense, the “use” of the Eucharist was synonymous with reception: not something offered as well as received. And yet there was reciprocity nevertheless, for in the Book of Common Prayer’s order of communion, the congregation declares itself an offering and a sacrifice to God. So too, the final stanza of “Unkindness” insists on the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice while casting it as part of a reciprocal dynamic: Yet can a friend what thou hast done fulfill? O write in brass, My God upon a tree His blood did spill Only to purchase my good-­will: Yet use I not my foes, as I use thee.

(lines 21–­25)

What Christ’s willingness to spill his blood reveals is not the absurdity of friendship tout court, as Strier contends. Nor does it simply support Schoenfeldt’s claim that the sacrificial friend—­ the one who is wholly selfless—­epitomizes friendship’s ideal. Instead, Christ is the best friend because Christ has given and will receive (“to purchase my good-­will ”). Cumulatively, “Unkindness” conveys the impression that the speaker’s mistake was to give

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to those who give nothing in return. The singular concern that ties this poem together is a concern with reciprocity—­a concern heightened by Herbert’s uncertainty about how to reconcile sacrifice with intimacy. It is in this light that the poem’s structural and syntactical emphasis on “use” should be understood. Rather than equating “use” exclusively with selfish reception and a failure to give, the poem enacts the importance of giving and taking, distance and proximity. This is indeed the double valence of the title, “Unkindness.” Because the etymological link between “kind” and “kin” was culturally reinforced in Herbert’s day, to be unkind connoted difference as well as a lack of consideration. What Herbert confronts in this poem, as in other poems about sacrifice and friendship, is the devotional challenge of how to figure out what interactivity means between those who are not kin, or kind—­between those who were unlike, as he and God were unlike. In “Unkindness,” Herbert explores the possibility that kindness can be replaced by “use” as the basis of friendship.

“I have called you friends”: Sacrifice and Friendship in “The Church Porch” The most illuminating source of Herbert’s quest to befriend God is biblical, from Jesus’s farewell discourse to his disciples in the Gospel of John.12 Here the paradoxes Herbert sought to reconcile are already laid out, in a passage that follows an account of the Last Supper, after Jesus has comforted his followers, enjoined them to keep his commandments, and declared that those who love him will be loved by his Father. Jesus then explains why he calls his disciples friends: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth, I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. ( John 15:14–­18, KJV)

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Praise of sacrifice initiates the passage: giving up one’s own life for others, not anonymous others but one’s friends, is the greatest expression of love. Friends are those who offer all that they have—­even their lives—­to their friends. This affirmation that sacrifice is the supreme act of friendship is followed by a conditional claim, “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you,” equating friendship with a relationship between patron and client or lord and servant. A friend is a friend insofar as he does what he is told. Jesus concludes, however, by proclaiming that he and his followers are friends because they have achieved an intimacy unavailable to those who simply do what they are told: “Henceforth, I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.” Hierarchy yields to a kind of equality, as sacrifice, obedience, and love culminate in the intimacy of shared knowledge. Sacrifice frames the broader context of this passage as it does the passage itself, for Jesus delivers this speech on the eve of his own sacrificial death. And what it frames is an account of friendship, for the speech envisions sacrifice not as a singular or all-­sufficient offering but as part of a relationship between companions bound by shared knowledge and trust. Herbert echoes this biblical passage when he construes friendship as synonymous with sacrifice—­with a willingness to lay down one’s life for one’s friends—­and as a relationship between loving companions who share knowledge and trust. In Herbert’s devotional poems, the figure of the friend represented just this: his attempt to work out how incommensurable offerings might become the basis for an intimacy characterized by mutual devotion, care, and trust.13 Herbert’s interest in how sacrificial friendship might rectify isolation figures prominently already in the “The Church Porch,” the long, didactic poem that serves as a point of entry to the entire collection. After many straightforward passages exhorting friends to ally with one another, the complexity of Herbert’s interest in the connection between friendship and sacrifice is captured midway through the poem in this abruptly ambiguous stanza:

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Thy friend put in thy bosom: wear his eyes Still in thy heart, that he may see what’s there. If cause require, thou art his sacrifice; Thy drops of blood must pay down all his fear: But love is lost; the way of friendship’s gone Though David had his Jonathan, Christ his John.

(lines 271–­76)

The first line, directing the reader to take a friend into his heart and “wear his eyes,” hints at the puzzle to come, as commonplaces about allegiance give way to images of blood sacrifice. Appearing after many stanzas about how to navigate society—­to laugh without becoming a buffoon, to respect the powerful without being sycophantic, to assert oneself without going overboard—­ this directive about what to do with a friend insists instead upon the visceral intensity of friendship, characterized by the willingness to “wear his eyes,” to take another within “thy heart,” to affirm this bond with “drops of blood.” The last line compounds the ambiguity by severing the reader from the relationship the poem has just brought to life by citing exemplary friends from the Old and New Testaments. These couples, the poem declares, personify the religious ideals of love and friendship that no longer exist: “But love is lost; the way of friendship’s gone / Though David had his Jonathan, Christ his John.” The overlapping sounds of “Jonathan” and “John” echo through the biblical cavern from which the reader has been banished. This conclusion should lead us to revisit the first line of the stanza, where the speaker directs the reader to take “thy friend” within and “wear his eyes.” It is unclear from the outset whether “thy friend” who shares one’s heart and eyes refers to Christ: in the context of the poem, it more obviously refers to a human friend. But the subsequent invocation of Christ’s friendship with John reminds us the poet has Christ on his mind. If not Christ, who is worthy of becoming one’s eyes, of residing, as the next line has it, “Still in thy heart, that he may see what’s there”? And to what end?

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The line about a friend in the heart, providing new eyes, offers Herbert’s twist on the Renaissance commonplace that friends possess one soul in two bodies. Humanism’s discourse of perfect friendship emphasized that true friends had to be equals so they could school each other in virtue rather than greedily seeking to fulfill instrumental needs and selfish desires. Herbert, however, depicts a physical merger without concern for whether the friends had the requisite qualities and without engaging the question of whether what is gained is spiritual insight or even just allies. Relative merit and social advantage were less important than the claim that friendship ameliorates loneliness and self-­ sufficiency. We can imagine the friend who shares one’s heart and eyes as a scolding adviser or dispassionate onlooker, akin to one’s conscience. Either way this is not the equal partner of perfect friendship. Nor is it the partisan advocate of an extended kinship network, as in the social model of friendship. Friendship here is instead a transformative presence, distinct from and also part of oneself. Herbert was greatly concerned with the collective, with common prayer, and with the church as the body of Christ.14 Here, however, his redemptive alternative to independence is an interpersonal relationship rather than a community, and this relationship is envisioned through the juxtaposition of friendship to sacrifice. When the poet writes “thou art his sacrifice” and that his reader should be prepared to “pay down” his friend’s “fears,” he implies that much more is required than the capacity to see the world from another’s perspective. The ideal is not simply to be influenced by a friend. The sacrifice the speaker calls for elides the distinction between worldly debt and spiritual salvation: to “pay down all his fears” claims simultaneously that payment is possible and that the debt is existential and in this sense unquantifiable. The image of blood sacrifice both reinforces and expands the significance of the previous references to heart and eyes. Envisioned now as elements of a bloody sacrifice, these two familiar metaphors set friendship awash in religious imagery. Sacrifice also links friendship to the claim that poetry itself is a relational activity, for the single previous reference to sacrifice

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in “The Church Porch” appears in this concluding couplet of the poem’s first stanza: “A verse may find him, who a sermon flies, / And turn delight into a sacrifice” (lines 5–­6). What does it mean for delight to become an offering? Herbert’s emphasis on pleasure and its effect on the reader echoes Philip Sidney’s definition of the poet as one who seeks “both to delight and teach.” To delight, Sidney explains, is to “to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger,” whereas to teach means to “make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved.”15 This allusion to Sidney’s call to induce change rather than just convey information sharpens Herbert’s point that the goal must ultimately be to make the pleasure of the poem an offering to another. He envisions this as part of a series of exchanges: the poem, offered by the poet to the reader, in turn can become a source of pleasure that the reader offers to God. To apprehend the poem as a sacrifice means to receive it as something that should in turn be given, to learn that one’s own response (“delight”) can be an offering. Appearing as it does in the first stanza of the pastor’s long poem, this couplet shifts the reader’s attention from doctrinal apprehension or the reception of content to reconceive the poem itself, like the sacrifice it describes, as a work of mediation, a relational act.

Moving Inward: Sacrifice and Use in “The Church” As we move from “The Church Porch” to “The Church,” the second part of The Temple, the centrality of sacrifice is evident immediately: the first poem the reader encounters is “The Altar,” configured in the shape of its title, and the second is “The Sacrifice,” with Christ narrating the events leading up to his sacrificial death. Sacrifice does not, however, figure prominently in most works about what scholars call Herbert’s Eucharistic or sacramental poetics. This may well be because, as Debora Shuger describes, “reformed discourses of experiential inwardness,” including devotional poetry, duplicate the passion narratives only to “suppress” them, to “suppress the appalling sacrificial subtext of

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the Calvinist subject.”16 The cultural work accomplished by sacrifice clearly shifted in the early modern period. And yet alteration does not necessarily entail suppression. Shuger’s own work traces the way Calvinist Passion narratives (rather than spiritual autobiography, pilgrims’ progresses, or devotional poetry) produced a “divided selfhood,” sustained by “an ineradicable tension between its natural inclinations and religious obligations.”17 In keeping with Shuger’s claim that sacrifice was suppressed in genres of experiential inwardness, including poetry, scholars exploring what they call Herbert’s Eucharistic or sacramental poetics usually focus not on sacrifice but instead on questions of presence. They contend that Herbert’s poetry transposes divinity into language, infusing words with the same significance that Catholics imputed to the Eucharistic host or a saint’s relics or a holy site. This question of where and how God is accessible to believers is widely understood to be the crux of the divide between Protestants and Catholics. Recall, for example, Robert Orsi’s contention that modern denial of presence is the most significant effect of the Reformation.18 Applying that point to poetics specifically, Kimberly Johnson observes that in early modern England, “the lyric poem becomes a primary cultural site for investigating the capacity of language to manifest presence.” Modern poetics, she concludes, emerged from this translation of sacramentalism into language.19 Shuger may well be right about the subjectivity produced by Calvinist passion narratives. And Johnson’s argument about poetics is compelling above all in its recognition that what poems say about divine presence is less important than how this presence is conveyed.20 Herbert’s interest in juxtaposing friendship to sacrifice suggests another equally important development, however: a relational model that merged the mediating dynamics of sacrifice, characterized by obligation and freedom, a limited offering and unlimited effects, with the emotional intimacy and immediacy Herbert associated with friendship. Taken together, the first two poems in the devotional sanctuary of Herbert’s Temple seek to construct an intimate relationship at the site of sacrifice. Where “The Altar” stages an exchange of

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“mine” and “thine,” revealing how the poet’s own sacrifice might bind him to the God who sacrificed himself to redeem humanity, “The Sacrifice” exposes the effects of a failure to engage in an exchange, to respond to Christ’s sacrifice with one’s own, by revisiting Christ’s lament about how his friends abandoned him even as he sacrificed for them. Consider “The Altar.” A broken altar, Lord, thy servant reares, Made of a heart, and cemented with teares: Whose parts are as thy hand did frame; No workmans tool hath touch’d the same. A heart alone Is such a stone, As nothing but Thy pow’r doth cut. Wherefore each part Of my hard heart Meets in this frame, To praise thy name That if I chance to hold my peace, These stones to praise thee may not cease. O let thy blessed sacrifice be mine, And sanctifie this altar to be thine.

In this poem, the transformation from a broken to a blessed place of offering requires a change of heart, dramatized by language of carving and cutting. “The Altar” is unquestionably a Eucharistic poem, not because it stakes a claim in the doctrinal and liturgical controversies but because it plays on all the traditional associations with sacrifice, encompassing the spiritualized sacrifice mandated in Psalm 51 (“The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise”), the literalism of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, and the liturgical experiences scripted in the Book of Common Prayer, where the congregation proclaims itself a sacrifice: “here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto thee.”21 Instead of doctrinal guidance about what is being reenacted at the altar, and

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why, the poet offers a narrative transition from broken to holy, carefully piecing together the fragments of its whole, contained within the symmetry of its finished form. The unspoken “I” is visually present, the same shape as the poetic altar. In this way, the form as well as the content of the poem underscore that the self takes shape only through interaction. The union described within the “I” involves giving up or giving over. As Christ, “thy blessed sacrifice,” is offered in the narrator’s words, on the narrator’s very self, the mutuality of imperfection (a broken altar, the broken body of Christ, the imperfect human narrator) emerges as that which makes exchange possible. The inverse of the themes compressed and localized in “The Altar” are explored expansively, in sixty-­three stanzas, in “The Sacrifice,” where Christ relays his own story in a first-­person account. Declaring his own death a “sweet sacrifice” (line 19), Jesus highlights the failure of his followers to do anything for him even as he was preparing to give his very life for them. They fell asleep although he had asked for company through the night, and they provided no consolation, for “their drowsy brain / comforts not me, and doth my doctrine stain” (lines 30–­31). Even as Judas comes close enough to kiss Christ, the disciples drowsily awake and then flee. “Fear puts a bar,” the narrator laments, “Betwixt my friends and me” (lines 49–­50). The recurring refrain, at the end of every stanza, is the lament of one who feels abandoned: “Was ever grief like mine?” Because the disciples failed to reciprocate as friends should, Jesus claims sorrow—­and sacrifice—­all for himself. On the road to Calvary, just after predicting that his death is imminent because it is so fervently desired by the shrieking crowd, Jesus speaks directly to his followers: “Weep not, dear friends, since I for both have wept / When all my tears were blood, the while you slept” (lines 149–­50). These erstwhile friends cannot share his sadness because they did not give what was needed when they had the chance. The Gospel of Luke, the only text that mentions followers at this point in the story, describes the followers as wailing women whom Jesus warns rather than comforts:

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“Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming [when] they shall say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never [bore], and the breasts that never gave suck’ ” (Luke 23:28–­29, KJV). The version in Herbert’s poem conflates these women with the disciples and transposes this into an encounter between friends, reflecting on the emotions experienced by one who thinks his friends have failed him. The command to refrain from weeping shifts from a dire apocalyptic warning to a personal rebuke. Tears are not allowed because they imply the mutuality of shared suffering. The disciples who failed to share can, as Jesus bitterly asserts, cry only for themselves. The recurring refrain insistently personalizes Christ’s grief: “Was ever grief like mine?” This line varies only once, at the end of the poem, recast from question to implacable assertion: “Never was grief like mine.” The refrain reiterates the chasm between Jesus and his friends, reinforcing the poem’s claim that one-­sided sacrifice causes grief and sorrow rather than reconciliation. Where “The Altar” figures sacrifice as exchange, “The Sacrifice” laments the absence of exchange, represented by Christ’s acute sadness about how fear set a “bar . . . betwixt my friends and me” (lines 49–­50), impeding mutuality and therefore friendship.

The Economy of Friendship in The Temple The alternative that the devotional poet might succeed where the disciples failed flowers in “Sunday,” as Herbert praises the day and, by extension, all of creation as “endorsement of supreme delight, / Writ by a friend, and with his blood.” Sunday is a day of celebration (a “day of mirth,” Herbert calls it), commemorating the successful completion of Christ’s sacrifice and the re-­ creation it made possible. Drawing from the imagery in 2 Corinthians, where Paul addresses Christ as “our epistle written in our hearts,” Herbert describes it more specifically as a letter written by a friend, an epistle that inspires an attentive friend’s response. Delight requires violating the boundaries of the self; the flow of blood communicates something to the speaker, who in turn

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creates the poem we read. So too, at the end of the poem, “Christ’s hands, though nail’d, wrought our salvation, / And did unhinge that day” (lines 48–­49). Christ the friend endorsed delight with his sacrifice—­not only by alleviating fear, as the complicated stanzas about friendship in “The Church Porch” suggested a friend could do, but also in a way that returns us to the opening stanzas of “The Church Porch” and the claim there about how the verse itself might “turn delight into a sacrifice” (line 6). In “Sunday,” Herbert concentrates on how Christ’s sacrifice sanctions human delight and, as the poem implies, makes it possible for humans to understand their own joy as a suitable offering to God. Or, as he puts it in the penultimate stanza of “Sunday,” Christ is he “whose drops of blood paid the full price, / That was requir’d to make us gay, / And fit for Paradise” (lines 54–­56). What more could one want from a friend? The writing that describes this delight, however, expands beyond appreciation to mutuality, for the poem that offers delight was itself made possible by the blood of the offered body, “Writ by a friend, and with his blood.” The writer and the sacrificed friend work together here. Herbert leads his reader through a contrasting scenario, the exhilaration and frustration of trying to offer—­to sacrifice—­his own creation, in “Jordan II.” The poem begins with a burst of enthusiasm, as the poet describes how “When first my lines of heav’nly joys made mention . . . My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell” (lines 1, 4). In the second stanza, however, the artist’s excitement gives way to an excess of invention, a rush of conceits. These prove unsatisfying: Thousands of notions in my brain did run, Off ’ring their service, if I were not sped: I often blotted what I had begun.

(lines 7–­9)

Stricken by the feeling that his offering was inadequate, the poet finds himself repeatedly dissatisfied with the words that once came so easily. The faint outline of sacrificial imagery becomes darker in the

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final stanza, where the poet likens his invention (“Invention” is the title in one of the other printed versions of this poem) to a fire: As flames do work and wind, when they ascend, So did I weave my self into the sense. But while I bustled, I might hear a friend Whisper, How wide is all this long pretense! There is in love a sweetness ready penn’d: Copy out only that, and save expense.

(lines 13–­18)

The initial image, of the poet subverting “my self ” to the composition (line 14), as if consumed by fire, feeding flames that show the strength of the fuel by reaching ever higher into the air, is itself dampened by the suggestion in the final two lines that this is so much ornamentation. For Rosemond Tuve, this quandary about creativity is at the heart of Herbert’s insight about relationality: The image in these two lines is equally a statement of a fundamental human problem—­the painful paradoxical attempt to lose the self in sacrifice, to devote the very personality without ceasing to be a person and yet without trace of self-­interest or self-­approbation. Herbert’s solution of the paradox is not that of today’s pseudo-­ psychologizing—­all devotion is self-­love in disguise, all service of the good at best a form of self-­fulfillment, preserve the self at all costs, by way of looking to the good of others if feasible, but if not, at their cost. His solution is more daring. But the difficulties which have brought us to this sorry answer were no more hidden to him than to us, and the series of poems I am treating is the history of his advancing perception of them.22

Tuve’s psychological reading of Herbert’s poetics alludes to the issue explored throughout this chapter. The poem, she argues, acknowledges that there is no poetry without self-­sacrifice. The poet who gives up the illusion that he creates alone can instead offer what he creates. So too human devotion—­by implication, the devotional relationship Herbert sought to establish with

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God—­necessarily entails sacrifice: giving up self-­absorption and self-­reliance enables one to receive what is offered, to accept what is already written. Crucially, this is a lesson not didactically taught but whispered by a friend. The significance of Herbert’s choice to call this figure a friend is highlighted by comparison to a source it clearly echoes, the first sonnet in Philip Sidney’s popular Astrophil and Stella, lamenting the limits of language, describing how “words came halting forth,” and ending with this intervention: “ ‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’ ”23 In both poems, the reader is positioned alongside the speaker. But Sidney’s Muse waits until the last line to chide him abruptly, whereas Herbert’s invocation of a friend accompanying him through a more reflective conclusion suggests that only the receptive, attentive listener can apprehend what the poem, like a friend, discreetly conveys. Other critics find the last two lines, lines 17 and 18, of “Jordan (II)” unsatisfying (“There is in love a sweetness ready penn’d: / Copy out only that, and save expense”). They are not, however, necessarily frustrated for the reasons Tuve identifies, because they presume the desirability of self-­love and artistic self-­reliance. The dissatisfaction might also arise from the sense that what Herbert has offered is not a conclusion: the poem, Barbara Harman exclaims, offers “no demonstration of what it would mean to copy out a ‘sweetness ready penn’d.’ ”24 Few disagree about the basic meaning of the line itself: the devotional poet need only copy out what is already written in Scripture. This straightforward gloss, however, begs the question. The reader, like the poet, still needs to figure out how the act of copying might be done without effort (to “save expense”). The advice from the friend—­indeed, the presence of the figure of a friend—­foregrounds this as unavoidable problem, the difficulty that Tuve alludes to in the previous quote: How to act without imposition? How to receive without usurping the offering? The friend, in other words, who offers comfort also makes a possessive claim. The caring friend also looms as one who has the power to pull you in. These poems, as Tuve says, record Herbert’s advancing perception of these questions. Sacrifice is the

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necessary premise. But for this sacrifice to have the right effects, it must be offered and received within the interactive context of an intimate relationship. The emphasis on exchange, not what each offers and receives as much as that both offer and receive, is even more explicit in “The Temper (I)”: “Thy power and love, my love and trust / Make one place ev’ry where” (lines 27–­28). Helen Vendler perceives these concluding lines as a “talisman of mutuality . . . where divine love and human love touch and overlap.”25 The poet and God break down distinctions together. The echo of John Donne’s line in “The good-­morrow,” where love makes “one little room, an every where” amplifies the point, for instead of imagining, as Donne does, that the macrocosm might be contained within a distinct place, Herbert declares the absence of boundaries. Herbert has not forgotten his own awareness of distinctions. Although the parallel placement of “thy” and “my” and the chiasmus of “love” and “love” suggest symmetry, power is not the same as trust. When he writes “Thy hands made both, and I am there” (line 26), God is granted creative powers where “I” simply shows up. It does not, then, simply assert mutuality; mutuality is instead cumulatively inscribed. “The Temper (I)” is the poem, after all, in which the speaker asks not to be tortured by his Lord: O rack me not to such a vast extent; Those distances belong to thee: The world’s too little for thy tent, A grave too big for me. Wilt thou meet arms with man, that thou dost stretch A crumb of dust from heav’n to hell? Will great God measure with a wretch? Shall he thy stature spell?

(lines 9–­16)

There is an incommensurable distance between humanity and divinity, a vast difference between the world’s boundlessness and a body even smaller than the box it is buried in. Yet the poem itself traverses this gap and performs the answer to the questions

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it asks to and about God (“Wilt thou meet arms with man?” and “Will great God measure with a wretch?”). Although the speaker longs to “roost and nestle” in God, evoking one of Luther’s favorite images of justification as Christ’s death covering the sinner as a hen’s wings cover her chicks (“In the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice”; Ps. 63:7), the poem also endorses the process of change theologically known as sanctification: Yet take thy way; for sure thy way is best: Stretch or contract me thy poor debtor: This is but tuning of my breast, To make the music better.

(lines 21–­24)

The speaker is exclusively focused on God. Other friends, lovers, or worldly obligations are invoked only obliquely, as part of the stretch from heaven to hell. But the final achievement of divine and human love together, making one cosmos, comes through the painful process of exploring both fully.26

Reciprocity and Friendship in “Love unknown” The poet appeals to a figure of a friend to guide him through this process in “Love unknown,” where sacrifice figures prominently as a one-­sided offering that—­over the course of the poem—­ becomes a bond of reciprocity between friends. Intimacy is presumed from the beginning of this appealingly conversational poem, but the narrator’s slightly awkward opening disclaimer reveals also uncertainty about what he seeks: Dear Friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad: And in my faintings I presume your love Will more comply, than help.

(lines 1–­3)

There is love between them, yes, but as the title underscores, it is a love as yet unknown: given a long, sad tale, it makes sense that

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this narrator needs the help he worries his friend might not provide. Things get more complicated before the story commences, as the somewhat hapless narrator tries to explain the complexity of his situation, for the friend he appeals to is not the only one he has to deal with: A Lord I had, And have, of whom some grounds which may improve, I hold for two lives, and both lives in me. (lines 3–­5)

The confusing syntax reflects the confusing theological premise: like a tenant with his landlord, the speaker is uncertain about the terms of his lease with God. The legal custom being invoked here is relatively straightforward. Holding a lease for “two lives” means “two generations.” He will have this land for a long time. But the metaphorical application is less so, for “two lives” also refers to the earthly and heavenly life. These two lives are also one. The narrator is trying to understand what it means to have both simultaneously (“in me”). In terms of the narrator’s relationship with God, this means he cannot transact with a transcendent Lord only in transcendent terms; he has to live out their exchanges in this world too. Moreover, while it is clear that improvements are needed, the responsible party is appropriately vague. Is it the narrator himself? Or his Lord? In Herbert’s experiential take on Protestant theology, this is the conundrum of sanctification: the process of purification wholly credited to God but carried out nevertheless by and within the believer.27 The rest of the poem is easier to follow, as the narrator describes a series of attempts to improve himself. It culminates with a speech by the friend, helpfully italicized, describing God’s glorious work on the narrator’s behalf. By the end of this poem, love unknown becomes love known. The narrator, initially discouraged, slowly learns the error of his ways through three emblematic attempts at self-­improvement: his heart is seized from an offering of a “dish of fruit” (line 6), his heart is thrown

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into a boiling cauldron, and his attempt to sleep off his faults is thwarted when he finds the bed where he sought rest “stuff ’d” (line 51) with thorny thoughts. The temptation is to read this poem the way the Protestant doctrine of salvation through faith alone is often interpreted, as though it all turns on the repudiation of self-­reliance and the subjective certainty that one is wholly dependent on God. But in “Love unknown” as in much Protestant devotion, the believer is transformed progressively, relationally. More specifically, Herbert’s poem records his own efforts to reimagine sacrifice in relational terms, as the premise of a friendship with God. With the business of landlords and leases out of the way, the real action begins with the narrator’s account of how his first offering was snatched from his hands: To him I brought a dish of fruit one day, And in the middle placed my heart. But he Lookt on a servant, who did know his eye Better then you know me, or (which is one) Than I my self. The servant instantly Quitting the fruit, seiz’d on my heart alone.

(I sigh to say)

(lines 6–­12)

The narrator’s offering combines an allusion to the first sacrifice in the Bible—­Cain’s offering of the fruit of the ground (refused by God while the meat offered by his brother Abel was accepted)—­and the proclamation in Psalm 51 that a broken heart is a suitable offering to God. Ignoring the fruit, the servant seized the heart. While the narrator stands haplessly by, the servant throws his heart into a font, where it is covered with blood, dipped, dyed, washed, and fiercely wrung out, “the very wringing yet / Enforceth tears” (lines 17–­18). The entirety of Christ’s work on the regenerate Christian is encapsulated here, which suggests that the narrator needs to learn that Christ will do for the believer what the believer cannot do for himself. And yet this is not a conclusive lesson. The poem goes on, first

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offering a commentary from the attentive friend, whose lines stand out in italics: “Your heart was foul, I fear” (line 18), the friend observes. Yes, the narrator concedes (“Indeed ’tis true. I did and do commit / Many a fault more than my lease will bear”; lines 19–­20). Then he tries again, recounting his next mistake, stealing away alone (“Walkt by my self abroad”; line 25) he wrongly perceives suffering as the central reality to be confronted: A boiling cauldron, round about whose verge Was in great letters set affliction. The greatness show’d the owner.

(lines 27–­29)

Unable to look away from suffering, the narrator tries again to forge a bond with God by making an offering: “So I went / To fetch a sacrifice out of my fold, / Thinking with that, which I did thus present, / To warm his love, which I did fear grew cold” (lines 29–­32). Again the offering was seized, this time to be thrown into a scalding pan. Prompted to protest (“My heart, that brought it (do you understand?) / The offerer’s heart”; lines 36–­37), the narrator is again chided by his attentive friend: “Your heart was hard, I fear” (line 37). Here the change begins. The narrator not only recognizes the truth of the observation, as he did on the first occasion, too, but also begins to bathe his heart himself, “ev’n with holy blood.” Moving the scene to a table, he merges the reference to the heart washed in blood with the Eucharistic sacrifice, emphasizing both Christ’s presence and the significance of the believer’s reception: I bath’d it often, ev’n with holy blood, Which at a board, while many drunk bare wine, A friend did steal into my cup for good, Ev’n taken inwardly, and most divine To supple hardnesses.

(lines 41–­45)

Unlike those who simply drink wine, the narrator discovered Christ in his cup, in the figure of a friend who is with him now “for good” (line 43).

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But this presence does not alleviate all the narrator’s problems. He lies down to “sleep out all these faults” (line 49), only to find that “some had stuff ’d the bed with thoughts, / I would say thorns” (lines 51–­52). Deprived of rest, he thought his heart could break, and “indeed a slack and sleepy state of mind / Did oft possess me” (lines 57–­58), preventing heartfelt prayer. The narrator knows, as he says explicitly near the end of the poem, that his debt is paid by another. He himself cannot atone for his sins. This, then, reiterates mainstream Christianity’s central premise, repeatedly emphasized by Calvinists and explicitly affirmed in George Herbert’s affirmation of the covenant of grace. Atonement—­the possibility of again being-­at-­one with God—­ depends entirely on Christ. And yet, in the long, sad tale the narrator tells, the alleviation of debt in itself is less important than the narrator’s sustained exchange with his friend. We mistake this poem if we track just the action. It is also, crucially, about interaction, staged within the context of friendship: “Dear friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad” (line 1). If the tale begins to try your patience, if you find yourself frustrated with the narrator, then perhaps you in turn might be sympathetic to the friend’s instructive tone. Either way, whatever your reaction to the dynamic, the poem puts you as a reader in a position to think about friendship and offerings, simultaneously, just as the narrator is doing. The poem puts you in the position to experience the frustrations and comforts of this friendship, just as the narrator is doing. In the final ten lines of the poem, the murmurs from a friend become an eloquent speech, for the narrator hears and heeds his friend, having drawn closer, with greater understanding. The friend says to the narrator: For ought I heare, your Master shows to you More favour than you wot of. Mark the end. The Font did only, what was old, renew: The Cauldron suppled, what was grown too hard: The Thorns did quicken, what was grown too dull: All did but strive to mend, what you had marr’d. Wherefore be cheer’d, and praise him to the full

Truly Friend,

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Each day, each hour, each moment of the week, Who fain would have you be, new, tender, quick.

(lines 61–­70)

As the friend recounts, each scenario in the poem is reinterpreted from a calculation of an offering given and received into a relational transformation. In this concluding context, the friend encourages the narrator (and reader) to imagine that what he has received (the debt paid, the sacrifice offered on his behalf ) is best understood within the context of a reciprocal relationship. In this interpretive context, bloody sacrifice is transformed into expressions of joyful rebirth. In “Love unknown,” the right understanding of sacrifice emerges through a progressive discovery of intimacy’s effects, revealing the poet’s process of merging sacrifice and personal familiarity into a relationship he can experience as friendship with the Christ. In a literary study of Herbert, Ryan Netzley provocatively suggests that the absence of a definitive “answer” in many of Herbert’s poems can be explained by the fact that Herbert is more interested in the way the poems will be received, much as the Eucharist is received. According to Netzley, devotional poems in Herbert’s Temple encourage readers to forsake interest in achieving something and to be devoutly attentive instead. Netzley argues these poems are sacramental, and Eucharistic specifically, because they are concerned with the “nature of presence” and the “appropriate dynamics of active reception.”28 Herbert’s poems, he says, model an “attentive response” to an immanent god.29 For Netzley, this means that Herbert’s poems “describe, enjoin, and quite simply are a loving activity”; as such they “evade” the “iron logic of struggle, subjection, and subjectivation.” This, Netzley concludes, is what makes these poems revolutionary.30 What Herbert’s poems convey is more subtle than revolution, however, and messier than Netzley’s vision of poetry that “wants nothing from us” but is “still a type of relation.”31 Relations can never be so pure. Although something can be learned from positing this ideal, as Netzley does, there is even more to be gleaned from the way Herbert mixes the ideal and that which it may

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seem to oppose. Herbert’s poetry is important not just—­as Netzley argues—­because it fails to offer a clear conclusion, teaching the value of attention in and of itself by frustrating our desire for results. Equally crucial is the way Herbert’s speaker seeks transformation and his insistence that this transformation is accomplished in and through the words of the poem, in and through the relations these words enact, and more specifically, as I have argued throughout, in and through a challenging engagement with friendship.

Conclusion: A Theology of Friendship For Herbert, friendship is thus an achievement rather than a premise. After all, he himself declared (in the stanza of “The Church Porch” explored earlier) that “the way of friendship’s gone” (line 274). There is little sense in his poetry that everyday experiences of friendship or any of the dominant discourses of friendship in his day could simply serve as models for his relationship with God. This makes some sense, given Herbert’s reputation as an accomplished court player who walked away in disgust to become a country pastor instead. This dramatic plot, first scripted by Herbert’s contemporary biographer, Izaak Walton, remains a key point of reference in Herbert studies today, as in Debora Shuger’s assertion that for Herbert, the “confessional intimacy of divine-­human encounter fulfills the need for relationship not available in society.” Shuger contends that Herbert envisioned himself alone with God, as part of an alternative community of two, because love and trust lost out to competitive pragmatism in society at large. This interpretation conforms to the new private-­public distinction that Shuger and many others discern in seventeenth-­century texts. Encouraged by Luther to imagine a social self distinct from a self that belongs to Christ, and disheartened by the calculated pursuit of honor and glory that determined social success, many Protestant writers differentiated the soul or inward self from the public self and from social roles and obligations.32 Shuger and others are right to connect Herbert’s sense of self-

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hood to modernity and one of its putative sources, Protestantism. Not, however, because Protestantism drew a clear boundary between the public self and the soul, between the self in relation to society, and the self in relation to God. Indeed, the opposite: by drawing attention to the need for this boundary, Protestantism put new weight on the relationship between human and divine as on the relationships between people, providing new occasions for uncertainty about what both sorts of relationships entailed. In Herbert’s poetry, salvific friendship is not readily differentiated from social friendship. Sacrifice figured prominently in both. Friendship was the site of spiritual self-­discovery, not because it was set apart from the social but because it staged the drama of everything Herbert both sought and disdained in the social, including hierarchy as well as mutuality and pragmatism as well as purity.33 George Herbert’s devotional poems did not, moreover, participate in what Ullrich Langer has called the radicalization of friendship theory, the paroxysmal unification celebrated by Montaigne and others, unfettered by obligations except to one another. This is important because, as Langer says, “when the Other is an end unto itself, absolved of the network of the ethical, and thus communicable, activity of our social existences, then in effect the Other is only an ineffable to the Self.”34 Herbert, the poet of intimacy rather than ineffability, the seeking friend rather than ecstatic lover, does not go this far. Neither does he offer a virtue theory of friendship that improves on Aristotle’s ideals, the model Ivy Schweitzer hails as a moderate vision of friendship based on mutual care rather than autonomy, a relationship that forgoes the interest in self-­love but instead provides cognitive access to self-­awareness through interaction.35 Herbert’s poems offer instead the difficult drama of friendship, a relationship that necessarily entails the difference it seeks to overcome and intimacy not shorn of calculations of self-­interest and service, the affective requirement of sacrifice, and an enduring ambivalence about inescapable questions of primacy.

Three3 Love Today it may be easier for Christians to imagine God as a friend than a lover. This state of affairs should surprise us. “Upon my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves” a yearning speaker writes of her beloved in one of the love poems that make up the biblical book known as the Song of Songs (3:1, NRSV). Clearly an erotic poem, the Song of Songs became a beloved spiritual text through allegorical interpretation; Christian interpreters explained that one lover was the soul or the church while the other was Christ or God. This tradition of interpretive reading encouraged rather than dissuaded medieval monks, nuns, and mystics from dwelling on the sensual power of the imagery, no one more so than Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached some forty sermons on the first verse alone: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” (Song 1:2).1 Within as well as beyond monastic walls, medieval Christian devotion could be, and often was, highly erotic, punctuated by dramatic encounters with the divine in relics and shrines, through pilgrimages, festivals, and liturgies that included the kiss of peace and visceral meditations on Christ’s suffering body.2 All this was challenged by Protestant theologians and practitioners frustrated by what they perceived as a church more focused on human actions and emotions than on divine power

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and intent on differentiating the lustiness of eroticism from the gratuitous generosity of divine or agapic love. The love that saves, Luther insisted, is not the desire that propels us to seek a beloved but the love that undeserving humans receive from a gracious God.3 Where much of medieval theology spoke of faith formed by love, Luther insisted that faith comes first. Love follows. Only by receiving divine love through faith, Luther explained, can love be freely received and given.4 From this perspective, eros is a problem not a solution: acquisitive, yearning, driven by the quest for satisfaction, eros stands opposed to salvific love.5 What, then, are we to make of the eroticism of poetry by John Donne and Aemilia Lanyer? “A holy, thirsty dropsy melts me yet,” John Donne declares in “Since She Whom I Loved,” the Holy Sonnet that describes the death of the woman he loved and his subsequent attempt to love God instead.6 Still thirsty, still desirous, Donne’s speaker laments mortality and announces himself “wholly set” on heavenly things. At the same time, he dramatizes the power of the flesh and erotic desire. This same refusal is evident in the title poem of Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, where she presents Christ “environed with Love and Thoughts divine” (line 1328) and encourages her readers to embrace his body, kiss his cheeks, and relish his presence.7 This unwillingness to separate eroticism from religious devotion is, Rosalie Colie observed decades ago, the one thing that “everyone knows” about John Donne.8 Lanyer’s eroticism is less obviously provocative but similarly significant, as Theresa DiPasquale makes clear in describing Lanyer as a poet who “recasts women’s erotic experience—­both sacred and profane—­as holy, liberating, and redemptive.”9 Clearly, Protestantism did not discourage poets from envisioning their love as erotic. In fact, the “eroticization of spirituality floods religious discourse until the late seventeenth century,” Richard Rambuss points out, in Protestant as well as Catholic sources, although this eroticization also comes to be increasingly closeted, “especially in its most amplified registers.”10 And it is eroticism’s amplified registers we most often explore. Eros seems

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significant because its effects can be so extreme. We speak of burning with desire because love, like fire, has the power to consume and destroy, to transform us, dramatically and irreversibly. When, in the sixteenth century, Giordano Bruno described the culmination of eros as dispossession and death to oneself, he encapsulated assumptions shared by both naturalistic and spiritual theories of eros. Where the naturalistic theories emphasized the need to rectify eroticism’s destructive effects, spiritual theories of eros celebrated the transcendent union that an experience of alienation or death to self might make possible. Either way, however, theorists then, as now, emphasized eroticism’s power to transform the one who loves.11 Writing in the seventeenth century, Donne, Lanyer, and other poets were influenced not only by the Song of Songs but also by Petrarch’s poetic descriptions of the power of unrequited love and Ovid’s lusty appreciation of the pleasures of fulfillment.12 These were highly elaborated and diverse discourses, but similar in their interest in extremes of longing or fulfillment, often described then, as now, in terms of self-­loss or transcendence through unification.13 Yet in much of their poetry, Donne and Lanyer both revel in erotic love without affirming either of these extremes. Donne’s poem “A Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s Last Going into Germany” describes the “amorousness of a harmonious Soul” (line 18) as both seeking and finding, unifying and maintaining distance. This poem attributes jealousy to Christ and the speaker alike, and affirms that “loving more” both frees and constrains the lover (lines 21–­22). Love is both partial and plenteous, for the divine lover as well as the human. This interest in the coexistence of two in one echoes the logic of Christology—­the simultaneity of human and divine in the God-­man. For her part, in dedicatory poems and a long meditation on Christ’s passion printed together in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, Lanyer presents Christ to her readers as the perfect lover. Instead of making Christ the object of love, however, Lanyer’s text envisions a triangulated circuit of desire between text, reader, and Christ, focusing less on the absence or presence of the beloved than on the need to

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awaken the love she and her readers already possess. This triangulated dynamic is akin to Christianity’s Trinitarian theology. Both poets stage the drama of desire within the constraints of a poetic form. For both, the allure comes not from a dizzying play at extreme heights of satisfaction and frustration in which the devotee pushes ever onward, gasping for an absent beloved or finding unity without distinction, but from a kind of obsessive interest in how things look at lower altitudes where no single peak defines the terrain. Both wrote amid the religious turmoil of their time—­amid debates described now in terms of eros versus agape, of sinful human love versus the perfection of God’s love, or of longing versus satisfaction. The poetics of love in Lanyer and Donne remind us, however, that passionate love need not be understood only as selfish or selfless or as a force that extends or dismantles the self. Love, including passionate love, can also be a concentrated experience of being together and separate, drawn together and pulled apart. Even when they envision the lover as God or Christ, these poets do not presume transcendence or immanence, absolute difference or undifferentiated unity. Instead, inspired by imaginative license as well as spiritual urgency, they survey these as simultaneous possibilities. The comparison of Donne’s erotic poetry and Lanyer’s offered by this chapter does not propose a single theory of love or desire. In what follows, I track relational models that are neither platonic (in presuming metaphysical continuity) nor materialist (in prioritizing physical pleasure), neither Hegelian (in their interest in dialectical synthesis) nor psychoanalytic (in affirming the inevitability of unsatisfied desire). The relational models explored in this chapter are instead theological, best understood in terms of Christian ideas about the nature of Christ and the Trinity. Jesus Christ, one person, was fully human and fully divine, orthodox Christian theology declares. God is three in one—­Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each distinct and yet all one God—­ according to Christian doctrine. Often puzzled over as doctrines or devoutly affirmed as articles of faith, Christology and Trinitarian theology should also be understood as sophisticated theories

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of relationality. Christology’s description of two natures in one person prepares us to appreciate Donne’s interest in how love sustains—­and is sustained by—­an interplay of duality and unity. And the reflections of Trinitarianism on how relationality itself requires three rather than two encourages us to attend to the relational dynamics between the speaker, reader, and the text as well as the reader, Christ, and the speaker, in Lanyer’s poems.14 In both cases, the density and dynamism of their poetics of love reveal not a self lost or transcended but the way that eroticism—­ like relationality more generally—­can be sustained through doubling and tripling, through emulation as well as unrequited longing, and through interest in difference as well as the pleasure and reassurance of unification.

Can Two Be One? The Erotic Economy in Donne’s Poetry When it comes to love, Donne and Lanyer alike have been described as traditionalists who were also great innovators.15 Donne, for example, has been characterized as the “Heidegger of Renaissance love philosophy”—­a “continuer” and a “destroyer” of traditions of Christian devotion, Petrarchan longing, and Ovidian celebrations of sexual consummation.16 Deeply engaged in divinity and theological hermeneutics, Donne “wittily adapted these materials” in his poetry to say about “amatory and sexual experience” what “no one else had said.”17 Indeed, the subject of love may be the one thing that unites the disparate poems gathered together in the second (1635) edition of Poems by J.D. and collectively named his Songs and Sonnets—­a collection that includes everything from playful accounts of sun-­dappled lovemaking to poems that seem to sacralize sexual love.18 When the collection considered is stretched to include the poetry that the editors of the second edition categorized as Divine Poems there is another constant: even the poems that affirm the goal of transcendence refuse to wholly renounce earthly attachments. It is the mortal, suffering Christ these poems depict as the object of longing, as in “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” in which

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the “spectacle of too much weight for me” (line 16) is nevertheless described in vivid detail. And it is the world created by two humans in love with another human being, the orgasmic experience of death and rebirth, that forges his strongest connection with transcendent love. “We die and rise the same,” his poem called “The Canonization” proclaims, “and prove / Mysterious by this love” (lines 26–­27). This is what makes Donne’s love poetry so powerful: blasphemous, titillating, paradoxical, and difficult to encapsulate, the author of “Batter my heart, three-­person’d God” knew there was no escaping the pain and pleasure of love—­not with God and not with a lover, for he used the same language to speak of both. This unwillingness to separate physical passion from religious devotion is apparent to any reader who has felt the shock of the last line of this sonnet, when the speaker invites God to violate him by insisting that he will be “Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” For many interpreters, this line succinctly conveys what many of Donne’s love lyrics—­secular and religious alike—­express more indirectly: that the primary subject is the subject and the subject is defined by frustration (seeking an unobtainable chastity) or subjection (to ravish or be ravished). These interpretations vary. Assessed according to a traditional gender binary, this means that Donne’s masculine desire to dominate existed in “perpetual and excruciating tension” with devotion’s feminized longing to submit.19 A queer reading dispenses with these binaries by insisting that love is not gendered. “There’s nothing straight about desire for Christ,” Richard Rambuss observes. Rambuss’s analysis of the homoeroticism of “Batter my heart” and the variable desires in other devotional poems make the related point that there’s nothing “straight” about desire itself: men as well as women might find abjection arousing and long to be overcome by a domineering beloved.20 Notably, these interpretations of why Donne’s lyrics emphasize the submissive self correspond with interpretations inspired by very different ideological commitments. These include the historicist argument that Donne’s notion of desire replicates absolutism’s focus on the relationship between

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(submissive) subjects and (dominant) sovereigns,21 and the psychoanalytic argument that Donne’s poetry both conceals and reveals a lover’s inescapable abjection.22 As Ben Saunders explains in his version of this latter argument, love is not about coming to a certain understanding of one you love, or a confidence in your connection with the one you love, or a self-­overcoming that enables you to love. What it is about instead—­what love is about—­is the subject’s solitary fantasy of recovering a unity he or she never had. That is the fantasy that inspires love, and it is the fantasy that love exposes. It can be traumatic to confront this reality, Saunders says. This is a trauma that Donne’s poetry both conceals and reveals, showing that the “ecstasy of love proves unsustainable.” What all of these interpretations have in common is a focus on how desire shapes the self.23 This focus on the singular subject has been challenged most directly by those who emphasize the incarnational or sacramental nature of Donne’s spirituality.24 In a work that rereads the desire in Donne’s devotional poetry, Ryan Netzley contends, for example, that the poems are in fact about not a subject isolated by abjection or frustration but instead the possibility of an “immanent, present, this-­worldly connection to divinity.”25 This conclusion echoes Regina Schwartz’s argument about Donne’s sacramental poetics and her claim that his lyrics achieve communion “between body and soul, man and God, and human lovers . . . in this world and in this time.”26 Schwartz explains that Donne is “steering a course” through a Christian tradition that describes the story of the Christian soul as a love story, guided by the conviction that there is “no competition between lowly carnal love and higher spiritual love.” This is, according to Schwartz, the world Donne’s poetry brings into being, and it is what makes Donne’s poetry sacramental in a context where the Eucharist was no longer interpreted by many as the material point of contact with transcendence. In a sense, then, this was a break with tradition—­making language do what rituals once had. Schwartz argues that it is also evidence of the continuity of the tradition, that Donne’s turn to erotic love was deeply informed by the mys-

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tical tradition, and that it was this tradition that enabled him to affirm that “love of man or woman leads to God instead of away from God.”27 As do Schwartz and Netzley, I think that Donne’s lyrics are misread when their eroticism is equated with frustration or submission, and I too want to bring the resources of Christian theology to bear. Where Schwartz views union and transcendence as Donne’s ideal,28 however, my reading is closer to Netzley’s in attending to the generative effect—­and affect—­of the desirous activity in itself. Where Schwartz and others focus primarily on the incarnation and sacramental theology as an affirmation of presence, and Netzley attends to the “immanent order” of the “tissue of relation embedded in the grammar and syntax” of the poems, I assess Donne’s simultaneous interest in distance and proximity, similarity and difference, in light of the Christian teaching that Christ was fully human and fully divine, containing two discrete natures in one single person: the Christological paradox of two in one. The Christology codified in the Chalcedonian definition—­ also known as the Chalcedonian decree—­of 451, was the singularly authoritative source for all subsequent discussions of Christology, including that affirmed in the second of the Thirty-­Nine Articles of the Anglican Church (first established in 1563).29 The authors of the Chalcedonian definition were under ecclesiastical and imperial duress to consolidate orthodoxy against the so-­called heresies of Apollinarianism (that Jesus had a human body but that his mind was divine), Eutychianism (the belief that Christ’s humanity was consumed by his divinity), and extreme Nestorianism (that Christ’s two natures were wholly distinct, not united). They responded by affirming two natures (physeis) in one person (hypostasis). In the exact wording of the decree, there were “two natures [that exist] without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” This statement places a claim of distinction (“without confusion, without change”) alongside the assertion of unity (“without division, without separation”). The simultaneity of similarity and distinction is reasserted in the next sentence: “the difference of the natures having

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been in no wise taken away by reason of the union, but rather the properties of each being preserved.”30 The status of the Chalcedonian proposition is, as Sarah Coakley has observed, difficult to establish: it cannot be dismissed or simply claimed as metaphor because “key terms” have a “bewildering range of uses elsewhere,” and there is no way to tell if they are in this text used literally, metaphorically, or analogically. The decree itself was horos in Greek, suggesting a horizon rather than a fixed proposition. Coakley suggests that the “oddness of the claims of the ‘Definition’ ” are then “perhaps more truly” understood as the “oddness of ‘paradox’ or riddle’ ”—­paradox in the sense of “contrary to expectation” rather than self-­contradictory and a riddle in the sense described by Cora Diamond, as able to show us “something beyond what we had ever taken to be possible . . . to a novel level of perception.”31 Although devotional trends and theologians alike often simplified things by accentuating just one of Christ’s two natures or by emphasizing distinction over unity or unity over distinction,32 it is these notions of paradox and riddle I have in mind when I suggest that Chalcedonian Christology invites a novel level of perception about Donne’s interest in “love’s riddles.” To illustrate this, I begin with “Lovers’ Infiniteness,” a love poem from early in Donne’s career, part of the “secular” Songs and Sonnets, before turning to poems that explore gender and relations with God explicitly.33

Partial Infinity Critics describe “Lovers’ Infiniteness” as an intellectual game, a series of grammatical dilemmas, and an educational poem designed to teach the lady addressed (and thus the readers) the problems with conventional ways of thinking about love.34 It is all these things. Most intriguing, however, it is a poem that explores alternatives to the extremes of all and nothing, extremes regularly associated with erotic love’s yearning. “If yet I have not all thy love, / Dear, I shall never have it all” (lines 1–­2), the speaker laments at the outset, fearing that his lover’s “gift of love” was “partial” (line 9). If only “some to me” and “some should to

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others fall,” then it seems his greatest fear is realized: “Dear, I shall never have Thee All” (lines 10–­11). So ends the first stanza, with what seems a classic expression of a lover intent on consuming his beloved, voracious and seemingly insatiable, certain that only total possession will suffice. Things change in subsequent stanzas. If in the first stanza the speaker unhappily confronts the impossibility of having all that he wants, in the second he begins to critique this goal. There is no way to get a fix on everything, to be sure when one has it all, for “if then thou gavest me all, / All was but All which thou hadst then” (lines 12–­13). In the second stanza, then, the hinge of the poem, the speaker moves from a lament—­that the beloved’s gift was partial—­to an affirmation that “thy gift” is “general” (line 20). And although it concludes on an adamantly possessive note—­“ The ground, thy heart is mine, what ever shall / Grow there, dear, I should have it all” (lines 21–­22)—­the stanza registers a shift to the third and final stanza’s alternative vision. “Yet I would not have all yet,” the speaker declares in the first line of the third stanza, for “He that hath all can have no more” (lines 23–­24) Key to these three stanzas is the move from the “partial” to the “general” to the “liberal” (all with two ls in seventeenth-­century spelling). These three words stand in the same place in successive stanzas of the poem, marking a shift from regret to affirmation to liberation: Yet I would not have all yet, He that hath all can have no more, And since my love doth every day admit New growth, thou should have new rewards in store; Thou can not every day give me thy heart, If thou can give it, then thou never gav’st it: Love’s riddles are, that though thy heart depart, It stays at home, and thou with losing sav’st it: But we will have a way more liberal, Than changing hearts, to join them, so we shall Be one, and one another’s All.

(lines 23–­33)

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The third stanza builds to a climax by declaring its topic an investigation of “loves riddles,” a dizzying series of reversals and denials that break the stultifying hold any singular claim might have over the lovers to free them for a more encompassing unity. Throughout the first two stanzas, the paradox of emotional longing is figured as a contractual dilemma. The claim in these two lines—­that it is the heart that departs but stays and what which is lost is saved—­instead echoes the Gospel of Matthew’s call for self-­sacrifice (“whosoever shall save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall save it”; Matt. 16:25). But the poem concludes by offering a third option, a “way more liberal,” presented here as the answer of how “we” come to be: not through exchange, not through self-­sacrifice, and not through total consumption of another. One who loves both is and is not self-­enclosed (the heart “departs” but also “stays at home”). Or, to take this from another angle, distance solves the problem it creates: lovers unite by bridging the gap between home and away. In the final triplet, the speaker confirms that there is a simultaneity of distinction and unity: “But we will have a way more liberal, / Than changing hearts, to join them, so we shall / Be one, and one another’s All.” The repeated rhymes of the last three line endings (“liberal,” “shall,” “all”) emphasize the importance of the “all.”35 The poem thus ends on the word it uses more than any other, with the “all” of “partial” and “general” freed—­a connotation of “liberal” is to “free-­all”—­and so finally hailed as an achievable goal. Crucially, this conclusion rejects the conflation of “all” with the oneness and merging long associated with platonic unity; it praises instead a joining of two that does not dissolve the particular “ones” involved. It is, in short, analogous to the paradox of two natures in one person that comes to us (and to Donne) from orthodox Christology. “Lovers’ Infiniteness,” it turns out, does not involve the choice between all and nothing but is instead a way of figuring simultaneity: the infinite with the finite, the two with the one, simultaneous yet also distinct.36 The usefulness of my invocation of Christology is suggested by comparing this conclusion with the similar analysis but dif-

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ferent conclusion reached by Lynne Magnusson. With this final affirmation, Magnusson observes, the poem rejects any version of exchange, including “a new economy echoing scripture” in which “giving is, at the same time, keeping.” She conjectures that the poem opts for undifferentiated union because any specter of exchange, “however reciprocal and interactive” it may seem, invokes the logic of the market.37 Yet undifferentiated unity or the market logic of profit and loss were not the only two options Donne might have had in mind. Instead, the poem sustains the distinction that Magnusson maintains the last line denies: at the end, there is still “another” as well as “one,” and “All” belongs to both. What this conclusion affirms is an economy of love, understood according to the connotations of economy in Donne’s time—­ not a financial system (economy would not have this meaning until the nineteenth century) but instead the art or science of household management or what one sixteenth-­century theological treatise called the “order in doing or dispensation of God.”38 This latter meaning persists in modern theological discussions of what is called the economic Trinity, concerned with the relations between the three persons in a single divinity. As with orthodox Christology—­two natures in one person, without separation—­in the end Donne’s love poem is concerned less with calculating what is gained and lost than with exploring the possibility that difference might persist even as unity is achieved. To borrow from Jeffrey Johnson, “the matter for Donne is never either/or but both/and, and therefore all.” So too with the Chalcedonian definition of Christ.39 Donne explores this link between lovers and Christ more directly in a more famous secular love lyric, “The Canonization.” With a defiant first line—­“For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love”—­the poem proclaims that it will enact a love that contemporaries’ words have failed to explain. The speaker disavows Petrarchan conceits of endless longing and grief by instead likening the lovers to the Phoenix, a Christ figure because of its mythological association with resurrection, declaring that they are “made such by love”:

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And we in us find th’Eagle and the dove, The Phoenix riddle hath more wit By us, we two being one, are it, So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit, We die and rise the same, and prove Mysterious by this love.

(lines 22–­27)

The shift in this stanza from a defensive to a confident tone reflects the speaker’s commitment to the claim that the lovers are two as well as one—­and that their dying and rising together, invoking the familiar image of orgasm as well as the God-­man’s death and resurrection, is the mystery of love. The dominant meaning of “mystery” in the sixteenth century was theological, referring either to a mystical presence or a doctrinal or liturgical affirmation: the priest affirmed the mysterium fidei during the liturgy of the Eucharist, according to the Roman Rite likely to have been followed in England during Donne’s childhood, and a litany in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer affirmed the “mystery of thy holy incarnation.”40 Here, then, love is aligned with sex and sanctity alike. The stressed rhyme of “wit” and “it” (lines 23–­24) emphasizes that the lovers make sense of what is otherwise just a riddle—­they embody a reality just as Christian doctrine affirmed the mystery of the incarnation, that Christ was simultaneously human and divine. Cast in philosophical and psychological terms, this means that the lovers retain two distinct identities even as they unite, while the repetitious phrase “we in us” (line 22) conveys that this is a discovery in process rather than a static singularity. It also means that death is figured as something the lovers face together rather than as a threat of singular self-­destruction. Theories of love—­ranging from Pauline injunction that one must die to the world in order to live in Christ to the Lacanian idea that eroticism necessitates the pleasurable pain of self-­ shattering—­presume that love imperils self-­containment, for better and worse. From this perspective, death (of the self ) is a prerequisite for union. But the relationship between life, death, and love is subtly different in “The Canonization”:

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We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no piece of Chronicle we prove, We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urn becomes The greatest ashes, as half-­acre tombs, And by these hymns, all shall approve Us Canoniz’d for Love.

(lines 28–­36)

The previous stanza ended by proclaiming love mysterious. The next ends by declaring that it is what the lovers create together, not monuments but sonnets and hymns, and it is these activities that “shall approve” them “Canoniz’d for Love.” This stands in stark contrast to the more static model the speaker attributes to his friend in the next: And thus invoke us; You whom reverend love Made one another’s hermitage; You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage, Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove Into the glasses of your eyes So made such mirrors, and such spies, That they did all to you epitomize, Countries, Towns, Courts: Beg from above A pattern of our love.

(lines 37–­45)

Each line pulls the reader further and further into the stifling solipsism of the vision of love the speaker attributes to his friend. The final couplet breaks the hermetic seal of a self-­enclosed world in which love between two people obliterates everything else by commanding the addressee to look beyond himself. The upward vector of the commanded appeal recalls the invocation of canonized love in the final line of the previous stanza, a connection reinforced by the fact that “love” is similarly positioned as the last word in both stanzas. In this poem, sacralized passion becomes an alternative pattern of love in the making.

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In a recent work claiming that Renaissance English poetry “evolved through an understanding of love as finite,” Ramie Targoff argues that “The Canonization” reveals Donne’s success in relocating immortality from lovers to poetry. When Protestantism challenged Catholic assumptions of a continuum between earthly and heavenly life, Targoff explains, it inspired some poets to pen nihilistic love sonnets and others to compose carpe diem poems celebrating the fleetingness of love. Donne represents a third response: no longer confident that the lovers could claim immortality together, he instead immortalized love through its poetic expression. This focus on the boundary between life and death, however, minimizes the significance of what Targoff ’s own analysis acknowledges and what I assess above: that this poem’s images affirm a “simultaneously discrete but shared identity for the lovers.”41

“Contraries Meet in One”: Divine-­Human Relations in Donne’s Religious Poems My claim to this point has been that there is a structural analogy between the Christological doctrine of two natures in one person and a theory of love in Donne’s secular poetry. In this section I contend that the same interest in the dynamics of two and one is evident in poems that are explicitly religious, sustaining a tension that the reader might expect would be resolved in poems where the object of desire is God. This is apparent in “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” where a journey undertaken on Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ’s death, inspires the speaker to speculate about the cosmos, his own possibilities for redemption, and, above all, the terror and allure of a suffering savior: Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see That spectacle of too much weight for me. Who sees God’s face, that is self life, must die; What a death were it then to see God die?

(lines 15–­18)

There are several assertions about devotional desire in this poem: like a speculative theologian, the speaker declares devotion a con-

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ceptual abstraction, “in this, / the intelligence that moves, devotion is” (lines 1–­2). And as a despairing sinner, the speaker proclaims himself unable to respond to Christ’s sacrificial love as he should: “dare I’almost be glad, I do not see / That spectacle of too much weight for me” (lines 15–­16). In the context of the poem as a whole, however, these proclamations become precursors to the relational interaction the poem ultimately stages between Christ and the speaker, dramatizing the interplay of alienation and longing that binds them together. In the final eight lines of this forty-­two-­line poem, the pace slows, shifting from the regular pattern of varied couplet end rhymes (“this” and “is” followed by “grown” and “own”) to the repetition of a single rhyme: For that looks towards them; and thou look’st towards me, O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree; I turn my back to thee, but to receive Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. O think me worth thine anger, punish me, Burn off my rusts, and my deformity, Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, That thou may’st know me, and I’ll turn my face. (lines 35–­40)

The recurrence of “me,” rhythmically reinforced throughout the stanza, puts the focus clearly on the speaker. In reading his request to “Burn off my rusts, and my deformity, / Restore thine Image” (lines 38–­39), most interpreters are understandably preoccupied by the speaker’s unworthiness and his turn to Christ, asking Christ to do for him what he cannot do for himself. Donne’s speaker seems to deny the relevance of his own desire in order to underscore that only Christ’s angry punishment can restore their relations. On this reading, the final two lines affirm the speaker’s helplessness: “Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, / That thou may’st know me, and I’ll turn my face” (lines 39–­40). Here the speaker acknowledges he is not yet ready to look at Christ by imagining a future moment when he might be.

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Yet he introduces this conclusion six lines earlier by envisioning reciprocal movement rather than a passive receipt of punishment: “For that lookst towards them; and thou lookst towards me” (lines 33–­34). Here “that” refers to the mind’s eye, and “them” to the ideas about Christ’s sacrifice and sin and redemption contained in his memory. At the same time, in this same line, Christ gazes at the speaker. This moment of mutual action alters their relationship. The abstract speculations at the outset, where the speaker calls on the reader to consider the soul as a “sphere” and likens devotion to the intelligence that moves (lines 1–­2), which gives way to the fear of seeing Christ’s sacrificial death, the spectacle of too much weight for me” (line 16), culminates in an intimate encounter, as the speaker addresses Christ directly: “O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree” (line 36). The line that marks the shift asserts a moment of reciprocal action, forging a connection between the suffering Savior and the not-­ yet-­abject-­enough speaker. Christ is the one who looks, but the speaker is active, too, for it is he who scripts the scene. Taken together, these final eight lines encapsulate an exchange of looks that bind them together even as the speaker turns away, turning “my back to thee, but to receive / Corrections” (lines 37–­38). As a request, this script of self-­punishment is relationally enacted: “Burn off my rusts, and my deformity,” and “Restore thine Image” (lines 39–­40), he commands Christ, so they might recognize themselves in each other. The image of a spherical soul that sets this poem in motion and dictates its form (“I am carried towards the West / This day, when my soul’s form bends toward the East”; lines 9–­10), recurs as the speaker anticipates turning back to look at Christ. The devotional love imagined here is an interplay of union and difference staged as movement through space: distance enables connection just as the invocation of pain as well as self-­ absorption make possible the speaker’s description of desirous looks. The speaker’s agency (on display in every line for it is he who claims—­and displays—­the power of composition) is balanced by the speaker’s disavowal of agency. Like a good orthodox

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Christian (in a declaration that is neither definitively Catholic nor singularly Protestant) he attributes the possibility of change to grace alone. And yet it is significant that grace here is figured as a forceful and even violent physical encounter between the speaker and Christ. Readers might understandably conclude that this poem affirms an abject subjectivity or a masochistic form of desire. It could also reveal a devout subject’s search for a God who will liberate him from human limitations. But none of these readings accounts for the lack of resolution at the end of the poem: in the last couplet as before, the “me” and the “I” are still in relation with the “thou,” and although the speaker has not yet turned his face, neither has he been effaced. There are, in other words, two subjects in the poem, both making advances on the other. The poem does not only underscore separation or celebrate union. Nor does it dialectically resolve these contrasts. Instead, it sustains them, staging the muted tension as the climax of the poem.

Two and One in the Holy Sonnets This emphasis on relational interactions between two subjects can be found also in Donne’s Holy Sonnets. This is not how the dynamics are usually interpreted, however, because the sonnet form conventionally expressed desire for an absent beloved and Donne’s spiritual version seemed designed to cultivate devotional inwardness.42 Debora Shuger argues, for example, that Donne’s Holy Sonnets reveal early modern subjectivity to be “erotic, abandoned, and female.” Longing not just for an absent beloved but more specifically for a divine lover, the speaker is situated like the mournful Mary Magdalene, seeking and failing to find her lord.43 As noted earlier, a clear alternative is proposed by Regina Schwartz and Ryan Netzley, who argue that the Holy Sonnets affirm a this-­worldly connection to divinity.44 My own interpretation is closer to Netzley’s, but where he locates this connection in the “tissue of relation embedded in grammar and syntax,”45 I am equally interested in content and intrigued not just by the affirmation of connection but by the kind of connection affirmed.

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In these sonnets as in his love poems, Donne does not differentiate between partial and complete love in order to affirm one over the other. In these poems, there’s no simple unity or exclusivity, and no more certainty to be found in loving God than in loving a mortal woman. Instead, the speaker and his beloved alike desire stasis as well as change. They seek self-­containment as well as union with another. The contradictions Donne diagnoses in himself, memorably in the Holy Sonnet “Oh, to Vex Me,” are God’s too.46 God courts the poet, and the poet courts God, both without assurance of constancy or monogamy. Donne further proliferates these circuits of desire when he entices Christ to expose his spouse (traditionally, the church) to men who desire her in another Holy Sonnet, “Show Me Dear Christ.” This is a sonnet about love that refuses the easy options. This interest in avoiding simple affirmations is signaled, for example, in the fact that the request in the first line, metrically regular and syntactically contained as a single sentence, is followed by no fewer than seven questions, of varying lengths, often in lines more difficult to scan and syntactically fractured (“Is she self truth and errs?” is one a reader might puzzle over). This questioning culminates in the third quatrain with a final query that recalls what might be seen as the options of plenitude or lack: Dwells She with us, or like adventuring knights First travail [“travel,” “labor”] we to seek and then make Love? (lines 9–­10)

Is love conjured by the quest, or sought because it is already known? Both, the speaker has already declared in the first line, where he asks to see the one he knows as “bright and clear.” Neither, the conclusion of the poem asserts, offering instead an ambiguous alternative: Betray kind husband thy spouse to our sights, And let my amorous soul court thy mild Dove, Who is most true, and pleasing to thee, then When she’is embrac’d and open to most men.

(lines 11–­14)

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Here the content echoes form, for this final claim, “possibly the boldest erotic image in Donne’s sacred poetry,” according to one editor, is conveyed in a sentence where neither proposition nor structure is predictable.47 Beginning halfway through the third quatrain and extending into the final couplet, which usually stands apart, the sentence disrupts the conventional structure. Moreover, this single sentence offers two images as one. The dove amorously courted is clearly distinct from a woman available to many. And yet syntactically it is the dove that is embraced for her pleasing openness. Finally, the extremity of the metaphor “must impede the narrative of the poem,” Kimberly Johnson remarks, for the familiar topos of erotic devotion includes neither a “sluttish dove” nor “a God who is more than pleased to be cuckolded.”48 In Johnson’s argument, the outrageous metaphor thereby claims all attention for itself and announces that the true subject of the poem is poetry itself rather than spiritual eroticism. For my purposes, this is important because it reveals the shortcomings of any interpretation that suggests resolution: this poem is declaring the outrage and the intrigue of its own conflicted claims about the desirability of multiplicity. Desire here is not about one or none but about the multiplicity of active relational dynamics. These poetics of relationships pervade even “Since She Whom I Loved,” the Holy Sonnet mentioned at the outset of this chapter, the one that seems to offer a simple version of the contrast between heavenly and human love. The sonnet begins by lamenting the death of a beloved woman and the speaker’s decision to devote himself to God instead: Since she whom I lov’d hath paid her last debt To Nature, and to hers, and my good is dead, And her Soul early into heaven ravished, Wholly in heavenly things my Mind is set.

(lines 1–­4)

This opening tableau conveys the familiar lesson that love for a woman might lead one to desire the eternal:

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Here the admiring her my Mind did whet To seek thee God; so streams do show their head

(lines 5–­6)

Instead of being swept away in a tributary, the lover follows it up to its source—­only to find that loving God is not so different after all: But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed, A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet. But why should I beg more Love, when as thou Dost woo my Soul, for hers offering all thine: And dost not only fear lest I allow My Love to Saints and Angels things divine, But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt Lest the World, Flesh, yea Devil put thee out. (lines 7–­14)

The Neoplatonic ascent falters near the end of the octave with the stuttering “But though” (line 7) and loses all momentum at the end of that sentence, as the speaker, bewildered, realizes he still wants more even though he has everything. The next six-­line section, which begins with yet another “But,” poses the question more directly: God has replaced the woman he loved, and God seeks him out as a devoted lover, offering all the love he has to give. Yet it turns out that heaven and earth are not so far apart, and the play of love with God is no different from human love. God is a solicitous lover, but anxious and jealous as well. Why does love that should be perfect still make distinctions, entail competition, engender jealousy? Why can’t the lover, here God, ever be sure there’s no end to love, no possibility of being displaced?49 Arthur Marotti concludes that this poem shows Donne’s inability to reconcile spiritual and worldly desires, and John Carey reads it as a symptom of Donne’s inability “to believe that he was loved enough, even by God.”50 But this poem suggests instead that this is what love is, that the feelings of uncertainty and satisfactions alike are in play whether the lover is God or an-

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other human being. There is the promise of perfection in the love the speaker has received, for he has received all God’s love. And yet the possibility of imperfection persists. There is a hint that God has a voracious appetite in the reference to the soul of the woman “ravished,” and the promise of lasting devotion and tender attention, all attesting to an intensity arising from “contraries that meet in one” (line 1)—­in the encounter between divine and human as within anyone who loves another.

“Likeness glues love”: The Eroticism of Gender This fascination with the way the interplay of similarity and difference activates desire is evident also in Donne’s poems about sexual difference. The final line of “Air and Angels,” for example, declares that the disparity between “women’s love, and men’s will ever be” (line 28). This may seem an inevitable conclusion to an early modern poem dedicated to the idea that love is both physical and spiritual, that it must “take a body too” (line 10). For if, as humoral theory taught, bodily differences directly affected one’s capacity for self-­control, it was logical to conclude that bodily differences between men and women would directly affect the way they loved. A typical observation from a seventeenth-­ century text explains that the “loose, soft and tender” nature of a woman’s flesh “causes a sudden boiling of the body about the heart,” and the “venom and collections of humors that she every month heaps together” so inflame “the Heart and Brain” that women are unable to resist the passions of anger and love alike.51 Yet, as Michael Schoenfeldt observes, humoral theory was a much more flexible account of difference than it is often presumed to be, both because the differences are comparative rather than contrasting, and because the assumption was that men and women alike could (and should) vary their humoral composition through diet, digestion, sleep, and other forms of physical therapy.52 The seeming insistence on difference in Donne’s “Air and Angels” similarly turns out to be less rigid than the concluding line suggests. In fact, this poem that puzzles structure (varying

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the sonnet form by putting the sestet before the octave) as well as sense (with several lines that resist definitive interpretations) is about the particularity of love and the need for difference—­and is also a repudiation of any extremes, including extreme claims about the importance of difference to love: “For, nor in nothing, nor in things / Extreme, and scattering bright, can Love inhere” (lines 21–­22).53 If “Air and Angels” shows how claims of gender difference might frame a vision of an erotic quest that steers clear of extremes, Donne’s poem about the Greek poet Sappho’s love for another woman reverses the emphasis with much the same result.54 As Paula Blank argues, this poem about same-­sex love reveals that neither difference nor similarity is absolute for Donne.55 So in the first half of the poem there is a tone of defiant attraction as Sappho describes Philaenis as utterly distinctive, but perhaps for that reason incapable of “a mutually feeling.” Halfway through the poem, at line 35, the biting lament gives way to seductive admiration, as thoughts of distance and difference are banished and likeness secured. Differing evaluations of the poem turn on the question of how to interpret this likeness that “begets such strange self flattery.” Is this narcissism? Solipsism? Does Donne claim it for himself or for a female-­female homoeroticism from which he has distanced himself by invoking a kind of essentialist, bodily sexual difference (the body with the rough chin, the “tillage of a harsh rough man” compared to the breast and thighs of women, mirroring each other)? Or is there a way to read this juxtaposition of sexual difference to homoeroticism as part of the same inquiry? And, oh, no more; the likeness being such, Why should they not alike in all parts touch? Hand to strange hand, lip to lip none denies; Why should they breast to breast, or thighs to thighs? Likeness begets such strange self flattery, That touching my self, all seems done to thee. (lines 47–­52)56

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This is the self-­rendered strange to itself, in the sense that it perceives itself as not only unfamiliar or unusual but also estranged. In an ingenuous interpretation, Ben Saunders effaces this difference by highlighting two complementary puns: Donne’s familiar pun on his own name in the line “That touching my self, all seems done to thee” (line 52), and the less familiar pun on his wife’s maiden name, Anne More, “thee, my half, my all, my more” (line 58). Saunders concludes that “Donne is drawn to the fantasy that, at the level of desire, the difference between men and women may be no difference at all.”57 And yet the similarity Donne finds—­including the similarity between cross-­gender and same-­gender eroticism that Saunders teases out through his reading of Donne’s puns—­never escapes the tension of difference. The puzzle is not that likeness makes everything the same, that it collapses the “me” into “thee,” but that both remain in some way separate as well as joined: “Me to me; thee, my half, my all, my more.”58 Sexual difference intrigued Donne because desire was for him about the interplay of difference and similarity. The divine-­ human duality that is simultaneously unity is, for Donne, structurally analogous to love understood as longing for otherness that is also sameness. This means that in theorizing desire he is not content with claims of complementary differences and images of how two halves torn asunder are rejoined. Nor is he fascinated primarily by abjection or subjection or the need to die to self to live in another. Donne is instead interested in the dynamic interactions between subjects: variously painful, frustrating, pleasurable, and transformative, they are for him intriguing because there is no resolution, no final union, no reconciliation of the finite and the infinite. What his poems express instead is the enduring dynamic ensured by the simultaneity of two and one.

From Two to Three: Trinitarian Eroticism in Aemilia Lanyer’s Poetry As we have seen already in chapter 2, love was a problem in Aemilia Lanyer’s own life as well as a preoccupation in her poetry.59

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Herself perhaps a victim of a privileged man’s deceptions and betrayal, in “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” her long poem retelling Christ’s passion, Lanyer admits that Eve might have been too gullible, not wary enough of the “subtle Serpent’s falsehood” (“Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” line 799). But it is love itself that especially fascinates the poet and it is love—­erotic, desirous, even excessive love—­she seeks to arouse in her readers. Lanyer’s eroticism may seem notable for other reasons. Unlike Donne, Lanyer frequently uses images from the Song of Songs and other scriptural sources of sacred eroticism, and she is often explicit about the gender of the desired and desirous parties.60 Presenting Christ as the ideal male lover, Lanyer demotes husbands and other men who would command authority over women; describing Christ as the silent, beautiful object of the lover’s gaze and the abject victim of male violence, she celebrates relationships between women based on identification rather than hierarchical differentiation. Most readers, appreciative of how Lanyer deploys sacred eroticism in her bold defense of women, have framed all this in terms of two related questions: are Lanyer’s poems hetero-­or homoerotic?61 And in what ways are they subversive?62 In fact, though, the most remarkable thing about the eroticism in Lanyer’s poetry is the emphasis on triangulation, and the distinctive way she envisions its effects. In love triangles, two vie for a third. In the triangulation that structures patriarchy, bonds between men are soldered by the exchange of women. In Lanyer’s triangulation, by contrast, the emphasis is not on rivalry or exchange but instead on how love comes to life. Love between two, Lanyer’s poems proclaim, lies dormant without the involvement of a third party. Her poems are not, however, comparing each of the three to one person of the Trinity. Nor is my claim that Lanyer is countering patriarchy by constructing a feminine trinity. Indeed, Trinitarian theology is most profound, and here certainly most relevant, insofar as it concerns the reflexivity of three in one: not difference sustained or sameness achieved but the interactive relations that simultaneously distinguish and bind.63

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Relational Dynamics in Patronage Poems “Receive your Love,” the speaker of one of Lanyer’s patronage poems directs her intended reader, the Countess of Kent. This short phrase alone contains all the key elements of Lanyer’s Trinitarianism. There are the three persons—­the text, the reader, and Christ, referred to here as “Love.” There is also the recognition that a shared love between two is not really felt or experienced until a third is involved. The text interposes itself to bring this love to life: Receive your love whom you have sought so far, Which here presents himself within your view.

(lines 37–­38)

The reader might claim Christ—­he is already “your Love” (my emphasis)—­but the text makes it possible for the reader to experience that love. Put another way, the text enjoins the reader to want what the text wants. Instead of encouraging the reader to seek understanding, the text enjoins the reader to share in the experience. The poem praises the Countess as a paragon of virtue, hailed for following Christ’s example by cultivating humility and faith and rejecting worldly pleasures. At this juncture, however, it shifts attention from virtue to erotic love, explaining that because the Countess walks in Christ’s “humble paths,” she can “take this fair bridegroom” to her “soul’s pure bed” (lines 41–­42). From walking in his footsteps to tumbling in to bed together, the Countess traverses the boundary separating a devotional emphasis on virtuous activity to a devotional emphasis on desire. The reference to Christ as a bridegroom recalls allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs as well as Matthean wedding imagery.64 The bridegroom and soul are not figured as alone together, however, because without the text’s imperative description, the reader would remain a faithful follower rather than a bride. In this way, the text presents itself as a necessary third party, not just a matchmaker but a catalyst. Like a chemical reagent, it participates in the relations it quickens without itself being dispersed or lost in the process.

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This is akin to the emphasis on relationality in Trinitarian theology—­an aspect of this theology sometimes deemphasized in forms of Christianity with Latin roots (Eastern Orthodox Christians, by contrast, more characteristically revel in what they often call the “Social Trinity”). Catholics and Protestants who learn about the Trinity tend to focus on the mystery of three in one.65 Many pastors today are reluctant to say much more.66 Trinity Sunday, still on the liturgical calendar, rarely invites the sort of sermons John Donne preached on that liturgical occasion in 1620, inviting his listeners to find “Vestigia Trinitatis, Impressions of the Trinity, in as many things as we can.”67 For Donne the pastor, this meant that the Trinity established the primacy of community and, more important, the recognition of roles. “From the beginning,” Donne frequently reminded his congregation, “God intimated a detestation, a dislike of singularity.” God, he explained, thereby endorsed the importance of reciprocity, not only within the Trinity but also between God and creation, Christ and the church, pastor and congregation, and among Christians.68 Pastorally, this could often devolve into an emphasis on reciprocal roles rather than relational dynamics, but in poetry Donne and his contemporaries explored the nuanced relationality developed in some theological writings.69 As the fourth-­century theologian Gregory of Nazianzus wrote, although the essence (ousia) of God is beyond comprehension, the person or hypostasis of God is both distinct and relational (thereby implying that the one necessitates the other: the person is distinct because it is relational). In this sense, each person of the Divine Trinity is relational activity, and the three “modes” within the Godhead are to be understood as relationships.70 And even though Augustine’s De Trinitate is best remembered for its psychological analogy, looking inward to find the triad of memory (memoria), understanding (intelligentia), and will (voluntas), in the first half of that influential work he similarly maintained that the divine names signify relationships.71 This interpersonal emphasis was more fully elaborated by the twelfth-­century mystical theologian, Richard of St. Victor, who offered an etymological analysis of exsistentia (derived from ex, or “from, out of,” and sistere, “to

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be”) to support his conclusion that to exist in oneself means to receive one’s being from another.72 The fullness of glory, Richard wrote, “requires someone with whom to share this glory,” and the “perfection of a single person requires association with another one.” Alone, there is no possibility of “communicating” goodness or of being the object of love: according to this interpretation, three is the necessary number because only with the presence of a third can the goodness between two be shared. “Nothing is more precious and admirable in reciprocal, burning love,” Richard of St. Victor writes, “than one’s desire for someone else to be loved in the same fashion by him who is supremely loved and by whom one is supremely loved.”73 A perfect God, in other words, is necessarily a Trinitarian God.74 Jan van Ruusbroec, whose writings influenced the devotio moderna movement and through them some Protestant piety, radicalized this claim with language of divine indwelling: describing God as a “flowing, ebbing sea,” he contended that the “flowing of God always demands a flowing-­ back.”75 This interactivity is unending—­unless distorted by self-­ regard, which traps the dynamic within.76 This fascination with how relations simultaneously differentiate and unify is evident in Lanyer’s poetic description of devotional love.

Salve Deus Examples When Lanyer writes as she does in the preamble to the poem “Salve Deus” that offering the text and reading the text are alike sources of delight and desire, she clearly equates the effect of Christ’s love and passion with this process—­a process that signifies both death and devotion: . . . as thou no Labour will refuse, That to thy holy Love may pleasing be: His Death and Passion I desire to write, And thee to read, the blessed Soul’s delight

(lines 269–­72)

To write of Christ is to desire Christ, to use the poetic power of language to make him present, immediate, lovable. The efficacy

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of this depends on the reader’s love for the text—­a love that can in turn be called holy insofar as it communicates Christ’s love. Thus Christ and the Countess and the text all participate in this triangulated apprehension and expression of love (“His Death and Passion I desire to write, / And thee to read, the blessed Soul’s delight”; lines 271–­72). Describing the Countess as one who desires to “read” Christ’s death and passion or to “read” salvation in Christ’s “precious wounds,” Lanyer conveys the activity of apprehending and comprehending as more important than images of the death, or even compassionate identification with, Christ’s suffering. Active engagement is itself the delight—­and manifestation of love. Many interpreters, however, conflate this interactivity with an economics of exchange.77 “In the revised triangulation of desire in Lanyer’s sequence of poems,” Naomi Miller writes, “Christ provides a divine focal point around whom women can join with one another in a worship that excludes all earthly men, from Adam to Pilate.”78 Envisioned in this way, Christ is the organizing principle of the economy rather than a participant.79 In Lanyer, by contrast, the focus is not on how desire positions the subject or dialectically overcomes the boundaries between subject and object but instead about how the interplay brings love to life.80 The text does not “dispossess” the self of the self, as ecstatic notions of the Holy Spirit suggest it must, but instead mediates the self. The poem itself serves as a form of mediation akin to the Holy Spirit, experienced through meditative reading akin to lectio divina, where the savoring of the experience is more important than the scientia, or knowledge of the words.81

The Imitation of Desire The distinctiveness of Lanyer’s focus on the dynamics of desire, not fixed by an exchange between partners but effective insofar as they are catalyzed, is highlighted by her poem’s account of a suffering Christ—­the usual object of imitatio Christi meditations. In A Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified (1596), William Perkins described imitatio Christi as a

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mode of devotion whereby the believer should “dive and plunge thy self wholly both body and soul into the wounds and blood of Christ.”82 Like his medieval predecessors, Perkins encourages believers to identify with Christ’s suffering. Lanyer, in contrast, wants believers to partake of the desire described. It is the interaction rather than the identification that will bring desire to life. “Whereas” Christ gave himself to “us,” Perkins writes, “we can do no less than bestow hearts upon him and love him most.” According to Perkins, believers will come to love Christ by knowing what they owe to Christ.83 A similar focus is evident in Nicholas Breton’s verse narrative, the Countess of Pembroke’s Love, which also stresses how the agonies of Christ’s death might lead one to feel disgust for oneself, wonder and appreciation at the alternative ideal embodied in Christ, and then love fueled by appreciation.84 The analogous emphasis on pain is captured in one of Breton’s lines, setting the scene by describing the darkening day when it became clear that any pleasure “breeds a further pain.”85 Lanyer proposes a different devotional model by suggesting that descriptions of love will inspire love and by putting less emphasis on pain than pleasure.86 On this score it is telling that even the brief reference to Christ’s death in the second stanza of Lucie’s poem introduces him as one who descended from “celestial glory.” Equally notable is the fact that the reminder that he did so to “taste of our infirmities and sorrows” is recast in the next line as a picture of him as a wise reader, “Whose heavenly wisdom read the earthly story.” Then comes the depiction of Christ’s death, generalized to encompass martyrdom by drawing details from popular images of the martyred St. Sebastian:87 Lo here he comes all stuck with pale death’s arrows: In whose most precious wounds your soul may read Salvation, while he (dying Lord) doth bleed.

(lines 12–­14)

Each line offers a detail that reminds the reader that he suffered: “stuck with . . . arrows,” “wounds,” and “he . . . doth bleed.” Pain,

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however, is alleviated by the modifiers—­for the arrows belong to death described in fairly gentle terms as “pale”; the wounds are “precious”; and the line that reminds the reader how the “Lord doth bleed” is introduced by the reassuringly stalwart “Salvation,” set apart by comma and capitalization. In the context of the poem, as in the title poem “Salve Deus,” moreover, these brief references to Christ’s suffering are couched in beauty. Described hanging on the cross with “joints dis-­ jointed, and his legs hang down” (line 1161),88 and yielding to a “shameful death” (line 1168), the narrative poem devotes just as many stanzas to elaborating on the “Bridegroom that appears so faire” (line 1305). Beauty is in the eye of the beholder (“in his Spouse’s sight”; line 1306), but the speaker’s delight in using language from the Song of Songs shows how she identifies desire with beauty rather than compassion: That unto Snow we may his face compare, His cheeks like scarlet, and his eyes so bright As purest Doves that in the rivers are, Washed with milk, to give the more delight; His head is likened to the finest gold, His curled locks so beauteous to behold; Black as a Raven in her blackest hew; His lips like scarlet threads, yet much more sweet Than is the sweetest honey dropping dew

(lines 1307–­15)

Everything that might cause the eye to linger on Christ echoes classic descriptions of desirable lovers, the skin as white as snow, the scarlet cheeks, the dove-­bright eyes, the curled hair, the red, delectable lips. The imagery from the last line recurs near the end of the poem, where the “honey dropping dew of holy love” is described as the love the martyrs felt (line 1137). By imputing this feeling to the Countess and—­by extension—­other readers, the poet (and the poem) encourages the reader not just to comprehend or observe but also to experience what the text describes. To appreciate the significance of this emphasis on beauty, it

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is helpful to return to the last stanza of the dedicatory poem to “Lady Lucie,” where the brief invocation of the scene of the Passion is enveloped in a tableau of joy and appreciation. Christ is a “blessed Arke” surrounded by “bright Angels” (line 19), and although a “dying lover” (line 16), he is also a “lovely guest” (line 23). As the “Ocean of true grace” (line 17), Christ is the source of streams that fill his followers “with Joy” (line 18). The appropriate response is not to keep vigil at a deathbed or to be stricken with compassion, but to offer something beautiful in return, to serve “flowers of fresh comforts” as he “doth to that blessed bower impart” (lines 24–­25). Not death but love is stressed throughout—­a distinction made more notable by comparison with Fletcher’s insistence that suffering is the source of “our” joy: “Christ suffers, and . . . our joy springs in this.” Instead of generalized readers, instructed to feel compassion in order to feel joy and love, the reader in Lanyer’s text is particularized. The affect the text encourages is located in the relationship itself. Lanyer portrays not just Christ’s death but also his resurrection in relational terms. Risen from death, he is attended by his faithful wife the church, and offered as still accessible to the reader in the sensual images of loving bride and bridegroom. At this point the narrator reasserts herself to affirm that rather than a flat picture or a dyad, this relationship with Christ was embedded within other relationships. So she says explicitly that her text, the written description of Christ, conveyed Christ to her reader, that her inadequacies as writer were remedied by the reader’s powers of perception. Christ became a living presence in and through this interaction: Ah! Give me leave (good Lady) now to leave This task of Beauty which I took in hand, I cannot wade so deep, I may deceive My self, before I can attain the land; Therefore (good Madame) in your heart I leave His perfect picture, where it still shall stand, Deeply engraved in that holy shrine, Environed with Love and Thoughts divine.

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There may you see him as a God in glory, And as a man in miserable case; There may you read his true and perfect story, His bleeding body there you may embrace, And kiss his dying cheeks with tears of sorrow, With joyful grief, you may entreat for grace; And all your prayers, and your alms-­deeds May bring to stop his cruel wounds that bleeds.

(lines 1321–­36)

Alone one might be self-­deceived, for beauty can be dangerously seductive as well as salvific. Yet the speaker provides an antidote by taking on the “task of beauty,” where interactive engagement with the poem puts the reader in right relation with a picture “environed with love.” The Christ described and thus possessed through the interaction of writer and reader is in turn affected by the reader’s loving response.89

“Cast Your Eyes upon This Little Book”: The Triangulation of Devotional Love Lanyer’s triangulation of love differs subtly but significantly from socially sanctioned love between husbands and wives. In the dedicatory poem to the Countess of Suffolk, for example, the Countess is first described as a virtuous wife to a praiseworthy husband and a mother to noble daughters. Her husband, of “honorable Howard’s ancient house” (line 32) is a “most loyal Spouse” (line 34); she herself a “loving Hinde and pleasant Roe” (line 38; the pun on deer a familiar one in English Renaissance poetry); and theirs a “worthy Love” (line 36). The cadence shifts, however, when Christ is introduced at the end of the stanza: Fair tree from which the fruit of Honor springs, Here I present to you the King of kings:

(lines 41–­42)

Alliteration and repetition announce the shift to something more dramatic and dynamic. Visually as well as syntactically, the colon

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after “kings” serves as a gateway to the eleven stanzas that follow. Gateway is the right metaphor here, for in what follows the poem does not so much “present” an image of Christ, the “King of kings,” as a distant sovereign or even as an object of devotion (insofar as “object” signifies something that is acted upon rather than an entity that is also actively responsive). Instead, it “presents” a field of play, where the reader is invited to engage with Christ as a lover and source of “sweet desires” (line 1103). In the triangular field of play the imagination is invited to inhabit—­the field of play created by the invocation of a divine lover—­gender binaries and concern with human-­divine differences are pushed to the side. The real action is in the relational dynamics themselves. When Lanyer cites a divine source for her text, for example, she emphasizes not God’s power in itself but the text it inspired and the reader’s response. “His power,” she says, “hath given me power to write / A subject fit for you to look upon” (lines 13–­14). The important thing is what they have set in motion: And guided me to frame this work of grace, Not of it self, but by celestial powers, to which, both that and we must needs give place.

(lines 7–­9)

So too in the social realm Lanyer often scrapes like a courtier, accentuating the status of her intended reader and her own subservience when she appeals to them, as she does to the Countess of Suffolk to “accept these lines.” Still, it is the active relations she accentuates, especially by using sensual imagery, as when she describes these lines as “Writ by a hand that doth desire to do / All services to you” (lines 20–­21). The hand that writes services the reader by arousing her desire. Throughout her work Lanyer declares that the love her “hand” (her text) both catalyzes and satisfies is Christ, the Word incarnate. Wendy Wall notes that Lanyer carries the “text-­as-­body metaphor, a staple of Renaissance prefaces, to one logical extreme” by equating the text with a divine body.90 Lanyer also

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extends this metaphor to the text-­as-­love: the divine body that is the text is also the love the text incites. She hopes, for example, that the Countess of Suffolk’s daughters will find in her “little Book” not only “heavenly food”—­imagery that recalls the Eucharist—­but also a “Lover much more true” (lines 51–­52). Wall describes the book as the “incarnated, spiritualized, and eroticized body of Christ.” But that description implies that the book becomes the body because of the sensuality of Lanyer’s descriptions of Christ. Equally important to this conflation of book and body, however, is the reader’s sensual response. The book becomes a living, breathing body, in other words, not because of what it describes but because of the responses these descriptions evoke. This Trinitarian dynamic of offering and receiving, longing and fulfillment, is clear in the way the text is figured as Christ in this instruction to Ladie Arabella: Come like the morning Sun new out of bed, And cast your eyes upon this little Book, Although you be so well accompan’ed With Pallas, and the Muses, spare one look On this humbled King, who all forsook, That in his dying arms he might embrace Your beauteous Soule, and fill it with his grace.

(lines 8–­14)

Lanyer boldly equates this “little Book,” that is, her poetry, with “this humbled King,” that is, Christ. Her poem is, itself, the catalyst for the transformation figured here. By promising that her book will lead the reader to Christ’s embrace, Lanyer’s speaker makes no distinction between her words and Christ’s love. The reader embraced by Christ is now also intimate with the text that made this encounter possible. Setting the scene with rumpled bedsheets in the background and a sleep-­tousled reader who already has well-­endowed companions, the speaker beckons her to an overlooked beloved. The scene abruptly stages an operatic shift to a tragic death scene, where the dying hero embraces (and “fills”) his beautiful lover.

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As Wall says, quoting just the first five lines of the stanza reproduced here, Lanyer’s published text hereby “becomes” Christ. Yet this claim of identification distracts from the way the text stages ongoing interactions. The text, like Christ, is not just “physically desirable” or an object of desire; it is also actively desirous—­tantalizing, seducing, exciting, and gratifying.91 There is a single relational circuit, triangulated between reader, text, and Christ. Desire courses among all three.

Desirous Relations in Lanyer’s Closet Devotions By inscribing the presence and accessibility of the divine in this way, Lanyer created a distinctive devotional model.92 Like many Protestant devotional writers, Lanyer fostered what Richard Rambuss has called “closet devotions,” likening the self to a prayer closet where one should prepare oneself for Christ, encounter Christ, and cultivate a relationship with Christ. However, her closet devotion speaks less about faith and the “increasingly introspective involutions” Rambuss identifies as typical than about the relational dynamics of love.93 The revealing idiosyncrasies of Lanyer’s approach can be seen in the way imitation and interiority are configured in the dedication to Lady Lucie, as was discussed briefly in the introduction. This verse begins conventionally enough by likening the soul to a private place that contains private thoughts.94 Me thinks I see fair Virtue ready stand, T’unlock the closet of your lovely breast, Holding the key of Knowledge in her hand, Key of that Cabin where your self doth rest, To let him in, by whom her youth was blest The true-­love of your soul, your hearts delight, Fairer than all the world in your clear sight.

(lines 1–­7)

On the most straightforward reading, this stanza proclaims the importance of internalized devotion: find Christ within. Reading

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it this way, however, deemphasizes the importance of the triangulation between text, Christ, and reader—­as Jonathan Goldberg recognizes in an interpretation that is nevertheless hobbled by disengaging the sexual from the devotional. Noting that Virtue is feminine, and so her penetration of Lucie’s heart a “same sex encounter,” he underscores also the role of Christ, configured here “as a kind of supplementary instrument for penetration.” Goldberg concludes that Virtue acts “at the very least” as a “kind of pander in this triangular relationship, as she passes on to the Countess her former lover.”95 Goldberg’s notion of the third as a conduit rather than an equal participant distracts us from key features of the description here. For one thing, note the way the lines alert the reader to focus on the relations themselves: the text holds the key, with the subject position displaced from Lanyer, who speaks at the outset in the first person, by personification (“Holding the key of Knowledge in her hand”; my emphasis). A similar move of displacement through identification occurs in the fifth line, when the reference to “her youth,” though syntactically referring to Virtue, seems by sense to refer to the Countess instead—­the one blessed in her youth by “him” who can be understood as already proclaimed the Countess’s “true-­love” and “hearts delight.” Reading it this way makes clear that Christ the expectant lover is described here as one already seen and known by the Countess as “fairer than all the world”—­yet also as one who is able to gain entry to the “Cabin where your self doth rest” only insofar as the text successfully acts out what it attributes to Virtue. Goldberg, however, reads the “her” in line 5 as referring simply to Virtue and equates triangulation with the titillation of shared lovers. He rightly underscores that this sort of triangulation is not readily plotted along the axis of gender difference.96 But where he then concludes that religion “vehiculates many things,” it is telling that his list of things “vehiculated” by religion consists of “power relations, gender relations, patronage, and sex.”97 Interpersonal relations do not make the cut. Similarly, devotional affect—­what Goldberg refers to as “sexualized religious passion”—­is important

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first and foremost for social reasons, because it “provides the mediating language to overcome social disparity and to put Lanyer on some kind of footing with her patrons.”98 The problem with this interpretation is not that it treats religious passion as a way of navigating sex and power dynamics or as a “mask” for female-­female relations. The problem is that in doing so it elides its own best insight, that Lanyer’s triangulation is worthy of attention because it puts a distinctive twist on desire. This does not mean, simply, that Christ is substituted for a female lover (or vice versa). Nor does it mean that the intended female reader and Christ are united through a “system of equivalences and exchanges,” as Janel Mueller puts it.99 Instead, it means that the devotional element is essential because the divine is like a free radical, unpairing binaries that are otherwise fixed. Here, then, Lucie’s desire is described that it might be imitated—­not just by Lucie, the intended reader, herself but by any reader, who is put in Lucie’s position by reading a line addressed to “you.” What is being “unlocked” and offered is the experience of “true-­ love,” available to the reader who enacts the responses of the “you” described.

Conclusion: Lanyer’s Dream and Donne’s Ecstasy In a note appended to the end of her book, Lanyer explains that she had dreamt the title of the work long before she actually wrote the poems. This is a way both to displace what she has written from herself and to claim it, for the name “was delivered unto me in sleep” but then recovered in her memory. A similar dynamic is in play in the eroticism of the dream she describes in a poem dedicated to Mary Sidney Herbert, where “looking back into my thoughts” (line 5) the speaker spied a woman, seen with the eye of reason but “fast tied” to her thoughts with a “golden Chain” (line 7). This refers to the Platonic theory of the bonds of love. The centrality of desire is also declared in the first line of that same poem, with an allusion to a mountain city sacred to Venus, goddess of love and sexuality.100 The dream unfolds

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with descriptions of gods and goddesses listening alongside fair springs to Sidney Herbert’s “holy hymns” (line 116), and the author herself seeking more knowledge of the “lovely Lady” she praised and being told “Not only that, but more than I desired” (line 136). Lanyer’s dream, in other words, is like the love the poem enacts, a desire in excess to what is already felt but not external to those who feel it. It is experienced not as self-­love or a feeling that turns one back into oneself but instead as love for another within. This is the dynamic that pervades both Lanyer’s gendered emphasis on likeness and the devotion to Christ her poems seek to inspire. Where her vision intersects with Donne’s is in making a dream seem like an astute theory of desire. In “The Ecstasy,” Donne describes it this way: When love, with one another so Interanimates two souls, That abler soule, which thence doth flow, Defects of loneliness controls.101

(lines 41–­44)

It is a relatively moderate vision of what ecstasy might achieve: not transcendence but the creation of an “abler soul.” Still, alleviating loneliness is no small feat. In lieu of all or nothing, one “might thence a new concoction take / And part far purer than he came” (line 27–­28). This purity did not mean dispensing with the body.102 And even the fixed state of the souls is not set in quite the way that some of the imagery initially suggests, for Donne imagines the souls combining through a mutual enlivening that he must coin a new word to describe: “Interanimate,” as it appears in the editions from 1633 to 1639, but “interinanimate” (my emphasis) in most of the manuscripts. This neologism reflects Donne’s fondness for the prefix “inter” (intensified in this case by the additional “in”), which matches his interest in the simultaneous possession of contraries.103 Thus lovers together make something new but are not thereby freed entirely from what they were before they loved. Pivoting around the specter of

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loneliness ameliorated, Donne thus turns back to the body, and differentiation, observing that love is an experience of retaining as well as overcoming separation through the coincidence of two and one.104 Donne, then, like Lanyer, offers a clear alternative to theories of eroticism that present it primarily as a drama of subjectivity—­ the singular self longing for a connection it can never quite achieve, yearning for what it cannot have, confirming what has often been described as the inevitable connection between death, desire, and loss, projecting itself onto an object and seeking in return to incorporate the object into itself.105 What both poets offer is still, then, a drama—­the interactive drama of separating and connecting to another, the need for the other to stand as subject rather than object, able to resist and respond independently. Whether in Donne’s emphasis on how “contraries meet” or Lanyer’s interest in catalyzing desire within a triangulated relation, the focus is less on the self lost or gained than the dynamic of love it engages.

Four4 Marriage Love and doubt combine to potent effect in marriage poems by Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. “Lord, why should I doubt any more when thou hast given me such assured Pledges of thy Love?” Bradstreet asks in one of the meditations found among her papers after her death in 1672. Why indeed? God, she recalls, has declared himself her creator, master, father, and Christ her brother. Best of all, he has promised this: “thy maker is thy husband” (Isa. 54:5). “Nay, more,” Bradstreet exclaims, “I am a member of his Body; he, my head.” It is not the marriage pledge alone that alleviates Bradstreet’s doubts but the literal merging of two in one—­the union of flesh—­that she associates with marriage.1 Edward Taylor, quoting the same pledge, conveys a similar mix of uncertainty and reassurance: “My Maker, he my Husband? Oh! Strange joy!” In poems about divine-­human betrothal, Taylor seeks evidence that his sinfulness will not keep him and God apart. “What art thou mine? Am I espoused to thee?” he asked in a poem meditating on the phrase “my beloved,” from the Song of Songs.2 Can he marry God? The following lines respond: My Love is then right well bestowed, alone When it obtains thyself her Lovely One.

(2.115.47–­48)

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The speaker’s love, isolated in the enjambment of the first line, merges with another in the second. Possessives jostle together (“my Love,” “thyself,” “her Lovely One”), as “alone” gives way to “One.” Here as throughout his marriage poems, Taylor’s fears are soothed by the poetic relations of marriage. Why the need for reassurance? And what sort of reassurance did marriage provide? To understand Bradstreet’s and Taylor’s answers to these questions, we need to locate these poets in their own time and dwell in their poetry, but the questions themselves persist. In an argument that links the early modern period to our own, Stanley Cavell observes that marriage somehow became our singular, fearful response to the loss of metaphysical certainty. “What has made the invention or reinvention of marriage necessary?” he asks. “What has caused the radicalization of the threat of skepticism, such that a ceremony of single intimacy is what we have to oppose to the threatened withdrawal of the world—­of the realms of the natural, the social, the political, the religious?” Marriage keeps the demons of doubt at bay, Cavell contends. He reads Shakespeare plays from the sixteenth century and comic marriage films from the 1940s to elucidate how this singular form of committed love came to stand for everything. Rather than Shakespeare or screwball comedy, I take my lead from Puritans and poetry, to suggest that the tensions sustained in the taut lines of this poetry—­the tensions between affection and obligation, free choice and contractual mandates, duality and singularity, and presence and absence—­better explain the surprising significance of marriage as a site of unparalleled reassurance.3 Anne Bradstreet’s poems about the spiritual significance of her human marriage address the fear of absence and the assurance provided by presence. “And if he love, how can he there abide?” she asks of her absent husband. “Nought but the fervor of his ardent beams,” she insists, “Hath power to dry the torrent of these streams” (lines 13, 35–­36, pp. 248–­49). For Edward Taylor, writing of a betrothal to Christ, the problem is not literal absence but the absence of feeling: “Oh, that I ever felt what I express!” he writes in 1689 (1.35.1). Forty years later he still laments the lim-

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its of his feelings; “I do bewail,” he writes, “my heart hath little of ” the love that should be given to God (2.165.19). Poetic relations between bridegroom and bride enact the love he is otherwise unable to feel. There are no simple answers in these poems. Conversions are momentary, and love offers no guarantee. The parties involved are not equal, but neither are their power relations predictable. These poems refuse to choose between what today are often seen as mutually exclusive options: that married love requires spontaneous passion or, conversely, unwavering commitment; that marriage preserves patriarchy or, conversely, enables a new vision of equality. Instead, these poems enact marriage as a relational dynamic structured by obligation even as it is sustained by intense emotion, as an interaction between unequal parties who are equally implicated in an interactive relationship. Impelled by the problem of doubt and the need for certainty, working within a theological and social context that upholds desire as a duty, Bradstreet and Taylor write as the conventional adherents of a Christian movement known for its rigid insistence on convention. They wrote, however, about married love with a creativity few match today.

Marriage and Covenantal Theology This creativity was rooted in Puritanism’s covenantal theology. Bradstreet and Taylor were Calvinists, the sort of Calvinists known as Puritans because they viewed the liturgy and episcopacy of the Church of England with some suspicion. Puritans characteristically identified doubt as a necessary and important stage in the process of repentance. And Puritans drew great comfort from the divine promise or covenant between God and his people. Covenantal theology was not unique to the Puritans, but it had unparalleled significance for Puritan piety. Strictly speaking, Calvinism’s covenantal theology distinguished between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace—­between the covenant that promised eternal life to those who fulfilled its require-

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ments, and the covenant that freely offered salvation to sinners who, by definition, could not meet these requirements. But Puritans unintentionally stitched these two different versions of the covenant back together by envisioning the covenant of grace as a bond of mutual obligation.4 The basic logic of Puritanism’s covenantal theology remained fairly straightforward: God pledges to love his elect, although they are unworthy, and the elect, in turn, are obligated to love God. The devotional and psychological effects are more complicated.5 While some theologians and pastors hailed the covenant as an affirmation of divine sovereignty, arguing believers could take comfort from the reliability of a divine promise, others celebrated it as an expression of divine love. All schools of Puritan piety, however, equated the covenant with marriage, not just because the link was biblical, but because marriage, like the covenant, was both contractual and personal. Richard Sibbes, a leading preacher and promoter of Puritan theology in England, underscores the importance of this dual emphasis in a sermon on the Song of Songs. Marriage “holds fit resemblance” to the “spiritual” contract between Christ and his church, Sibbes explains, because marriage is a “civil contract” between man and wife. That is not all. Just as husbands and wives have an obligation to love each other, Christ loves the elect, and the elect, in turn, have a “duty” to “love him again with a mutual and obedient love.”6 On these points, Sibbes’s account is typical. The covenant is like a marriage because both entail a duty to desire.7 This paradoxical requirement—­the obligation to love—­ explains why covenantal theology and Puritan marriage, both ideologically straightforward, had such complicated psychological effects. Believers anxious to overcome doubt were called on to gauge the intensity of their desire. John Cotton, pastor to the Bradstreet family when Anne was a child in England and then pastor of the church in Boston after she and her family migrated to New England, addresses concerns about deception directly in the opening pages of A Brief Exposition with Practical Observations on the Whole Book of Canticles. The Song of Songs—­often

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referred to as Canticles—­was a practical aid, according to Cotton, because it could help believers discern between true and false feeling. “But how shall I know that the sweetness found in the Word is not a delusion?” asks Cotton’s worried reader. Cotton answers by equating devotion with desire. Satan’s “false flashes” satisfy our longing, while God leaves us wanting more. “We do not thirst the more after [Satan], as the soul does” in relation to God. Because desire is a devotional imperative, every believer is like a desiring spouse: “Every chaste Spouse of Christ . . . longs for the kisses of his mouth, not for a single kiss, but for kiss upon kiss.”8 The zealous soul, Cotton wrote in Christ the Fountain, is “remarkable for its panting and longing, and eager desire after God.” Do you have a “strong and hearty desire” to meet Christ in the “bed of loves . . . ?” he asked his readers. If so, “truly then you have Christ for your Christ, because you have him by way of covenant.”9 The covenant’s reassurance depends on the strength of one’s desire. Husbands and wives, anxious to ensure they were fulfilling the obligations of marriage, were similarly instructed to stoke the flames of passion. A husband’s main duty to his wife is to “Joy and delight in her,” according to Thomas Gataker’s Marriage Duties (1620). Echoing Proverbs 5, Gataker encourages husbands to resist the temptation to betray their wives by remembering to “rejoice in the wife of thy youth.” Arousal is encouraged: “Let her breasts . . . content thee at all times: and delight continually.” This is what it means to “doate on the Love of her.” In a sermon on marriage, Gataker helpfully encapsulates the seemingly contradictory assumptions involved in commanding love. “As there is no affection more forcible” than love, so also there is “none freer from force and compulsion.” Those who cannot love must try nevertheless. They must “to strive even to enforce their affections; and crave grace at Gods hand.” Why? So that they “may be enabled to bring themselves to that disposition, that God now requires.” Grace enables love and love is required. Conversely, the capacity to love—­the feeling of panting, desirous love—­is a sure sign that one has received the gift of grace.10 In a work published

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fifty years after Gataker’s, Richard Baxter sounds the same note: “The first Duty of Husbands is to Love their Wives (and Wives their Husbands) with a true entire Conjugal love.” This duty cannot be fulfilled by dutiful actions alone. Desire is required: “Keep up your Conjugal Love,” Baxter encourages his readers, “in a constant heat and vigor.”11 These were consistent themes in Puritan writings. Although they had rejected the Roman Church’s claim that marriage was a sacrament, Puritans exalted companionate marriage by linking it to the heavenly covenant. Both relationships involved contractual obligations. Both relationships required the parties involved to love each other. Both relationships consequently raised doubts about whether these obligations were being fulfilled. And both relationships thereby associated assurance—­the conviction that one was fulfilling one’s obligations—­with relational experience. In one sense, we know all this already. Anyone who reads or writes about Puritans encounters the message that introspection is a spiritual obligation. Puritanism’s sophisticated interest in inner experience is—­along with witchcraft—­a primary reason these sources still interest nonspecialists. Long before postmodernism unleashed a plague of uncertainty on people once inoculated by reason, Puritans confronted what the great Puritan depth psychologist Daniel Dyke called the Mystery of Self-­Deceiving (1614).12 The struggle to vanquish this mystery is the reason Sacvan Bercovitch can attribute the origins of the American self to the Puritans, to their interest in what he calls an “inner civil war.” Bercovitch can cite almost any canonical Puritan source to make this point, including Thomas Hooker’s “thunderous” declaration that Christians must consider “not what Self will, but what the Lord will,” and Richard Baxter’s proclamation that “self-­denial and the love of God are all [one].”13 The predictability of these sources is the reason Jeffrey Hammond can declare that all Puritan poetry had a single goal: to inculcate an experience of “redeemed identity” by expressing the speaker’s transformation from “sinful self ” to “saintly self.” The gender dynamics of Puritan experience are similarly uniform. Puritan conversion involved

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the “transformation of all saints, male and female, into feminine vessels,” Ivy Schweitzer observes, “emptied of self and filled with God.” Schweitzer’s study of Puritan lyric reveals how masculine speakers reclaimed authority by admitting to a properly feminine passivity, finding in themselves a “redeemed subjectivity” by replacing the “old man in Adam” with the “new man in Christ.”14 Knowing all this, however, we still do not know what Bradstreet’s and Taylor’s poems themselves deem most important; that is, not the transformation from the “old man” to the “new man”—­f rom self-­assertion to self-­denial, sinful to saintly, masculine to feminine—­but that this transformation was relational.

Two Poets in Puritan New England Appreciating the importance of relationality requires close readings of the poems—­which differ, as did the poets themselves, in varied and nuanced ways. Bradstreet and Taylor both emigrated from England as adults, a generation apart, she with her husband, parents, and other settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the Great Migration of 1630, when she was just eighteen; he, as a single man in his twenties, a nonconforming Calvinist who may have been spurred to depart by oaths of allegiance required of all ministers and schoolmasters after the Church of England’s restoration in 1660. Both were married. Bradstreet was survived by her husband and eight children when she died in 1672. Taylor, who lived well into his eighties, lost his first wife and five of their eight children by the time he was in his early forties; he and his second wife had six children. Both were members of covenantal churches. Bradstreet’s autobiographical letter to her children narrates the confession of doubt and reassurance—­known as a conversion relation—­that by Taylor’s time was formally required of all who wanted to be full members.15 As a woman, Bradstreet was denied the public roles available to her father and husband, both of whom served as governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But she was a published poet, known and acclaimed in her own time as the author of The Tenth

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Muse, a book of poetry printed in England without, Bradstreet later implied, her knowledge or permission. The Tenth Muse, championed and praised by many prominent men, was the only book of poetry in Edward Taylor’s library. The subjects and style of Bradstreet’s writing, demonstrating knowledge of classical as well as contemporary poets, attest to the quality of the education she received at home. And her range of topics—­including recondite poems about elements, seasons, and monarchies; an elegy for Philip Sidney and a poem in honor of Queen Elizabeth; as well as numerous religious meditations and poems about the birth and death of family members, the absence of her husband, and the fire that destroyed her house—­collectively convey a creative mind at work in the context of a conventional woman’s life. Taylor, by contrast, lived out his life as a public pastor but a private poet. During forty-­three years as pastor of a church in Westfield, Massachusetts, he published a “Treatise on the Lord’s Supper,” and many public documents refuting what he viewed as Solomon Stoddard’s dangerous laxity, in a dispute that came to be known as the Half-­Way Covenant Controversy. Alone in his study, Taylor also wrote hundreds of poems, preserved by his family until their publication in 1937. This collection included occasional meditations and two series of what Taylor called “Preparatory Meditations,” many meditating on the betrothal depicted in the Song of Songs. Their gendered experiences of life clearly influenced the concerns manifest in their poetry. Unable to travel, as her husband, son, and father did, and frequently pregnant, Bradstreet had good reason to lament absence and fear death. She speaks not with a feminine self-­deprecation, however, but often in the voice of the psalmist, as one who believes that spousal promises license her demands. Taylor, by contrast, speaking from a position of masculine self-­assurance, writes obsessively about his own depravity. He regrets his lack of feeling and engages the love between bride and groom in the Song of Songs to overcome his inability to experience the intensity of desire he professes. These gender differences are important, but so too are the similarities. For

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both poets, form is the medium of relationality in which they depict the obligation to love as a problem as well as a solution. In Bradstreet’s and Taylor’s compositions, poetry presents itself as an interactive expression of relational fidelity. In their marriage poems in particular, these poetic relations reveal themselves to be more important and more nuanced than standard accounts of Puritan marriage and Puritan introspection acknowledge.

Demanding Presence: Anne Bradstreet’s Marriage Poems What sort of faith or fidelity is possible when one’s spouse is absent? What sort of presence does love require? Can presence be mandated? Can love? These are the questions that Bradstreet’s marriage poems ask and answer, as they seek to ameliorate the effects of distance. The distance imposed by death is the subject of the first of the five marriage poems published in the second edition of The Tenth Muse (1678). This poem, entitled “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” acknowledges that death is inevitable, for “all things within this fading world hath end.” And, in accord with many Protestant theologians, the poem also concedes that marriage ends when a spouse dies.16 The speaker is nevertheless worried about being separated from her husband. The poem responds to these fears by inscribing another possibility—­an alternative scenario the speaker is “bid” by love to compose: How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend, How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend, We both are ignorant, yet love bids me These farewell lines to recommend to thee, That when the knot’s unty’d that made us one, I may seem thine, who in effect am none.

(lines 7–­12, p. 243)

Death will untie the “knot” that bound them together and negate the speaker’s current existence. These written lines, however, might make it possible for the reader to claim her nevertheless.

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This poem’s interest in directing the reader’s attachments and affections is reinforced by the capitalization of “Lot” (“thy Lot to lose thy friend”), bringing to mind the biblical character who was impelled to leave his home behind by angels who told him not to look back (Gen. 19:16–­17). “Escape for thy life,” one angel told him. The poem here plays Lot’s role as well as the angel’s—­ hesitating, as Lot does, and then compelling the reader forward. By enjoining the reader to experience love after death, the speaker does not attribute immortality to the poem as an inert object, like a memorial, but instead makes reading the poem the activity that will extend the speaker’s life. While death will render her absent, these “farewell lines,” hold out the promise of ongoing engagement, if the reader responds to love’s bidding. The poem thereby builds on the duty to desire in marriage, instructing the reader to experience the longing the words describe, to “love thy dead,” to breath “sad sighs,” and “kiss this paper for thy love’s dear sake.” The reader who follows these directions might taste the “salt tears” the writer has shed (lines 20, 26, 27, p. 244). The images that depict the physicality of composition and reading reinforce the poem’s plea for presence. By inspiring the reader to be similarly invested in presence, the poem suggests, this sort of reading might ease the fears of the speaker, an expectant mother who knows the risks of childbirth. The second marriage poem in the published collection is the most confident in proclaiming that married love provides reassurance. This confidence is encapsulated in the first line: “If ever two were on then surely we.” The simplicity of that message, mirrored in its form, structures a messy process in which two becomes one becomes we. So too in its entirety, the poem performs the unity it declares. Simple couplet rhymes, compactly unified in the first half, with single-­syllable words (“we” and “thee,” “man” and “can,” “gold” and “hold”), are slightly extended in the second half, as the poems rhyming words lengthen and the relationship deepens: If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

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If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold, Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that Rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay, The heavens reward thee manifold I pray. Then while we live, in love lets so persever[e] That when we live no more, we may live ever.

(lines 1–­12, p. 245)

The repetition of “If ever” turns what is syntactically a conditional phrase into a litany of delight. The fifth and sixth lines of this paean to married love echo the proclamation of Psalm 19 that the “judgments of the Lord are truth,” and “more to be prized are, then honey” (in the Bay Psalm Book translation). But Bradstreet’s slight change of wording shifts the emphasis from judgment to love. This alternative turns the passive construction into an active proclamation: judgments that are “to be desired” become the wifely speaker’s concise, first-­person claim, “I prize thy love.” This attention to shared love carries over into the following line as the speaker announces her love cannot be diminished. It can be matched, but only by “love from thee.” This is love’s just reward. The speaker acknowledges that love between husband and wife cannot supersede what the divine has to offer, for only the heavens can give her husband his true reward. Nevertheless, the concluding lines reaffirm what the love they share in this life means for the next: Then while we live, in love lets so persever[e] That when we live no more, we may live ever.

(lines 12–­13, p. 245)

This reference to heavenly reward recalls Christ’s teaching in the beatitudes, where he reassures the blessed that they will receive their reward in heaven and warns that the uncharitable will be denied this reward (Matt. 5:12 and 6:1). Bradstreet’s call for per-

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severance also has biblical echoes, one from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, where he instructs the faithful to persevere in watchful prayer “for all Saints”; and a second from the Geneva Bible’s version of 2 Timothy, where the heading explains that the author likens the effort of the elect to the duties of sons and husbands, “the better to set out perseverance in the Christian warfare.” Read with these biblical passages in mind, Bradstreet’s concluding lines seem remarkably confident: as does Jesus, she differentiates between actions that impede and enable immortality; as does Paul, she instructs her reader to persevere. But where Paul associates perseverance with watchful prayer and warfare, she links perseverance with married love. In the concluding imperative to love well, the repetition of the word “live” (“while we live . . . / . . . live no more . . . / . . . may live ever”) conveys the urgency of a poet who wants to perceive, and communicate, the life of love. In the third marriage poem, Bradstreet makes clear that she has little use for the principle of unity without the experience of union. Her conviction that the demands of love are immanent and immediate authorizes her complaints about her husband’s absence. “How stayest thou there,” she asks in “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment,” while “I at Ipswich lie?” (line 4, p. 246). Bradstreet is not content to uphold the ideal of marriage. “My head, my heart, mine eyes, my life, nay, more,” she begins, addressing her husband as herself (line 1, p. 246). If marriage means that “two be one,” the poem proclaims, then everything that belongs to him belongs to her. Distance, however, diminishes what they share. Her “chilled limbs now numbed lie forlorn” (line 11), she writes, underscoring that the psychological sense of abandonment has physical manifestations. These descriptions of pleasure and sadness culminate in an imperative at the end of the poem’s first movement: “return, return, sweet Sol, from Capricorn” (line 12). In four short lines, compressed between images of the speaker beset by darkness, deprived of her sun, the poem considers compensatory pleasures by recalling the children that “in thy heat” I bore:

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In this dead time, alas, what can I more Than view those fruits which through thy heat I bore? Which sweet contentment yield me for a space, True living pictures of their father’s face. (lines 13–­16, p. 246).

But her children are comforting only insofar as they evoke him; in her husband’s absence, the speaker can look on their children, “true living pictures of their father’s face.” The poem concludes by reiterating that this deprivation cannot stand. Pronouncing herself the home of “my dearest guest” (line 22), the speaker insists that her guest return. “Go not thence,” she commands: Where ever, ever stay, and go not thence, Till nature’s sad decree shall call thee hence; Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone, I here, thou there, yet both but one.

(lines 23–­26, p. 247)

In Bradstreet’s poem, relationality takes place in real time: neither children nor memories nor some abstracted sense of faith can substitute for presence. In Bradstreet’s day, most Catholics and Protestants alike understood marriage to be a form of union that upheld hierarchy. It has always been thus, Frances Dolan argues in her book assessing the legacy of Christian marriage. The Christian ideal of marital unity, Dolan asserts, conveys the message that marriage only has room for one, requiring one person to cede to another and giving spiritual sanction to the requirement that wives subordinate themselves to their husbands.17 Traditions are never singular, however, and just as egalitarian interpretations of the creation account in Genesis complicated John Milton’s depiction of Adam’s superiority in Paradise Lost (published in 1667, during Bradstreet’s lifetime), so too Puritan pastors betrayed the tensions inherent in affirming the spiritual equality of men and women while insisting that wives must obey their husbands. While in England and her colonies, the law of coverture denied wives legal standing apart from their husbands (according to the

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legal fiction that husbands and wives were a single entity), the congregationalist Puritans in the Bay Colony required women as well as men to apply for full membership and anxiously insisted that women, like men, were free.18 A wife’s obligation to obey is “in a way of liberty not of bondage,” the Puritan leader John Winthrop maintained, because a woman freely chooses the man she becomes subject to: “A true wife accounts her subjection her honor and freedom, and would not think her condition safe and free, but in her subjection to her husband’s authority.”19 Yet these questions of hierarchy and parity or freedom and subjection—­the issues that preoccupy men writing marriage manuals and sermons about a woman’s duty to obey her husband—­ are not Bradstreet’s concerns. She cites the traditional formula of union from Genesis not as a principle but as a demand: “Flesh of thy flesh, bone of thy bone,” she writes, in the concluding couplet of “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment.” “I here, thou there, yet both but one” (line 26). This is a protest poem. She reminds her husband of Adam’s words in order to demonstrate that their separation violates the covenant. Covenantal comfort depends not on her obedience but on his presence. The protest continues in the fourth poem, entitled simply “Another.” “If he love, how can he there abide?” she asks (line 13, p. 248). The speaker appeals to the sun to shed light on her problem: “Commend me to the man more loved than life, / Show him the sorrows of his widowed wife” (lines 9–­10, p. 248). That she is not widowed but merely left behind is of no consequence to the speaker, for whether the cause is death or travel, her spouse’s absence deprives her of the experience of love. The touch of the sun puts her husband to shame: “Tell him, the countless steps that thou dost trace, / That once a day, thy Spouse thou may embrace” (line 21, p. 249). He should not be permitted to stay away. “Mark what I say,” the poem demands, before continuing with a request: “by all our loves conjure him not to stay” (lines 39–­40, p. 249). These lines themselves, like a conjuring spell, summon the sun and the reader to witness her distress and bring her husband back to her side. With unwavering persistence, the next poem covers the same

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ground with different metaphors, a continuity signaled by the use of the same title, “Another.” Bereft of her spouse, the speaker complains, she leads “a joyless life, / I have a loving phere [companion], yet seem no wife” (lines 21–­22, p. 251). Absence turns “husband” and “wife” into meaningless words.20 This stark claim challenges the very premise of marriage. Presenting themselves in dynamic opposition to the static power of abstraction, these poems repeatedly maintain that a formalized commitment necessarily entails the immediate contact and emotional interactions that make it possible to live as a wife. Marital unity, they assert, cannot simply be affirmed in principle. It must be poetically enacted. In these ways, Bradstreet’s marriage poems refuse to imagine the redemption of soul without body or to praise spiritualized love divorced from proximate interactions, making physical presence key to her poetics of marriage. Just as bodies, distinct even when together and tangibly missed when apart, underscore the persistence of difference, so too they dramatize the pleasures of proximity. These poems, merging the poetics of tactile experience with the poetics of marriage, thereby represent a notable domestication of a long tradition of lamenting absent lovers. Medieval examples include the scholar Heloise (1101–­64), who rejects the very title of wife because with it comes the distractions of housekeeping and children. In letters to Peter Abelard, the lover she secretly married, Heloise concludes that the figure of a wife is implacably opposed to the possibility of single-­minded passion. Or Margery Kempe (1373–­ca. 1438), one of many Christian wives in premodern Europe whose longing for Christ required her to excise sex from her marriage and thereby spiritualize the human bond.21 In early modern Europe, Christian poets found it nearly impossible to pry themselves free of Petrarch’s insistence that distance increases desire. Death compelled grief and inspired poems of mourning, but more often than not it became an occasion to insist that united souls ensure life after death, or to reiterate Augustine’s message, that the loss of friends and lovers proves the need for God, the beloved who cannot die. Like Heloise, Bradstreet resists the spiritualization of loss and the imperative to redirect her desire, but unlike her tragic prede-

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cessor, she does so in the name of marriage. “Worst of all,” her speaker protests, is the fact that she cannot pursue and regain her husband: “I here, he there, alas, both kept by force” (lines 23–­24, p. 251). All creatures feel the same way, this poem proclaims. Bereft of a mate, they naturally long for a reunion because the formal unity of marriage is both necessary and insufficient—­to be fulfilled it requires physical proximity and embodied interactions. For Bradstreet, absence does not encourage different commitments; rather, it strengthens the demand for union and presence within the existing commitment. Death will part spouses, but that is to be lamented rather than praised; the need to travel and the problem of distance may be a fact of life, but it is not an acceptable fact. Bradstreet’s poems about marriage thus maintain that without physical interactions and real presence, the institution is no comfort. The duty to desire in itself is meaningless. Without interactions, the marriage cannot provide the evidence needed to allay persistent doubts and fears. But what does a spouse’s presence make possible? This question is the focus of the more explicitly devotional poems about marriage published in 1867 along with some of Bradstreet’s other manuscript writings. In these poems, addressing God, Bradstreet contends that proximity to her husband enables her to perform her “duty with delight.”22 Writing in 1661, in a poem occasioned by her husband’s departure for England, Bradstreet prays to God for his safe return: “Lord let my Eyes see once Again / Him whom thou gavest me.” Why? So that “we together may sing praise / For ever unto Thee” (lines 44–­47, p. 289). Devotion is increased by not just the bond, but more important by the lived experience of marriage: And the Remainder of our Days Shall consecrated be With an Engaged heart to sing All praises unto Thee

(lines 41–­48, p. 288)

In the poem’s tableau, husband and wife praise God together, but they cannot do this as a “we” until they are reunited. The implicit

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claim is that apart their hearts are less engaged and their praises less fulsome. Accordingly, the reunification of husband and wife involves the triangulation of husband, wife, and God, all bound together by duty as well as longing, generosity, and devotion. No one in the triangle is envisioned as interchangeable with another: the union between the speaker and her God, like that between speaker and husband, presumes the difference that makes it possible for each to answer another’s need. In another poem written while her husband was away, “In my Solitary houres in my dear husband his Absence,” Bradstreet acknowledges that her husband’s absence should prompt her to embrace “a more beloved one / Whose comforts far excel” (lines 17–­18, p. 291). But in a manner reminiscent of Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Since She Whom I Loved,” the poem fails to offer a clear contrast between finite and immortal love. The assumption that the speaker should shift her allegiances appears within a series of calculations that presume the specificity and desirability of her human husband. God may be a better spouse, but what she wants most from him is the return of her human husband. This is a relationship of debt, obligation, and petition. If you give me my husband, I’ll praise you. If you give me a “better heart,” I’ll “pay the vows which I do owe / For ever unto Thee.” If you help me, I’ll “Return Thee what I owe” (lines 47, 49–­50, 54, p. 292). Here, as in the poems directly addressed to her spouse, obligation and intimacy are mutually productive. The bidirectional vectors of obligation—­what the speaker owes to God and what she wants God to give her—­are plotted in relation to all three parties: husband, wife, and the divine beloved. Rather than privileging her relationship with God, the poem makes this relationship dependent on the speaker’s relationship with her spouse. Duty and love, marriage and devotion, become inseparable acts, faithfully rendered in a poem that records the speaker’s provisional ability to fulfill in life what she enacts in her poetry.

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Mine and Thine in Edward Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations Edward Taylor’s poems manifest a similar interest in making dutiful love come alive. “What Chilly Love, and Cold?” he asks in the first of his meditative poems (1.1.16), and then still again in one of his last, “My Love alas is a small shriveled thing,” he attests (2.161[B].7). Given this chill, the inadequacy of his love, how, then, can he fulfill his lifelong project, to feel “conjoined” to God? Theologically, the answer was clear: love for God comes from God. But experientially, the answer was relational. Although this may seem an obvious point, as Taylor’s goal, after all, was union with God, it is regularly minimized in most accounts of Puritan piety, which tend instead to focus on how the dual focus on depravity and regeneration shaped the Puritan sense of self. Taylor’s practice of poetry was meditative, in keeping with an Augustinian tradition of seeking divine illumination within, through a lively engagement with Scripture. In The Saints Everlasting Rest, Richard Baxter described meditation as “preaching to oneself,”23 and although this description applies just as well to Catholic as to Protestant meditation, the covenantal theology ensured that meditation had a specific purpose for Protestants who believed their inclusion in the covenant required them to confirm that the promises of grace could be claimed in the first-­person singular. Like other Puritans, Taylor believed that meditating on Scripture enabled believers to break open the Word and “quicken” the heart.24 His interest not just in the intensity of love but also in the relational dynamics that enabled these feelings of intensified love are clearly laid out on the first page of Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations: What Love is this of thine, that Cannot be In thine Infinity, O Lord, Confined, Unless it in thy very Person See, Infinity, and Finity conjoined?

(1.1.1–­4)

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The question asked here about love is also the question of poetry: What do these confined words, the careful scripting of “Love” and “thine” and “infinity” and “finity,” each one calling attention to its own placement, shape, and sound, have to do with the meaning of each? What are we to make of these words, this succession of words, given that their meaning is not contained or containable within black ink on white paper? Love is not love on the page. The poem is not reducible to script. The infinite cannot be confined within the finite. And yet in posing this question—­what love is this?—­Taylor’s gives visible form to the joining it declares impossible. The recurrence of “in,” appearing nine times in four lines, as a self-­standing preposition and within “confined,” “infinity,” and “finity,” percussively aligns the finite and the infinite. And in these lines—­“Unless it in thy very Person See, / Infinity, and Finity conjoined?”—­the message that love entails the connection of divine and human is conveyed as much through sound as signifier. The recurring syllable (“infinity” and “finity”—­signifiers of sacred and profane) turns the latter into an echo of the former. The prefix that makes finite into infinite audibly conveys the line’s message: creator and created are “conjoined.” This conjoined love is, in a very literal sense, in the poem.

My Maker, He My Husband? Taylor’s poetry repeatedly displays its ability to make lowly things and inadequate words frame the interaction between a “dull soul” and a heavenly spouse, as in this meditation on the phrase “My Spouse,” from the Song of Songs: I know not how to speak’t, it is so good: Shall Mortal, and Immortal marry? Nay, Man marry God? God be a Match for Mud? The King of Glory Wed a Worm? Mere Clay?

(1.23.19–­22)

These hyperbolic descriptions of difference and inequality enact the connection that the speaker questions. Although the speaker

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says he knows not how to speak the pleasure of their union, the next line does just that, as if gaining confidence from the poem’s eloquent account of the impossible, affirming what cannot be in a short declarative sentence: “This is the Case.” And on it goes, demanding that the words be heard: This is the Case. The Wonder too in Bliss. Thy Maker is thy Husband. Hear thou this?

(1.23.23–­24)

The Bible gives the poem its script, for “thy Maker is thy husband” is from Isaiah. But the poem scripts its own relations. Following Bradstreet’s wording exactly, rather than the translation in the Geneva Bible or the King James Bible, Taylor’s poem then departs from hers by beginning the next stanza with a different version of the same line: Thy Maker is thy Husband.25 Hear thou this? My Maker, he my Husband? Oh! Strange joy! If Kings wed Worms, and Monarch Mites wed should, Glory spouse shame, a Prince a Snake or Fly An Angel Court an Ant, all Wonder would. (1.23.24–­28)

The space between the stanzas visually demarcates the speaker’s transition; as “Thy Maker” becomes “my maker,” the speaker moves from hearing the words of promise to claiming the spouse for himself. Proclamation becomes possession. It is a strange union, inspiring an ongoing sense of wonder; any sense of stasis—­of undifferentiated unity achieved and uncertainty forever allayed—­is forestalled by the question mark, and the poem’s recurring insistence on distinctions between the speaker and his spouse: I am to Christ more base, than to a King A Mite, Fly, Worm, Ant, Serpent, Devil is; Or Can be, being tumbled all in sin, And shall I be his Spouse? How good is this?

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It is too good to be declared to thee. But not too good to be believed by me.

(1.23.31–­36)

The visual connection between the final two lines of this stanza—­with the repetition of “too good to be,” the near symmetry between “declared” and “believed,” and the rhythmic echo of “thee” in “me”—­all create connections even while upholding the distance and difference between the speaker and his God. In these poems, where Taylor’s speaker adopts the position of the bride in the Song of Songs, lines differentiating the speaker from his bridegroom are interlaced with images of their joyful union. Even as the speaker avers the impossibility of mortal marrying immortal, the poem celebrates this marriage: Thy saving Grace my Wedden Garment make: Thy spouse’s Frame into my soul Convey I then shall be thy Bride Espoused by thee And thou my Bridesgroom Dear Espoused shalt bee.

(1.23.45–­48)

The poem does what the speaker asks “saving Grace” to do: to make the soul ready for union and commence the ceremony. Detached from the form of the poem, the message is simple enough. The speaker needs to be transformed by grace. But within the lines of the poem, this is an interactive process. When the speaker asks for the divine spouse’s “Frame” to be conveyed into his soul, this seems to mean a structural substitution: where the speaker’s soul once was, now the divine spouse must be. But “frame” also connotes a manner or method of construction, just as to “frame a house” means joining together the elements that give the structure support and shape. This corollary meaning of frame corresponds to the poem’s interest in process, and as the lines of the poem convey “thy spouse’s Frame” into the speaker’s soul, the poem itself interacts with God, Christ, and the speaker to perform the wedding of Bride and Bridesgroom.

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Spinning the Wedding Garment In this way, by giving structure and shape to a union between a human speaker and his divine “Bridesgroom,” Taylor’s poems enact a solution to the concerns that came to the fore during the Half-­Way Covenant controversy. This controversy—­technically a debate about church membership and the sanctifying power of grace—­was necessarily also a debate about evidence and whether the elect could trust their own experiences of regeneration. Taylor said yes. Solomon Stoddard, a minister in nearby Northampton, said no. Stoddard, who advocated admitting everyone to the Lord’s Supper, argued that the covenant could not protect against the problem of empty formality and self-­deception in the way that its defenders hoped it might. Instead of seeking out “secret Hypocrites” who are, as Stoddard pointed out, easily perceived as “visible Saints,” or relying on the evidence of works when it was the inspiration of the Spirit that was wanted, Stoddard insisted that ministers and members face up to the fact that they had always and necessarily relied on claims of faith “made evident by fruites, & sufficient knowledge.”26 Stoddard specifically objected to the custom of describing one’s conversion experience (the public accounts of personal conversion experiences known as “conversion relations” that had become a widespread practice in Puritan churches).27 Taylor countered that the Lord’s Supper was like the wedding feast in Matthew 22, and only those properly attired, or sealed in the covenant, should be admitted. Taylor affirmed the importance of visibility, describing the feast as a “visible seal of the covenant” and insisting that it was “never to be celebrated but in the visible society of the guests together,” but he affirmed the reliability of personal accounts of regeneration by appealing to an experiential relationship with Christ. When the converted elect arrives at the feast, Taylor reassures his congregation, “the Bridesgroom will welcome thee.” Even in his sermons Taylor is unabashed in his use of erotic imagery derived from the Song of Songs to describe the personal encounter between the believer

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and Christ: “His left hand will be under thy heart,” the pastor instructs his congregation, “and His right hand will embrace thee (Cant. 2:6).”28 Taylor, vulnerable to the accusation of presumptuous subjective certainty in the wake of the Half-­Way Covenant controversy, hereby appeals to his interactive relationship with God as the best safeguard against hypocrisy and self-­deception.29 If Taylor’s sermons declare the need for the wedding garment, it is the poems that actually weave the robe and do so interactively. “Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheel complete,” the speaker requests in “Housewifery,” Taylor’s oft-­anthologized poem. Line by line, Taylor the poet instructs God in the work of a tailor: Make me, O Lord, Thy Spinning Wheel complete. Thy Holy Word my Distaff make for me; Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neat; And make my Soul thy holy Spool to be; My Conversation make to be thy Reel, And reel the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheel.

(lines 1–­6)30

Like a good housewife, Taylor understands the process of weaving. The process itself is not the poem’s singular concern, however. This is a fine example of poetic relations because the poem spins itself out by offering the reader material to work with, calling on the reader to weave together what the lines describe. “Make me Thy loom then” the second stanza begins, and “knit therein this Twine.” If the speaker is the loom, and the poem itself the words knit into a twine, then the poet’s work and the work of the Holy Spirit become part of the same process: Make me thy Loom then; knit therein this Twine; And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, wind quills: Then weave the Web thyself. The yarn is fine. Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills. Then dye the same in Heavenly Colors Choice, All pinked with Varnished Flowers of Paradise.

(lines 7–­12)

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There is no way to “weave the Web thyself.” Loom and quills and fulling mills are needed. In this poem, God and the poet are co-­creators of both text and textile. Interpreted in static terms, this is a poem about a single conceit: the speaker as a spinning wheel on which God weaves the robe the speaker hopes to wear. The conceit also, however, signals the need for a more dynamic reading. Read this way, what the conceit represents is the poem’s work of weaving a relationship between the poet and his maker. In the third and concluding stanza, the poem depicts the transformation this relational engagement is meant to achieve, as emotion, volition, and action are imagined as the material from which holiness is spun: Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will, Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill My ways with glory and thee glorify. Then mine apparel shall display before yee That I am Clothed in Holy robes for glory.

(lines 13–­18)

The wedding garment is the product of this interactive process. Clothed by the words that have woven this holy robe, the poem makes the humble work of spinning akin to the Holy Spirit’s work of transformation. And in this conclusion, the speaker confirms his interest in a thoroughgoing transformation—­of affections as well as words, judgments as well as actions. This is the transformation that the bride who wants to don these holy robes requires.

Am I Thine? The concern with transformation merges with Taylor’s characteristic concern with the dynamics of mutual possession in other meditative poems. “Lord am I thine?” Taylor asks in Meditation 1.35, and “art thou, Lord, mine?” In the lyric interplay of “me” and

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“thee,” “mine” and “thine,” the poem materializes the speaker’s quest to dispossess himself of lifeless love by requesting a mutual love instead: Make me the Couch on which thy Love doth lie. Lord make my heart thy bed, thy heart make mine. Thy Love bed in my heart, bed mine in thine.

(1.35.46–­48)

These lines perform an interactive ideal. Unimpeded by any lengthy words or complicated metaphors, the short possessives (“me,” “thy,” “my,” “mine,” “thine”) demand attention. Every line, indeed every clause, contains both the speaker and “thee.” Every line expresses a request to transfer something from the speaker to his Lord, or from the Lord to the speaker. This concentrated display of interactivity is encapsulated in one of this poem’s arresting clauses: “thy heart make mine.” These four short words capture a movement characteristic of Taylor’s poetics, for “thy heart make mine,” means both “give me your heart” and “take my heart as yours.” As in this clause, so also in the poem as a whole—­and in many of Taylor’s poems—­what is on display is not a static proclamation of unity, or some abstract account of self-­denial or possession by another. As the literary historian Ivy Schweitzer explains in her study of the Puritan process of self-­representation, “The whole process of Puritan conversion affirmed the existence of a new kind of interiority, of a private, unique, inner space—­the space of self-­consciousness of subjectivity, only to demand its sacrifice, renunciation, and occupation by Another.”31 This conclusion makes sense only from a bird’s-­eye view. Far removed from the specifics of the poetry, it may be possible to draw conclusions about who loses and who prevails. Within the poem itself, however, the movements on display frustrate these efforts. The form and effect of the poem is thus quite different than a photograph, which fixes a couple in time, two figures, each distinct: the words instead unfurl across the page, then start again, line by line, stanza by stanza, moving

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from “me” to “thee” again and again, cumulatively revealing that there is no structure—­no relationship—­without the process of framing, without, in other words, the relational dynamics.

My Beloved Is Mine Many readers believe Taylor’s poems became progressively more confident over the years, climaxing in a celebratory affirmation of the betrothal in the Song of Songs. In form as well as content, however, the poems written at the end of his life were very similar to those written at the beginning. Kimberly Johnson makes this point by arguing that Taylor’s most consistent assurance came from the “astonishing constancy” of his form. She observes that the “cyclical regularity” and “unyielding structural certainty,” of his Preparatory Meditations manifests regeneration in an “assured poetic form.”32 Equally important is his enduring preoccupation with relational dynamics. At the end of his forty-­ year project, as at the beginning, Taylor worried he did not feel the love he professed for Christ his bridegroom. The poems assuaged this worry by redressing this problem, enflaming a “lifeless spark” over and over again. Thus, in a meditation written in 1707, nearly twenty-­five years after he began the practice of writing these poems, Taylor’s response to a verse from the Song of Songs, “My beloved is mine and I am his,” still displays a characteristic preoccupation with the poetic relations between the speaker and his bridegroom: Hence, O! my Lord, make thou me thine that so I may be bed wherein thy Love shall lie, And be thou mine that thou mayst ever show Thyself the Bed my Love its lodge may spy Then this shall be the burden of my Song My Well beloved is mine: I’m his become.

(2.79.67–­72)

It is not just presence but more specifically possession that is, as Taylor says, the “burden” of his song. And the song itself is in-

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deed burdened on this point. The tongue twisting of “make thou me thine,” or “be thou mine that thou mayst ever show / Thyself the Bed my Love its lodge may spy,” is matched by the awkward invocations of other figures, as in the first line of the meditation: “Had I Promethius filching Ferula / Filled with its sacred theft the stolen Fire.” And then in a stanza that fulfills the stereotype of a Puritan pastor, the speaker refutes Sherlosism—­referring to William Sherlock’s (d. 1707) now-­obscure teaching that distinctions between the three persons of the Trinity renders mystical union impossible. Just before the speaker’s concluding appeal to God, quoted above, to make him the “bed wherein thy Love shall lie,” appears this clunky refutation of heresy: Let this dash out the snarling teeth that grin, Of that Damned Heresy, called sherlosism That mocks, and scoffs the union (that blessed thing) To Christ’s Blessed Person, Happy Enkentrism. For if that’s true, Christ’s Spouse spoke false in this Saying My Beloved’s Mine, and I am his.

(2.79.61–­66)

This lapse into didactic content, rendered inert by leaden meter and rhyme, demonstrates how poetry can fail. There is no interactivity here, no weaving or entwining, no transformation of feelings now “mine” as they encounter what is “thine.”

Poetic Fidelity Judged according to its relational dynamics Taylor’s poetry often fails, as might be expected from meditations written but never revised, kept within their speaker’s study, and often motivated by the speaker’s need to express his sinful self. His words failed as he did. “Words though the finest twine of reason, are / Too Coarse a web for Deity to wear,” he acknowledges. Words are not just inadequate, but dangerously so: “My muddy Words so dark thy Deity,” another line in the same poem proclaims, conjuring a deity darkened by gloppy mud, unwashed by syntactical clarity.

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Words may deepen the darkness. But “I have no finer Stuff to use,” the speaker protests. There is no alternative. This is the way the problem of Puritan poetics is usually understood, as a conundrum faced by people who needed to express what they believed their words could not express. And it is undeniably true that Puritans were skeptical of eloquence. The failure of language is a popular theme in Edward Taylor’s poetry, if not in Bradstreet’s, which qualifies even conventional expressions of feminine modesty with confident claims about her poetry’s right to make demands, whatever the author’s failings. Those who study Puritan aesthetics are right to point out that almost every work of Puritan poetry was prefaced by some sort of apology, as was the very first book published in New England, a book of metrical psalms known as the Bay Psalm Book. The editors of that work explained that they “attended Conscience rather then Elegance, fidelity rather then poetry.”33 Notably, this disclaimer suggests that the editors were aware their audience might have other expectations—­that elegant poetry was appreciated by Puritan readers. And in fact poetry was popular in the Massachusetts Bay Colony as it was among Protestants and Catholics alike in England. The involvement of many prominent men in the publication of Anne Bradstreet’s verse suggests what the acclaim for The Tenth Muse would confirm: that accomplished verse by a female poet reflected glory on the English colony in North America. Every contemporary reference to Bradstreet or her poetry is in fact admiring, if not adulatory. And the work that both Taylor and Bradstreet produced testifies to their conviction that poetry was an appropriate genre for devotional meditation. All of these competing bits of evidence can be—­and usually are—­interpreted in ways that either confirm or deny the opposition claimed in the Bay Psalm Book’s preface: elegance versus conscience, fidelity versus poetry. What is most interesting about Bradstreet’s and Taylor’s poetry, however, is its insistence that poetry enabled the experience of fidelity. Both poets believed doubt was inevitable and necessary and reassurance was experiential and relational. Everyone needs to

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“seek after reassurance,” Edward Taylor insisted in his sermons challenging Stoddard: “What art thou mine? Am I espoused to thee?” (2.115). The poetic relations enacted in his verse served as an answer despite his persistent belief that he was unworthy of this betrothal. “Unfit for thee,” he describes himself in Meditation 2.26, “a bag of botches, Lump of Loathsomeness.” This abjection was understood to be a crucial antidote to hypocrisy or what Daniel Dyke’s book referred to as the “mystery of self-­ deceiving.” And so, in familiar fashion, Taylor’s speaker goes on to describe himself as “defiled by Touch, by Issue: Leprous flesh” (2.26). But he could not stop here. This loathsomeness was unacceptable to God, for “thou will have all that enter [to] thy fold / Pure, Clean, and bright, Whiter than whitest snow.” The theological answer to this problem was the covenant of grace. Grace sanctified sinners, satisfying the requirement of “pure holiness.” The experiential answer, however, was poetic relations: “Oh! Wash me, Lord, in this Choice Fountain, White / That I may enter.” Just as the bride might be joined to the bridegroom when attired in the wedding garment, so too the one who is defiled, like a leper, might nevertheless be washed by the poem’s “lovely stream of love.” Similarly, Anne Bradstreet’s poetry offered an experiential response to her doubts and uncertainty. “I could not read my evidence,” Bradstreet writes in a devotional poem describing how illness deprived her of God’s presence: “Hide not your face from me I cried.” Like Psalm 27, the source of this line, the poem concludes with comfort. The lines immediately preceding this predictable ending, however, convey Bradstreet’s interest in evidence and insistence that how she feels depends on what she sees: Thou show’st to me Thy tender love, My heart no more might quail.

(lines 24–­25, p. 270)

A show of love might calm her heart. Deprived of this display of tenderness, however, she may remain unsettled. Bradstreet applies much the same standard to Christ in an oc-

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casional meditation, proclaiming that her god alleviates her fears and provides her comfort by caring for her: My hungry Soul he fill’d with Good, He in his Bottle put my tears, My smarting wounds washed in his blood, And banished thence my Doubts and fears.

(lines 11–­14, p. 269)

With God and Christ, as with her human husband, the comforts of love require the presence of a lover. The poetic relations in Bradstreet’s marriage poems are thus inspired by her need to read the evidence that love provides. Separation, whether because of death or travel, threatens the immediacy and ardor of love. The poems consequently devote themselves to addressing that challenge: resisting the effects of distance by demanding presence. “Then come, dear Bridegroom, come away,” Bradstreet writes in the last line of her last poem, the only poem we have in her hand, composed only a couple of years before her death. What she proclaims in her spiritual poems she enacts in her marriage poems, fulfilling the duty to desire by inscribing the interactions that enliven her love.

Conclusion Although Bradstreet’s and Taylor’s poetic relations were structured in accord with the Puritan ideology of marriage, they did not simply replicate this ideology. Other authors reinforced the authority of marriage by confirming that it was a religious obligation. It is not enough to acknowledge that “conjugal Love is a main joint and duty of the married,” the Puritan writer Daniel Rogers confirms, for conjugal love perfectly balances between human and divine; conjugal love means “not only Christian love, a grace of God’s spirit: (for marriage borders much upon nature and flesh) nor yet a carnal and sudden flash of affection, completely enflamed by concupiscence: (rather brutish than humane) but a sweet compound of both, religion and nature,” which is “properly called marriage love.”34

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For Bradstreet and Taylor, marriage love was more than a compound. It was a redemptive relationship—­redemptive not because it bridged the gap between human and divine, if those are understood as fixed positions, but because it was relational, poetically so. Repetition, formal constraints, and creative variations all worked together in the idiosyncratic specificity of individually rendered poems, each concerned with an intensity they associated with married love. This is the relational poetics of Puritan marriage. But “relational poetics” is not how Puritan redemption is usually understood. As Jennifer Herdt argues, “Puritan autobiographical narratives do serve as a kind of social formation, but for a life of intense introspection and isolation.”35 The goal was self-­sacrifice, others have confirmed. The devotional poems by Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor may have been written in solitude, and never intended for a public audience. The interiority they express, however, is clearly not solitary. And the experiences they inscribe demonstrate not just the merging of marriage as a civil contract and a spiritual ideal but also the imaginative resources that the idealization of marriage provided to people in search of reassurance.

Coda Although not all of the poems explored in this book are explicitly devotional, cumulatively they reveal something significant about devotion, about spirituality. Spirituality is often deemed more individual than religion because it seems less concerned with institutions than with experience: what does it feel like to love God, to submit to Allah, to seek nirvana, to feel oneself permeated by a sense of wonder or awe? It is easy to assume that exploring spirituality means piercing through cultural influences to get at personal experiences. Even those acutely aware of the importance of hierarchy and conventions and authority associate spirituality with the power of the personal and the ever-­present temptation to linger on the individual. Whence the loneliness? The despair? The claims of companionship? Of comfort? What does it feel like, we want to know, to be a believer? What does spirituality do to and for people? That is one reason we read religious poetry, hoping to glean a believer’s sense of assurance, a glimpse of the divine, a loneliness alleviated and a transcendence assured. It is surely one reason we still read John Donne’s poems, full of love’s riddles and compulsive juxtapositions.1 Whether delighted or frustrated by Donne’s unfamiliar conceits, readers are also lured in by the promise of sonnets declared holy and by possible links between

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the rebellious love poems of the rakish young Donne, and the still-­exploratory verse of the man who delivered sermons from the most prestigious pulpit in England. Interest in spiritual experience is the reason work written in a country parsonage by George Herbert seems profound rather than pettily pious and the title of his book of poems—­The Temple—­intriguing rather than just outdated. The possibility of learning something about what people diminished by society claim for themselves when they address God sharpens interest in psalm sonnets by Anne Lock, or psalm translations by Mary Sidney Herbert, or Passion poems and dedicatory verse by Aemilia Lanyer. And the desire to explain the spiritual power of marriage continues to draw readers to that motif in poems by the New Englanders Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. These poems from the past that might otherwise seem frustratingly opaque documents about the lives of women, unsurprisingly pious verse by Christians steeped in Scripture, or showily complicated writing by elite men are fascinating in a whole different way when we read them as expressions of spiritual experience and religious personhood. What this book has shown, however, is that the medium cannot be detached from the message. These works are neither simply personal nor predictably conventional, neither revealing of individuals who stand alone nor representative of a social system. Instead, for these Protestant poets, form is the medium of relationality. Using language in a way that is both strange and familiar, this poetry simultaneously facilitates and obstructs readers’ attempts to understand the meaning of the words. This poetry slows us down and confuses us even as it also meets our expectations and invites us to share in its emotions. In their reliance on the external conventions of language and poetic form, these poems deny that selfhood is solitary or social, that people come into being through self-­creation or subjection to another, and that intimate relationships are private or public, intrinsically meaningful or extrinsically motivated. In this way, they also deny the impulse—­itself understood as a legacy of Protestantism—­to align religion either with private spiritu-

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ality or with public ceremonies. The diverse examples explored in the preceding chapters have shown how, in the cultural context of the English Reformation, Protestantism’s paradoxical mix of dependence and independence could also inspire poetry that was relational in form as well as content, socially constrained but individually creative, bound by convention even as it imagined transformation, and simultaneously self-­expressive and interactive. In this way, these sources confirm not only that the self is relational but also that the relational self is poetic. In this coda I explore both the persistence and the marginalization of poetic selfhood, by turning from the past to the present, to a recent work by the poet Christian Wiman. I end with Wiman not because his own poetry is influenced by Renaissance authors—­although it is—­but because in his memoir, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, he presents poetry and belief as rivals, as competing solutions to his own sense of isolation and existential despair. Poetry, he says, represents ambiguity and the power of language. Religious belief, by contrast, offers certainty and the comfort of unquestioned convictions. Finding neither satisfying in itself, Wiman ultimately reconciles them by affirming what he calls a poetics of belief, an answer that Wiman associates with the power of language to awaken consciousness of our ultimate commitments. Here, though, I think Wiman has misdiagnosed the problem as well as the solution, for reasons having everything to do with the misdiagnosed legacy of Protestantism. In My Bright Abyss, as we will see, the most powerful form of belief turns out to be the relational form of poetry.

›››‹‹‹

Poetry is a problem, Christian Wiman says, if what you want is belief. Wiman, himself a poet and for many years editor of Poetry, grew up in West Texas, where Christianity was as much a part of the landscape as wind and dust. Pulled out by the lure of college, he went east and discarded his childhood beliefs at the same time that he discovered poetry. An accomplished poet and no longer a believer, he was unconcerned about what he had lost until his

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late thirties, when he was recently married and on the brink of being diagnosed with an incurable and unpredictable form of cancer. Written during seven years of cancer treatments, Wiman’s reflections on the tension between poetry and belief—­his reflections on his own poems and poems of George Herbert and Philip Larkin, of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Wallace Stevens and Osip Mandelstam, and on spiritual writers, New Testament stories, the merciless effects of radiation, and his grandmother’s death, as well as the specter of his own—­are collected in My Bright Abyss. The title poem announces his desire for what he fears poetry cannot provide: My God my bright abyss Into which all my longing will not go Once more I come to the edge of all I know And believing nothing believe in this:

For years, he says, he had only that stanza, ending with a colon. Poetry could bring him only to the brink of belief, for it could not provide the content of the next stanza: poetry could not provide the content, or the certainty, he craved.2 The problem, as Wiman formulates it at the outset, proceeds from the premise that belief is about the certainties afforded by key tenets of Christian faith, including the existence of God, the salvific death and resurrection of Christ, and life after death for those who are saved. Poetry, he explains, differs from belief because poetry is concerned with perceptions rather than propositions. What is at stake, according to Wiman, is certainty versus ambiguity, the comfort of believing in God versus the amorphous power of poetic language. He knows what he loves (poetry), and he knows what he needs (belief ), and he cannot see how the two can be reconciled. Throughout My Bright Abyss, Wiman presents himself as frustrated by this binary, a duality he cannot quite dispense with. In his own life, he says, poetry held open the possibility of inspiration and grace, sharpening his awareness of the beyond and a form of existence unavailable in daily life. And yet, reflecting

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back on the years when he had dedicated himself to writing poetry, he echoes fears voiced by early Protestants, that poetry is a powerfully seductive distraction. One does not have to read much Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wiman observes, to see that the reason the Jesuit stopped writing poetry for a time was because “the intensity of his creative experiences competed with the intensity of his religious experiences.” So too with George Herbert, the poet whom Wiman hails as a beloved fellow traveler. Although Herbert “sometimes” inscribed his connection to God through poetry, Wiman contends that the seventeenth-­century pastor-­poet was nevertheless “conscious of some secular element at the very heart of making art, some necessary imaginative flair in himself that needed to be subdued or at least tidied up and made fit for sacrifice.” 3 Wiman could be talking about himself. The imaginative flair has dangers to match its rewards. It needs to be subdued or tidied up to make room for something else, the ability to “speak more clearly what it is that I believe.”4 Wiman thus concludes that poetic creativity distracts from the clarity that belief entails. This association of belief with certainty is a legacy of the early modern Reformation. As do most people today, Wiman equates religious belief with a foundation or a root system, as something that steadies us. “Definite beliefs,” Wiman says in a statement that presumes this logic, “are what make the radical mystery . . . accessible to us in our ordinary, unmysterious lives. And more critically: definite beliefs enable us to withstand the storms of suffering that come into every life, and that tend to destroy any spiritual disposition that does not have deep roots.” 5 Facing death, newly aware of how death threatens to make everything meaningless, Wiman sees belief as the antidote: “And that is the issue, isn’t it? Death?”6 If death is the problem, then belief seems to be the necessary answer. “For the question remains,” he insists: “What do you say, what in the world are you going to believe in when you are dying?” Belief provides comfort and security. The “whiff of the ineffable,” by contrast, whether from meditation or mysti-

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cism or poetry, is “toxic to the dying man,” who needs instead “the rock of one real truth.”7 What he loves about poetry—­its creative abandon—­threatens to deny him the answers that belief can provide. “We do not need definite beliefs,” Wiman observes, “because their objects are necessarily true.” No, we need “definite beliefs” because we all need security, because definite beliefs “enable us to stand on steady spots from which the truth may be glimpsed.”8 In all this, Wiman captures what many today would contend is the essence of religious belief, the reasons it is avidly sought and just as vociferously condemned. For a critic like Richard Dawkins, belief requires the “brainwashing” of faith, “a state of mind that leads people to believe something—­it doesn’t matter what—­in the total absence of supporting evidence.”9 Elaine Scarry makes the same point without judgment, equating belief with the “incontestable reality of a world invisible and unable to be touched.”10 Wiman, a self-­described modern believer, shares these assumptions, accepting the contention that to believe is to put oneself at odds with modernity. Belief for him entails the embrace of something other than scientific evidence as well as an alternative to what he sees as the primary options for modern ways of being in the world—­whether the disinterested stance of the hipster, the skepticism of the intellectual, or the heroism of the existentialist. As he casts about for some certainty, for the bright clarity of belief, he says that his faith rests on the “bedrock” of “one indestructible fact (fact?!): Christ’s resurrection.”11 Here Wiman presents himself as a modern believer insofar as the parenthetical italics and question mark acknowledge the skepticism this assertion provokes. At the same time, he declares himself a modern believer with the exclamation point, signaling his firm commitment to this doctrinal claim. However far poetry has taken him, however much it may still offer, it does not present itself as the purveyor of indestructible facts. Belief, by contrast, provides a steady place to stand. Wiman, however, finds himself unable to stand in one place, to stay with the beliefs he affirms. Mindful of his inability to

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claim this security, to compel his own assent to tenets of the faith, to doctrinal claims, to the conviction he equates with belief, Wiman repeatedly returns to what he considers the primary alternative: a poetics of belief, a language “capacious enough to include a mystery that, ultimately, defeats it.” 12 Following this logic, Wiman contends that poetry can fill the space vacated by belief because of poetry’s capacity to reveal the world anew, to wake us up, to immerse us in experience without interpretation, and honor the silence at the source of it all. To illustrate how poetry might promote rather than impede faith, Wiman offers the example of a seemingly secular poem, Craig Arnold’s “Meditation on a Grapefruit.” Line by line, as the globelike fruit is peeled, separated, eaten, there is so sweet a discipline precisely pointless a devout involvement of the hands and senses a pause a little emptiness each year harder to live within each year harder to live without

God is nowhere in this poem, but Wiman claims it as a “powerful aid to faith” nevertheless, because it awakens consciousness, creating a cascading effect from sweetness to discipline to devotion (“so sweet / a discipline / . . . a devout / involvement”).13 According to Wiman, it is this capacity to enhance our awareness of something as ordinary as eating a grapefruit that makes poetry a form of faith. It is this capacity to enhance our awareness of something as ordinary as eating a grapefruit that makes a poetics of belief more satisfying than propositional certainty. Observing that even Jesus’s first-­century followers did not believe that the man they encountered on the road to Emmaus was the resurrected Christ, Wiman suggests that “our own blindness, habit, and fear form a kind of fog that keeps us from seeing, and thereby believing in, the forms that grace takes in our everyday

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lives.”14 According to this diagnosis, the problem is not a lack of faith but the dormancy of the faith that all possess. Poetry solves this problem by piercing our perceptual fog. This is the central task of a poetics of belief, Wiman proposes: not to provide certainty but to awaken faith. Noting that his own poems “kept prodding me toward new ways of understanding that verb ‘believe,’ ”15 Wiman concludes the book by returning to the stanza with which he began, changing the ending by altering its punctuation: My God my bright abyss into which all my longing will not go once more I come to the edge of all I know and believing nothing believe in this.

The colon has become a period. What, then, does the poet believe in? What is “this”? The search to become someone who can pray without embarrassment and affirm the resurrection of Christ with conviction yields to recognition that he cannot detach belief from poetry. Even as he declares poetry a way to believe, however, Wiman does not appreciate the full implications of his own claims. Instead, he infuses the poetics of belief with a version of belief as it is conventionally understood, citing Paul Tillich’s contention that art “needs” some “ultimate concern.”16 For Tillich as for Wiman, this phrase is purposefully vague, reflecting a modern awareness that specific doctrinal claims are more likely to arouse skepticism than faith. Still, the insistence on an ultimate concern reflects Wiman’s conviction that a propositional commitment, however hazy, is needed to inspire poetry that answers our need for belief, poetry that is not simply playful but evocative in a more deliberate way (“precisely pointless,” as in Craig Arnold’s poem), not didactic in its meaning but meaningful nevertheless. By insisting that the poetry he believes in is animated by the need for some ultimate concern, Wiman relocates rather than redefines belief. But a more challenging alternative to modern assumptions about belief weaves its way throughout My Bright

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Abyss. The absence and presence of love is a theme throughout the book. A failure to love is his greatest regret, and the sustaining power of love is something he affirms consistently, as he embraces and discards belief in the resurrection or belief in poetry. This is not separate from his meditations on poetry: it is what Wiman affirms most powerfully about poetry. Thus, the more radical poetics of belief on display in My Bright Abyss is not just a commitment to the power of artful language animated by an ultimate concern but instead the demonstration that belief is poetic and, more specifically, that belief is inextricable from poetic relations. Belief and poetry alike succeed and fail, according to Wiman’s own account, insofar as they manifest either isolation or love. Seeking to explain the problem, he assesses what he describes as the self-­absorption manifest in a poem by Wallace Stevens. “Not less was I myself,” Stevens proclaims in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” ending with a vision of solitude: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Wiman contends that the beauty of the poem cannot compensate for the deadening effects of its expressed conviction that “you are the origin of everything, that the self is its own world, its own god.”17 The poem redeems itself for just an instant, Wiman thinks, with the invocation of “you” in the second line, a spectral figure that introduces “another mind and other needs into the poem.” Describing this as a “hitch,” Wiman views it as a moment of imperfection in “an otherwise perfect, and perfectly self-­enclosed, song.” And the song, he concludes, “is better, and truer” because of this imperfection, because the poem fails in its attempt to be self-­absorbed. This assessment of Stevens’s poem, the problem it manifests and the solution it suggests, discloses a form of belief Wiman illustrates without explicitly naming as such, not belief in statements of faith or in poetic language, but belief as he experiences it in and through poetic relations.

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Recognizing this makes it possible to see that the failure Wiman most often laments in reading his own poems and poems by others is the inability to recognize that poetry can and should be a “species of love.” Poetry perpetuates the illusion that we are alone, he says, when it is self-­absorbed, self-­referential, uninterested in or dismissive of the “you” that might be another character or a reader, a lover, or fellow author, or God.18 This, according to Wiman’s own telling, is how and why some poetry fails to awaken us to the coming and going of consciousness—­which is, again according to his own telling, the coming and going of our awareness of God.19 In praising Wiman’s work as a great spiritual memoir, the ethicist and Augustinian scholar Charles Mathewes offers only one negative assessment, that the work seems mired in modernity because of the diffidence of its “I” and its hesitation to “engage, confront, or beseech any ‘you.’ ”20 Much of Wiman’s work suggests he would concur with this critique. This is, after all, a familiar account of the modern condition, that we are now defined by isolation, by some sense of being separate from others. Empowering for some, chastening for others, this is nevertheless recognizable to many. Wiman tells us that he is embarrassed to pray. He finds it difficult to speak to God and explains that he has spent much of his adult life emotionally distant from family and friends. Reliant on the first person, he is in this sense a classic example of a modern lyric poet and—­as he and others would say—­a modern person.21 And yet his book also lives and breathes what he so often reiterates: that poetry fails or succeeds insofar as it reveals that life itself is relational. This explains why Wiman can read a poem by A. R. Ammons as an expression of faith, although the poet had no religious faith at all—­not because Wiman imputes belief to one who would deny it but because the poem itself “establishes us in relation to something that is beyond ourselves.” This is how he describes the effect of the “metaphorical explosiveness” of a poem by Norman MacCaig or the work of Seamus Heaney or Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes, that it puts us in a new relation to that which we ob-

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serve, revealing not something within reality but reality as it truly is.22 Wiman also calls this reality the soul, something that is both us and other. In a particularly insightful rendering, he defines “soul” as “the verb that makes an exchange between the self and reality—­or the self and other selves—­possible.”23 The poetry he hails in this book, the belief he seeks, is in fact aptly captured by this description of soul. Wiman’s book lives and breathes through the relationships it describes (just as he recounts himself coming alive when he fell in love). A discussion with an anonymous friend, the time spent with a dying great aunt and grandmother, his relationships with poets dead and alive, his awareness that his grandmother’s expression of fear at her own moment of death says far less about her beliefs than the openness to experience she taught him through example. The poetry Wiman holds up for our attention is itself relational. The belief he most consistently affirms is a relational act. Religion today—­nearly synonymous as it is with unshakable convictions—­obscures rather than reveals this insight. It is often said that this understanding of religion betrays a Christian bias. Christianity is a doctrinal religion—­orthodoxic, as scholars say, rather than orthopraxic—­and the Christian insistence that correct beliefs are more important than correct practices set it apart from most other religions. As anyone who has ever declared him-­or herself a “practicing Catholic” knows, even Christians differ on whether beliefs matter more than practices: traditional Catholics and Orthodox Christians can find themselves as puzzled as observant Jews or devout Hindus might be about an Evangelical Christian’s insistence that faith alone is the essence of religion. Given the need to overcome Christian—­and more specifically Protestant—­myopia, given all the unexamined assumptions about belief, given the ambiguity implicit in the very idea, perhaps those of us who are interested in understanding religion should just stop talking about belief. Perhaps, as the anthropologist Talal Asad suggests, we should attend instead to the senses, to study the way a self made up of nerves and muscles and synapses is shaped and formed by sensory encounters and

170 Coda

the way the senses, then, “build sensibilities and attitudes that are distinct from beliefs.”24 But the devotional poems studied in this book, like Wiman’s meditation, demonstrate that sensibilities and attitudes are not so easily distinguished from beliefs. Perhaps instead we should attend to some other possibilities present in the very sources that have created the problem we seek to overcome. To consider the connections between beliefs and sensibilities, it is helpful to recall that Christians have often insisted that true belief is inseparable from love. When Thomas Aquinas pointed out that demons may be compelled to believe truths about God, his point was that belief without love is empty.25 The only sort of belief that really matters, then, is appetitive, just as faith is appetitive: both name the way the will—­understood as a love or desire for goodness—­moves us to God. The definitions of “belief ” listed in the Oxford English Dictionary suggest a similar point, for they too emphasize the affective, interactive nature of belief. Belief, according to the first definition, is “trust that the believer places in God.” Defined in this way, belief is synonymous with the Christian virtue of faith. First and foremost, belief is trust in another rather than a cognitive conviction. Only with the second definition does the OED equate belief with a “mental action,” and then again in a way that emphasizes interpersonal qualities: “trust, dependence, reliance, confidence.”26 A formal set of doctrines or propositions are the third and fourth definitions, and it is the early nineteenth century that first links beliefs exclusively with a “presumption of knowledge.” The modern assumption that belief is cognitive, in competition with scientific or analytic forms of cognition, is just that: a modern assumption. As the nineteenth-­century dating confirms, the notion that belief entails a presumption of knowledge was not inherited directly from Protestantism. But Protestantism did shift the terms of discussion about belief. Martin Luther, for example, rejected the conflation of faith and love (known doctrinally as “faith formed by love”) that Aquinas assumed, seeing it as a covert way of equating faith with works.27 On this point, most early Protestants followed

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his lead. The idea that love is prior to faith is a “mere dream,” John Calvin said in his Institutes.28 Doctrinal assent must come first. But even within the context of this theological attack on medieval doctrine, Luther, Calvin, and other Protestants emphasized that belief is a process of perceiving and responding to God.29 This is quite close to the way Wiman describes a poetics of belief, but where Wiman diminishes the relational dimension by speaking of how poetry enhances consciousness, the theologians’ unembarrassed references to God situate perception and consciousness in the context of an interactive relationship. In Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, the historian of science Bruno Latour connects belief and relationships by describing a “Modern” as one believes that others believe. A question this raises, he says, is, “why the Moderns so desperately need belief in order to strike up a relationship with others.”30 Why indeed? Perhaps because we do not have faith enough in belief or in relationships. Just as the dream of certitude lured Wiman from his own best insights about how poetry sustained him—­not consistently, and certainly not only in happy or positive or life-­affirming ways, but instead in the sense of constituting his very being—­so too belief is a dream, or a nightmare, that convinces us that we are isolated beings, that we must believe in this world before we can relate to it instead of immersing ourselves fully in the always complicated, often destructive, but surely inescapable poetics of relationality: My God my bright abyss Into which all my longing will not go Once more I come to the edge of all I know And believing nothing believe in this.

The poem performs the knowledge Wiman denies he possesses. The crucial move here is that the question addresses the one questioned. In this way, the poem affirms that belief in nothing is belief in this, not in tenets of faith such as the existence of God or the salvific death and resurrection of Christ, but in the relations the poem itself inscribes.

Notes Introduction

1. “Meditation 17,” in John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 86–­87. 2. John Donne, The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985). For Donne’s poetry, I have relied throughout on Patrides’s edition, but readers should know that the manuscript versions of Donne’s Holy Sonnets are readily available in Gary A. Stringer, ed., The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2005). 3. Charles Taylor, “Buffered and Porous Selves,” The Immanent Frame (blog), September 2, 2008, http://​blogs​.ssrc​.org​/tif​/2008​/09​/02​ /buffered​-­­and​-­­porous​-­­selves/. 4. Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 40–­41. 5. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 217. 6. Orsi, History and Presence, 40. 7. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–­1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 91. 8. The widest-­ranging account of how religion came to be associated primarily, if not exclusively, with belief, and the problems with that view, can be found in Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion: A New Approach to the Religious Traditions of Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1963).

174 Notes to Pages 6–8

9. Here I side with those who think the “English Reformation” is a useful category of historical analysis, in a view informed by historiography showing that the Elizabethan and early Stuart church was held together by a broad Calvinist consensus. On this, see Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins, eds., Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-­Stuart Middle Way (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004); and Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–­ 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–­20. Recent examples of work by literary historians defining the movement in much the same way I do here include Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–­25; and Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). The alternative—­work challenging these sorts of generalized claims about the English Reformation, arguing that religious identities at the time were defined above all by their ambiguity—­is surveyed in the introduction to Ethan H. Shagan, ed., Catholics and the “Protestant Nation”: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), 8–­18. 10. Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 11. See, e.g., Stanley Fish, Self-­Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-­Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Fish’s interpretation of literature from this period remains influential because of the stress he places on the connection between independence and dependence, between self-­assertion and self-­sacrifice—­a version of the binary that defines most modern discussions of selfhood. 12. For an analogous argument about how the formal qualities of poetry were “used to confront unsettling phenomena of religious change,” see Murray, Poetics of Conversion, 7. 13. On the medieval sense of “self,” see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?,” in Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 82–­109; and as manifest in poetry specifically, see Sarah Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). A key study focused on England is Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private



Notes to Pages 9–10 175

Self in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3–­5. Bryan argues that this focus on how to reconcile an inner self with external codes made it possible for Hoccleve’s poetry, for example, to adapt devotional models of interiority for political ends. Other important works on medieval interiority in English texts include Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). Little’s focus on how the Wycliffite abandonment of confession marks a new stage in language and subject formation provides an interesting point of contrast to my own argument. Little identifies the subsequent rise of “self-­definition” with narrative, however, rather than poetics, offering a range of subject positions rather than a focus on relational dynamics. Still relevant to anyone making claims about differences between medieval and early modern selfhood are these critiques of early modernists’ chauvinism: David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject,’ ” in Culture and History, 1350–­1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing, ed. David Aers (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 177–­202; and Lee Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65, no. 1 (1990): 87–­108. 14. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-­Century England (New York: Routledge, 1994), 4–­9; the second quote is from Greg Walker, Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 15. On this point, John Calvin’s clarion voice was uncharacteristically muddled, and the ambivalence he expressed pervasive. See Lyn Bennett, Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth and Lanyer (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 88. 16. Kimberly Anne Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 17. For an argument that emphasizes the importance of Wyatt to the development of English Protestant literature, see Cummings, Literary Culture of the Reformation, 231. Privileging Wyatt in this way, over the women associated with poeticizing English versions of the psalms, affirms the standard account of Protestant interiority. For an alternative

176 Notes to Pages 10–13

account, see the sources by Wendy Wall, Jennifer Summit, and Julie Crawford discussed in chapter 1. 18. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy demonstrates the importance of shared care and relations to human evolution in Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). 19. John Bossy’s argument in Christianity in the West also focuses on relationships, although his story is about the loss of Catholic communalism and thus the objectification rather than internalization of relational models. Religion and society, he argues by way of a concluding illustration, had become abstract entities by 1700; Christianity, a “word which until the seventeenth century meant a body of people,” came to mean an “ ‘ism’ or body of beliefs” (168–­7 1). The poetic relationality I explore here is not a substitute for the communal relationality Bossy attributes to late medieval Catholicism; these relations are, however, significant in ways his analysis prepares us to appreciate but does not itself explore. 20. Brian Cummings, in Literary Culture of the Reformation, makes an analogous point about the effects of paradox by arguing that Protestant culture was literature’s “most enthusiastic friend and its most articulate enemy” (270) and that Puritan humanism, specifically, gave birth to a literature “with a creative ambition matched only by its own doubts about that ambition and that creativity” (277). 21. Yvonne Sherwood, “Passion—­Binding—­Passion,” in Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguration at the Limits of Discipline, ed. Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 171. 22. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 101. 23. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 183–­84. 24. Scholars trained in early modern Catholicism and Protestantism more often focus on theological, pastoral, and devotional texts than on literary works. Important exceptions include Peter Iver Kaufman, Prayer, Despair, and Drama: Elizabethan Introspection (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); and Susan Elizabeth Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). The boundary between literature and religious studies is blurrier for medievalists, as evident, for example,



Notes to Page 14 177

in work by Amy Hollywood, Patricia Dailey, Barbara Newman, and Ben Morgan, as well as by scholars working on religion and modernity, including Tracy Fessenden, M. Cooper Harriss, and Sarah Hammerschlag. Two works on modern materials with interests especially close to my own include Frederick J. Ruf, Entangled Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Björn Krondorfer, Male Confessions: Intimate Revelations and the Religious Imagination (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 25. I detail the sources and significance of these trends more fully in “Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80, no. 1 (2011): 7–­33. 26. Recent examples include Brenna Moore, “Friendship and the Cultivation of Religious Sensibilities,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83, no. 2 (2015): 1–­27; Mary Dunn, The Cruelest of All Mothers: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and the Christian Tradition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); and Jennifer Scheper Hughes, Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 27. A different kind of relationality interests scholars such as Webb Keane, Jeremy Stolow, and John Lardas Modern, in studies assessing Protestant subjects or subjects strongly influenced by Protestantism: these scholars are primarily interested in displacing modern notions of autonomy through a post-­humanist approach, by showing that the individual is necessarily and inevitably porous in relation to words and things rather than constituted in and by specific, sustained, intimate relations with other people. The individual, as Modern puts it, “is not compromised by what influences him or her, but rather is the site of influence—­a flow that generates momentary instantiations of bounded interiority”: John Lardas Modern, Secularism in Antebellum America: With Reference to Ghosts, Protestant Subcultures, Machines, and Their Metaphors; Featuring Discussions of Mass Media, Moby-­Dick, Spirituality, Phrenology, Anthropology, Sing Sing State Penitentiary, and Sex with the New Motive Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 293; Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Jeremy Stolow, ed., Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 28. Early Protestantism is not, of course, the direct source for all subsequent notions of individualized spirituality. For how this assump-

178 Notes to Pages 14–15

tion emerged in the United States, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2005). On the sort of “personal relationship with God” many people now associate with Protestant spirituality, see T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). 29. Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 30. Contino attests to the fact that this same fascination with alterity gripped scholars of religion and literature: Paul Contino, “Introduction,” Religion and Literature 22, nos. 2–­3 (1990): 1–­8. It did not, however, provide an organizing coherence for this subfield as it did for New Historicists in literature departments. The discussion in this paragraph of how alterity motivated literature scholars to study religion relies extensively on Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,” Criticism 46, no. 1 (2004): 167–­90; see also Graham L. Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Sovereigns, Citizens, and Saints,” Religion and Literature 38, no. 3 (2006): 1–­12. 31. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 9–­10. Greenblatt’s study marks a moment at which anxiety began to function as confidence once had, to explain the Renaissance individual. 32. See, e.g., Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 64–­74. In the study of Western lyric, however, even works that declare their interest in challenging the association of modern lyric with a singular, privatized “I” tend to isolate the “I” as they delineate a protected space for the self that poetry makes possible. See, e.g., Virginia Jackson’s analysis of how lyric became the “published private” in which the poet’s solitude stands in for the solitude of the individual reader—­a self-­address so absolute that every self can identify it as his own: Virginia Walker Jackson, Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 128–­29. The alternative has been a formalism that disavows the relevance of a personal voice, as in Blasing’s observation that the “I” in poetry is “not prior to its words, and its words have nothing to do with ‘self-­expression’ ”: Mutlu



Notes to Pages 15–16 179

Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry the Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 28. 33. Regina M. Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 8. See also Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and John N. Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988). 34. See, e.g., Debora K. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); and Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), discussed in chapter 3. 35. See, e.g., Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-­Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005); and Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 36. Nancy Gail Selleck, The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne, and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 56, 166. 37. Netzley explains, for example, that Donne’s lyrics focus “not on propositional claims, but rather the relations—­grammatical, syntactical, and otherwise—­that make such claims possible,” and Johnson assesses the way that seventeenth-­century poems “embody the shifting and precarious relationship between materiality and signification,” respectively in Ryan Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 114; and Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-­ Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 6. See also Heather Dubrow, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 38. Amy Hungerford, Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion since 1960 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 39. Talal Asad, “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics,” in

180 Notes to Pages 18–22

The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert A. Orsi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 37. 40. Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013). 41. Jean-­Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 29, quoted in Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-­de-­Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 19. Gandhi’s work shares Nancy’s investment in the radical contingency of the “between.” 42. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940); and Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970). Claire Cavanagh surveys the Western European and Anglo-­American debate about whether poetry is, or should be, political relevant by way of a comparison with the very different assumptions at work in Eastern European cultures in Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 43. Arendt, Human Condition. 44. Bradstreet, Works, 273. Chapter One

1. Jean Calvin, Sermons of John Calvin (London: John Day, 1560). At the bottom of the page, a monarch’s grace and sovereign authority is acknowledged: “Cum Gratia and privilegio Regiae majestatis.” By referencing the hand of God and the majesty of the Queen on the same surface, the title page illustrates what the poems also reveal: that authorship is enacted in and through relations with God and human patrons, in a context structured by social institutions and conventions. The two surviving copies, as well as the publishing history, of this volume are comprehensively described and analyzed in Susan M. Felch, ed., The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), lxix–­lxxvii. Scholars differ on which of the many different contemporary spellings of this name should be used (including “Lok” and “Locke”). 2. Felch, Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, 62. All citations from Anne Lock’s poetry are from this edition, with parenthetical references to line numbers followed by page numbers. 3. The range and complexity of these strategies are elucidated by



Notes to Pages 22–23 181

numerous authors in Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke, eds., This Double Voice: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 4. Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), chap. 3; see also discussion in Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 61 and 147n2. 5. See A. E. B. Coldiron, Printers without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). On Lock’s work specifically, see Margaret P. Hannay, “ ‘Unlokk My Lipps’: The Miserere Mei Deus of Anne Vaughan Lok and Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke,” in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed. J. R. Brink (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1993), 21. 6. Felch, Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, liv. 7. Behind this claim lies the complex assessment of modern authorship in Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 101–­20. On the complicated relationship between authorship and copyright specifically, which also shows how Foucault’s theory can be updated by historical and cultural assessments, see Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 8. Jean Leclercq, “Otium Monasticum as a Context for Artistic Creativity,” in Monasticism and the Arts, ed. Timothy Gregory Verdun (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 63–­80; Susan Groag Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 4 (1982): 742–­68; Margaret P. Hannay, ed., Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985); and Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). The gendered entwining of collaborative and individual notions of authorship is deftly traced in Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–­1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 9. Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 4–­5. Minnis dates this transition to the thirteenth

182 Notes to Pages 23–24

century. A later model of individual authorship, in which invocations of courtly, godly, and traditional authority culminate in a poet’s claim to “locate the source of authority in himself alone,” is illuminated in Jane Griffiths, John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14. 10. Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and David Scott Kastan, “Print, Literary Culture and the Book Trade,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel M. Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 81–­116. On the gendering of possessive authorship, see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 11. There are other versions of what I am here calling relational authorship. Two especially have influenced me: Kathy Eden’s assessment of the link between friendship and proprietary authorship in Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Lisa Jardine’s account of the relational context for authorial self-­ presentation in Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Other helpful works include Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Julie Crawford, Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Dobranski contends that a “cooperative relationship” between writers and readers was key to the increasing authority of both (11), and Crawford draws on Dobranski’s work to argue that this relational authority enabled a politics of “godly activism” (26). None of these studies, however, explores the link between poetic relations and spiritual utility that is key to the model of relational authorship on display in early Protestant women’s poem collections. 12. For a summary assessment of how these forces altered authorship in sixteenth-­century England, see Margaret Ferguson, “Renaissance Concepts of the ‘Woman Writer,’ ” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–­1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 143–­98. Helpful also are the essays on patronage, print, and religion in David Loewenstein and Janel M. Mueller, eds.,



Notes to Pages 24–26 183

The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 13. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 192. See also Raymond Williams’s point that “the introduction of writing, and all the subsequent stages of its development, are intrinsically new forms of social relationship”; Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), quoted in Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 380n10. 14. Susanne Woods and Margaret P. Hannay, “Renaissance Englishwomen and the Literary Career,” in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick Alfred De Armas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 303-­23; they cite Richard Helgerson, Self-­Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 2. Although this contrast may appear to ignore the centrality of imitation in the devotional life of men and women throughout medieval Christianity and subsequently, it is revealing nevertheless as a point about authorship specifically. 15. On the importance of imitation, exemplarity, and admiration, see Steven M. Zwicker, “Habits of Reading and Early Modern Literary Culture,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel M. Mueller, New Cambridge History of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 170–­98, esp. 182. 16. I say “liminal” rather than “marginal” because the figure of a woman writer was clearly not marginal in Elizabethan England—­an age that bears the name of a queen often praised for her writing, and in a context where devotional texts by an earlier queen, Katherine Parr, were widely circulated and in a culture not only where the writings discussed here were produced and survive, but also where very few men or women could read, much less write, and fewer still were in a position to have their writings circulated and preserved. 17. Women’s importance as mediators is explored, most recently, by Crawford, in Mediatrix. Lucid accounts of how the exchange of women facilitated the development of English poetry can be found in Wall, Imprint of Gender, e.g., 53; and Ilona Bell, Elizabethan Women and the

184 Notes to Pages 26–28

Poetry of Courtship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), e.g., 74. Studies that present women as figures of authorial ambivalence and modern subjectivity include Summit, Lost Property, 17; and Rosalind Smith, Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–­1621: The Politics of Absence (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 10. On the centrality of women to Protestant poetics, see Kimberly Anne Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Coles persuasively argues that “the sudden appearance of religious verse in the 1590s—­after decades of resistance—­has no direct explanation” unless Lock’s and Sidney Herbert’s work is taken into account (148). These studies offer historically and culturally specific confirmation that, as Simone de Beauvoir observed long ago, “because of women’s marginal position in the world, men will turn to her when they strive through culture to go beyond the boundaries of their universe and gain access to something other than what they have known”: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley (London: Vintage, 1997), 122. 18. Nandra Perry, Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), 11. 19. Felch, Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, xvi–­xxxvi. Recent work on Lock includes Rosalind Smith, “ ‘In a Mirrour Clere’: Protestantism and Politics in Anne Lok’s Miserere Me Deus,” in This Double Voice: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 41–­60; and Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 45–­7 1. 20. Lock apparently sent these writings back to England, where they were published, after her return, and entered in the Stationers’ Register shortly before March 25, 1560. Warley, Sonnet Sequences, 47. 21. John Knox, The Works of John Knox, ed. David Laing (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 6:103–­4. 22. Michael Kuczynski, Prophetic Song: The Psalms as Moral Discourse in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), xv, 77. 23. Cited in Rivkah Zim, English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer, 1535–­1601 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 28n116. 24. Ibid., 7.



Notes to Pages 28–33 185

25. On the centrality of psalms to English Reformation poetry, see Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 57–­84. 26. See, e.g., Jacqueline T. Miller, Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 27. Ullrich Langer shows how pre-­Reformation nominalist theology gave writers a framework for thinking about literary creativity as a human counterpart to the incomprehensible creativity of an unknowable, all-­powerful God, in Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominalist Theology and Literature in France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Lisa Freinkel argues that post-­Reformation authors responded to the loss of figural relationships with God by creating the figure of a theological author, in Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). These studies have influenced my own, although I look to different examples to assess the effect of new theological claims about the distance between humans and God, and draw different conclusions: where Langer argues that this distance—­first emphasized in nominalism and then reinterpreted by Luther and Calvin—­encouraged authors to imagine literature as a space apart, one in which the ideal and the real can be reconciled, and Freinkel argues that the author becomes a counterpart to God, I argue that women authors were positioned to respond to Protestantism’s insistence that faith alone bridges the distance between humans and God by focusing on how the text expresses, and thereby nurtures, faith rather than on how the text becomes a privileged site of creativity or the author a new sort of creator. 28. Elizabeth Heale, Autobiography and Authorship in Renaissance Verse: Chronicles of the Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 171. 29. Anne Lake Prescott, “Divine Poetry as a Career Move: The Complexities and Consolations of Following David,” in European Literary Careers: The Author from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Patrick Cheney and Frederick A. De Armas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 206–­30, quote on 210. 30. Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31–­34. 31. This method of meditation is distinctive here in its poetic form

186 Notes to Pages 34–36

but not unprecedented as a way of engaging the Scripture. Compare, for example, Bernard of Clairvaux’s many sermons, composed in the twelfth century, on just a few lines from the Song of Songs. 32. Warley, Sonnet Sequences, 54. 33. Ibid., 59. 34. Philip translated 43 psalms and Mary Sidney Herbert, 107. See Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan, eds., The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Clarendon Press, 1998). See also Shannon Miller, “Mary Sidney and Gendered Strategies for the Writing of Poetry,” in Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints, ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 155–­76. 35. Over the following twelve years, between this event and her husband’s death in 1601, Mary Sidney Herbert translated many works and wrote some original poems, encouraged and supported other writers, supervised publication of her brother’s works, and otherwise promoted his reputation. All of Sidney Herbert’s written work that survives can, in fact, be dated to this period; see Margaret P. Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 69. 36. Targoff, Common Prayer, 78–­79. 37. Noting that these poems were both private and public, Lyn Bennett observes that this “psalmodic duality” was not new: psalms were frequently, increasingly, sung, though also considered particularly appropriate for private meditation. See Lyn Bennett, Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth and Lanyer (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2004), 57, 69. What may be not new but is distinctively emphasized in early modern poetry concerned with the connection between poetry and devotion is emphasis not on both public and private uses of poetry but on a relationality that is neither just giving voice to the collective nor singularly individual. 38. Targoff, Common Prayer, 76–­84, quote on 76. This argument is reversed in Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing. Coles argues that the Sidney-­Pembroke Psalter is an attempt to “bring psalmody to the defence of English lyric” (112). 39. Mary Sidney Herbert presented herself and Philip as courtiers, people in a position to offer Elizabeth something and in a position to ask something of the Queen in return, Margaret Hannay and others



Notes to Pages 36–38 187

have argued. “Although ‘Angell Spirit’ is primarily a lament for personal loss,” Hannay explains in Philip’s Phoenix, “the conjunction of this epitaph with the dedication to the queen makes a powerful political statement” (90). Wendy Wall makes an analogous point by contending that Sidney Herbert used the tropes of wounding and mourning—­ seemingly private emotional experiences—­to affirm that she was an accomplished public poet. “As [Mary] Sidney expresses the powerful emotions of piety and grief,” Wall concludes in Imprint of Gender, “she clears a space within the ideology of authorship for an alternative poetics of display” (317). 40. Although the Sidney-­Pembroke Psalter has been described as a “secure bridge to the magnificent original seventeenth-­century religious lyric in the biblical and psalmic mode,” Coles argues in Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing that this standard characterization overlooks the “irresolvable” conflict between Protestantism and the literary tradition (77). My suggestion is that the tension that Coles describes as “irresolvable” encouraged a pronounced focus on passive receptivity and active giving manifest in Sidney Herbert’s version of relational authorship. 41. Hannay, Kinnamon, and Brennan, Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert, 102. 42. The editors describe “active times” as part of the “Protestant code”; ibid., 100. 43. The editors point to a different set of contrasts: instead of referring to the Queen’s beauty, her eternal youth, her chastity, or mythological models, the poem emphasizes Elizabeth’s religious and political power. It does so, as the ’editors acknowledge, by emphasizing her relationship to David and to God (ibid., 101). What the editors thereby take as a premise—­that the relationships affirm the Queen’s authority—­I evaluate here as the poem’s most significant claim. 44. Contrast this with Clarke’s claim that “questions of voice, subjectivity and authority are particularly vexed [in devotional writing] whatever the gender of the speaker, for there is a sense in which his/her voice is always not his/her own, as Mary Sidney Herbert’s dedicatory poem to the Psalm metaphrases clearly indicates. . . . Not only is the Countess of Pembroke engaged in the collocation of multiple intertexts, her ‘original itself is written in a number of voices, her work is collaborative in a personal and a textual sense, and the ‘voice’ at work in the

188 Notes to Pages 38–52

Psalms is ultimately that of God.” Clarke and Clarke, This Double Voice, 11–­12. Questions of voice are “vexed,” however, only when we assume subjectivity is singular. 45. Wall, Imprint of Gender, 313. 46. This formulation owes much to Elise Lonich Ryan’s insights. 47. On this distinction between condign and congruous merits, see Steven E. Ozment, The Age of Reform (1250–­1550): An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 233–­36. On how late medieval nominalism conflated the distinction, see Heiko A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001). 48. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “render,” definition 3b. 49. For a discussion of how this poem mirrored the internal conflict in the psalm, in form as in content, see Elizabeth Harriss Sagaser, “Elegiac Intimacy: Pembroke’s ‘To the Angell Spirit of the Most Excellent Sir Philip Sidney,’ ” Sidney Studies 23, no. 1 (2005): 111–­31. 50. Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 51. For this assessment of Christine de Pizan, see Jennifer Summit, Lost Property, 66–­70. 52. On the Eucharist in English Protestant literature, see the discussion in chapter 2. Here I allude to Calvin’s view; on Luther’s notion of real presence, see Richard Strier, “Martin Luther and the Real Presence in Nature,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 271–­303. 53. On Lanyer’s “quasi-­priestly” role, see Achsah Guibbory, “The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 191–­211, esp. 192 and 206–­7; Kari Boyd McBride, “Sacred Celebration: The Patronage Poems,” in ibid., 60–­82, esp. 65 and 79; Lynette McGrath, Subjectivity and Women’s Poetry in Early Modern England: Why on the Ridge Should She Desire to Go? (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 226–­44; and Theresa M. DiPasquale, Refiguring the Sacred Feminine: The Poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2008), 128. 54. This, for example, is the impulse at work in the caricatured description of New Criticism: the reader gazes at the text and sees herself,



Notes to Pages 55–58 189

what she wants to see. The subsequent decades of reactions against New Criticism should, however, remind us that what really happens is interactive. 55. Philip Sidney, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-­Jones and J. A. van Dorsten (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973), 85. 56. George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 95, 113. 57. Jonathan V. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 21. 58. This argument is akin to, and informed by, Margaret Ferguson’s analysis of what she calls Renaissance authorship’s concern with the “predicament of relation” in Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 159. But where Ferguson sees this predicament manifest in the writer’s attempt to do two related things: to turn the reader inward while also promoting this self “in the eyes of others,” I see the authorization arising not from the consolidation of an authorial self but from the text’s capacity to inscribe relations. My claim, in other words, is that the author was authoritative insofar as she was relational. 59. Here I echo the cadences from Cummings’s description of Wyatt’s psalm sonnets as a “masterpiece of suppressed scandal and of scandalous suppression,” in service to a very different conclusion: Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 231. Chapter Two

1. Izaak Walton, “The Life of Mr. George Herbert,” in George Herbert: The Complete English Works, ed. Ann Pasternak Slater (New York: Knopf, 1995), 380. 2. Throughout this chapter I have relied on the modernized versions of Herbert’s poems in Ann Pasternak Slater, ed., George Herbert: The Complete English Works (New York: Knopf, 1995). 3. Louis Lohr Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 249. For similar claims in studies that otherwise differ in their aims and arguments, see Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protes-

190 Notes to Pages 59–67

tant Poetics and the Seventeenth-­Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 296; Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 9, 15; Stanley Fish, Self-­Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-­Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 198; and Edmund Miller, Drudgerie Divine: The Rhetoric of God and Man in George Herbert (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1979), 73, 82. 4. John Donne, A Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers, Late Wife of Sr. John Danvers (1627) (Ann Arbor, MI: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 2006), 138, 131. 5. Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), 33. 6. John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 203–­7, 280–­85. 7. Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 18–­22, quote on 18. 8. Michael Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 81–­83. 9. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “use,” definition 1a. 10. “Holy Communion,” in The Book of Common Prayer, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 138. 11. Article 31 in Church of England, Articles (London, 1605). 12. I was alerted to the importance of this by the brief discussion in Jeanne Clayton Hunter, “George Herbert and ‘Friend,’ ” Notes and Queries 32, no. 2 (1985): 160–­61. 13. In a comparative analysis of how a Lutheran notion of the “intimate other” influences the poetry of Spenser, Donne, and Herbert, Esther Gilman Richey argues that for each of these writers, the “Passion . . . is at once the subject and the source of their subjectivity,” producing a “stunning record of intimacy made infinite.” See Esther Gilman Richey, “The Intimate Other: Lutheran Subjectivity in Spenser, Donne, and Herbert,” Modern Philology: Critical and Historical Studies in Literature, Medieval Through Contemporary 108, no. 3 (February 2011): 343–­74, esp. 374. My argument echoes her claim that this poetry offers a “dynamic model of relational intimacy” (374). Where she, however, sees this poetry successfully affirming the theology of the gift, I am more



Notes to Pages 69–79 191

interested in how the tensions in Lutheran (as in Calvinist) theology inspire poets to attend to the variable dynamics of relationality. 14. John N. Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988); and Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 15. See Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-­Jones and J. A. van Dorsten (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1973), 81. 16. Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 90. 17. Ibid., 7. 18. Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016). 19. Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-­ Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 6. Johnson summarizes her formalist claim as follows: “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” (33). Assessing Herbert specifically, she details how his interest in “the bodie and the letters both” led him to emphasize the “wordiness of the Word” (49) and treat poetry as an “incarnational mechanism, able to enflesh the abstract and make the absent literally present on the page” (51). 20. Jeffrey Johnson, The Theology of John Donne (Woodbridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 1. 21. Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, 138. 22. Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert, Midway Reprint (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 190. 23. For a different assessment of this comparison, see Drury, Music at Midnight, 23–­24. 24. Barbara Leah Harman, Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 48. 25. Vendler, Invisible Listeners, 15. 26. “Temper,” the title of the poem, invokes both the metaphor of metal made malleable by heat or an instrument well tuned, with overtones, too, of physical health achieved through balance—­a temperate

192 Notes to Pages 80–87

body. See George Herbert, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 194. 27. John Drury, in Music at Midnight, helpfully captures this in the observation that when the Reformation took away the host of saints, and the Virgin Mary above all, “the world of a Christian’s imagination was suddenly concentrated” (11). See also the quote from Edward Herbert’s de Veritate: “Retire into yourself and enter into your own faculties and there you will find God, virtue, and other universal truths.” 28. Ryan Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 15. 29. Ibid., 55. 30. Ibid., 200. 31. Ibid., 203. 32. Debora K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 91–­105, quote on 104. This argument has the benefit of explaining the structure of The Temple: the didactic author of “The Church Porch” directs a moral, performative, social self, whereas the speaker in “The Church” inhabits instead a radically vulnerable self seeking presence, healing, and redemption. 33. Michael Schoenfeldt forcefully argues in Prayer and Power that Herbert did not sequester social from sacred relationships, and thus that the “discourse of social control” deeply influenced Herbert’s poetry (4). His study, however, largely omits any discussion of friendship, because Schoenfeldt assumes it exclusively signified kinship and allegiance. 34. Ullrich Langer, Perfect Friendship: Studies in Literature and Moral Philosophy from Boccaccio to Corneille (Geneva: Droz, 1994), 250. 35. Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Chapter Three

1. Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, ed. Kilian J. Walsh (Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1971). Studies of the centrality of this scriptural book to Western Christian piety include E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); Ann W. Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-



Notes to Pages 87–88 193

sity Press, 1990); and Denys Turner, Eros And Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1995). 2. For a fuller discussion of devotional eroticism and works that have influenced my own, see Constance M. Furey, “Sexuality,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Amy M. Hollywood and Patricia Z. Beckman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 328–­40. 3. The notion that Luther purified what Catholicism had wrongly mixed alludes to the argument in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). Nygren, a Lutheran theologian, was focused specifically on definitions of love rather than broader questions of practice and sacramental worldviews. Still, his fairly technical claim is analogous to the broader distinction discussed in the introduction between Protestantism’s spirituality (regularly interpreted as compatible with modernity) and Catholicism’s materiality (regularly associated with anti-­modern superstition and fetishism). Nygren proclaimed that Martin Luther’s great contribution to Christianity was to differentiate undeserved (or, in more technical theological terms, unmerited) agapic love from self-­interested erotic love. Arguing theologically, Nygren contended that Luther thereby corrected a confusion introduced into the tradition by Augustine and his successors—­a confusion compounded by the renewed celebration of love in the twelfth century’s affective spirituality and mysticism. The accuracy as well as the implications of Nygren’s reading of the tradition have been challenged; nevertheless, there remains a tendency to assume that just as Augustine differentiated between caritas and cupiditas (each defined by the object of love), so too in Christianity more generally there is a clear distinction to be drawn between selfish and selfless love—­with eros associated with the former and agape with the latter. For an alternative to Nygren, see, e.g. the discussion of Bernard’s synthesis of eros and philia, and his and Aquinas’s emphasis on the mutuality of love between God and man which broke through an “over-­emphasis” on the “divine self-­sufficiency,” in John Burnaby, Amor Dei, a Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947), 262–­67. Other helpful discussions of eros and agape include John M. Rist, “A Note on Eros and Agape in Pseudo-­Dionysius,” Vigiliae Christianae 20, no. 4 (1966): 235–­43; Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller, eds., Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline (New York: Ford-

194 Notes to Pages 88–89

ham University Press, 2006), xv; and Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 324–­27. 4. “Faith justifieth before and without caritas.” Martin Luther, “A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians,” in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1962), 116. 5. For a study focused on early modern England that helpfully demonstrates how the aversion to and celebration of eros and sexuality intertwines throughout much of the Latin Christian tradition, see James Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 6. John Donne, The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985). All citations to Donne’s poetry are from this edition, with parenthetical references to line numbers. 7. Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). All citations from Lanyer’s poetry are from this edition, with parenthetical references to line numbers. 8. Rosalie Littell Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 136. 9. Theresa M. DiPasquale, Refiguring the Sacred Feminine: The Poems of John Donne, Aemilia Lanyer, and John Milton (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2008), 106. I was initially inspired to compare these two poets by reading Michael Schoenfeldt, “The Gender of Religious Devotion: Amelia Lanyer and John Donne,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora K. Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 209–­33. Schoenfeldt memorably wrote that Donne and Lanyer pursued analogies between divine and human love with a “zest unmatched by most previous or subsequent writers” (209). My debt to Schoenfeldt’s work is made clearer in an earlier—­and in many respects quite different—­version of the comparison I offer here: Constance M. Furey, “The Selfe Undone: Individualism and Relationality in John Donne and Aemilia Lanyer,” Harvard Theological Review 99, no. 4 (2006): 469–­89. 10. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 106. 11. On Bruno, see Ioan P. Coulianu, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 38–­41, 57–­75. See also



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Nicolas J. Perella, The Kiss Sacred and Profane: An Interpretative History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-­Erotic Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). The depth and force of premodern theories of eros are important to keep in mind when considering Jonathan Lear’s claim that this is one of Freud’s revolutionary insights, that love is a “force in nature,” in Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990), 4. For a discussion of how desire shapes subjectivity in medieval and modern theoretical sources, see Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002); and Hollywood, Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 12. Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 13. On Renaissance theories of eros and their valorization of desire’s capacity to disturb the self—­including the persistent theme that one could literally die from love; see Coulianu, Eros and Magic, 39, 57, 72. Debora Shuger argues that the confluence of Protestantism and humanism “replace[d] the unified erotic subjectivity of medieval Christianity” with the “decentering conflicts of the chimerical self ” more typical of modernity, and links this decoupling of the flesh and the spirit to the way Protestantism supplanted “image and sacrament with the less material mediations of the inspired text.” Debora K. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 189. Either way, discussions tack between notions of the self unified or destabilized; see Yvonne Sherwood, “Passion— ­Binding— ­Passion,” in Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline, ed. Virginia Burrus and Catherine Keller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 169–­ 93. For subtle assessments of the variable alternatives evident already in medieval texts, see Lara Farina, Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), esp. chap. 3. 14. What these two poets share, then, is an interest in distinctions, whether maintained or overcome. This is in keeping with the defining characteristic of Petrarchan lyric in the English Renaissance—­ characterized by Heather Dubrow as “diacritical desire,” or the “desire to make distinctions.” The eroticism of Petrarchan poetry is, she argues, inseparable from the “drive to differentiate” (Echoes of Desire,

196 Notes to Pages 91–93

ii). Dubrow further argues that diacritical desire in Donne is rooted in the “Augustinian distinction between caritas and cupiditas” (213). In keeping with Dubrow’s own method, I do not think that contrast is as marked in Augustine as she here assumes, and my analysis suggests that Donne’s interest in distinctions between and within people blurs the boundaries between different kinds of love. 15. Claims about Donne’s novelty include numerous variations on the argument that he reinvented love because he was proto-­modern in his assumptions. His celebration of erotic love was “boldly revolutionary,” anticipating the “modern privileging of romantic love,” according to Achsah Guibbory, “Erotic Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 144. He wrote about women’s pleasure and was “supremely attentive to the woman’s point of view,” Ilona Bell argues in “Gender Matters,” also in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, 201–­16, quote on 201. He privatized the whole experience, making the space that lovers create a welcome refuge from the demands for status and power that lurk just outside the bedroom: on this see Anthony Low, The Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics, and Culture from Sidney to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Donne has also been described as postmodern avant la lettre, as a melancholy isolate and optimistic artist who created poetic fantasies of erotic fulfillment to stave off existential despair; see Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 16. William Kerrigan, “What Was Donne Doing?,” South Central Review 4, no. 2 (1987): 2–­15, quote on 8. For a lively account of how Donne’s desire has been theorized, see Saunders, Desiring Donne, 16–­33. 17. Dennis Haskins, “The Love Lyric,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flynn, and M. Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 196, citing M. Thomas Hester, “ ‘This Cannot Be Said’: A Preface to the Reader of Donne’s Lyrics,” Christianity and Literature 39, no. 4 (1990): 365–­85. 18. For the argument about sacralizing sex, see, e.g., Murray Roston, The Soul of Wit: A Study of John Donne (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1974), 12; and Guibbory, “Erotic Poetry,” 143. 19. Schoenfeldt, “Gender of Religious Devotion,” 228. 20. Rambuss, Closet Devotions, 68. 21. Debora K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance:



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Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 182. 22. This is surprising in the sense that Rambuss and Shuger stand in different camps when it comes to talking about sex, but the clear and important distinction between historicist and psychoanalytic approaches has perhaps been wrongly allowed to obscure the way these two authors, for example, share an interest in positioning premodern texts in opposition to modern heteronormativity (as Rambuss would put it) and secular assumptions (for Shuger). Consider, for example, these statements from Shuger’s Habits of Thought: Donne consistently stresses absolutism “most alien to the modern mentality: the configuration of ideal relations in terms of domination and submission” (164). “Absolutist theology opens out on to what Rudolph Otto called the ‘idea of the holy’ ” (191). “At a certain point in Western history, guilt, dependence, and longing for passivity and for being ‘in relation’ to personal power—­the whole complex of archaic/infantile emotions valorized in Donne—­became offensive. As Christopher Hill remarked, ‘we are all Pelagians now’ ” (203). Shuger is quoting from Christopher Hill, The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill: Religion and Politics in Seventeenth-­Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985), 133. 23. Saunders, Desiring Donne, 158, 162. Saunders further observes that a belief in love can be terribly destructive if it is a “fantasy of complete identification with the other, in the face of the inevitability of separation” (163). 24. Theresa DiPasquale observes, for example, that for Donne, the Petrarchan love lyric is insufficient because it is a “poetics of an eternally suffering, definitively frustrated longing, rather than of love’s fruition.” Theresa M. DiPasquale, Literature & Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 147. “For Donne,” she writes, “Petrarchism is the Roman Catholicism of love; but where can a secular poet of the English Renaissance go to escape the Babylonian captivity of Petrarchism? For students of Donne, the oldest answer to this question is ‘Ovid’ . . . but Donne’s interest in the sacramentality of language leads him to consider another alternative as well: poetry modeled on the personal letter, which—­for Donne as for many Renaissance humanist writers—­is a truly sacramental genre, a form of writing that effects the presence of the absent writer and brings about his union with the reader” (187). And in a chapter titled

198 Notes to Pages 93–95

“Toward an Anti-­Petrarchan Love-­Religion,” DiPasquale reads “Aire and Angels” as an account of conversion from Petrarchan adoration to belief in reciprocal devotion: “Donne’s speaker inverts his own conceits in order to insist on a ‘disparity’ between lover and beloved, male and female, precisely because he desires to escape the solipsism of his own imagination and to experience a love in which there really is a ‘thou’ as well as an ‘I’ ” (147). Although he is, as Judith Herz remarks, still quite Petrarchan, DiPasquale concludes that he is also “remarkably conscious of and uncomfortable with that fact” (152), citing Judith Scherer Herz, “Resisting Mutuality,” John Donne Journal 9 (1990): 27–­31. See also Achsah Guibbory, “Donne, the Idea of Woman, and the Experience of Love,” John Donne Journal 9 (1990): 105–­12. 25. Ryan Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 110. This is echoed in Haskin’s more general observation about Donne’s love lyrics, that although they include powerful expressions of pain and cynicism about love, they “avoid giving an overall impression of frustration and failure” (“Love Lyric,” 188). 26. Regina M. Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 89. 27. Ibid., 93, 8, 93. 28. On this point, see also Ramie Targoff ’s argument that Donne’s concern throughout his life was the “challenge of securing future continuity in the face of present rupture”: Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 72. 29. “Of the Word or Son of God, which was made very man,” which reads as follows: “The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took Man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance: so that two whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God, and very Man; who truly suffered, was crucified, dead, and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for actual sins of men.” 30. Edward Rochie Hardy, Christology of the Later Fathers, Library of Christian Classics: Ichthus Edition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977), 373. This definition was formulated to rule out three unacceptable



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understandings mentioned earlier (Apollinarianism, Eutychianism, and extreme Nestorianism). Here is the full content of that definition: “Following, then, the holy Fathers, we all with one voice teach that it should be confessed that our Lord Jesus Christ is one and same Son, the Same perfect in Godhead, the Same perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, the Same [consisting] of a rational soul and a body; homoousios with the Father as to his Godhead, and the Same homoousios with us as to his manhood; in all things like unto us, sin only excepted; begotten of the Father before ages as to his Godhead, and in the last days, the Same, for us and for our salvation, of Mary the Virgin Theotokos as to his manhood; One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only begotten, made known in two natures [which exist] without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference of the natures having been in no wise taken away by reason of the union, but rather the properties of each being preserved, and [both] concurring into one Person (prosopon) and one hypostasis—­not parted or divided into two persons (prosopa), but one and the same Son and Only-begotten, the divine Logos, the Lord Jesus Christ; even as the prophets from of old [have spoken] concerning him, as the Lord Jesus Christ has taught us, and as the Symbol of the Fathers has delivered to us.” 31. Sarah Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It Not? Some Reflections on the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian ‘Definition,’ ” in The Incarnation: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, SJ, and Gerald O’Collins, SJ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 143–­63, quote on 154, 156, citing Cora Diamond, “Riddles and Anselm’s Riddle,” in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 267. 32. For a nuanced and detailed discussion of how Donne enacts John Calvin’s novel alternative to the “traditionally firm distinction between the human and divine natures of Christ,” see Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-­Stuart England (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 64–­73, quote on 64. In contrast to Luther (who insisted on the ubiquity of Christ’s human nature), Calvin reinforced this distinction between Christ’s humanity and his divinity. Yet he then accorded to language an “active, transformative role” in making the transfer between the realms these two natures inhabit (68–­69). As Anderson explains, Donne enacts Calvin’s alternative by using metaphors of ascent and descent, in

200 Notes to Pages 95–97

this way crafting a “rhetorical connection” between heaven and earth. The effect, she concludes, is an “exchange of value,” where that which descends is the vehicle of ascent, where humanity is brought back to divinity by the God who becomes a human being (73, original emphasis). 33. Perhaps it is helpful here to review Anderson’s argument in more detail. She is tracking debates about the communicatio idiomatum, the “communication of divine and human properties in the God-­man.” Anderson argues that Calvin ultimately aligns with Zwingli in repudiating the “scholastic insistence on absolute, a priori truths” by demonstrating an “awareness of the relative value of all rhetorical distinctions” (Translating Investments, 67). This is important for Anderson’s purposes because it brings faith to bear on the working of language, in lieu of the materiality that Luther, like Catholic theologians, affirmed. Calvin, she concludes, understands the move from higher to lower or lower to higher as the move accomplished in rhetoric—­in that sense it is, as Anderson puts it, “materially rhetoric’s” if “finally and spiritually faith’s.” What I might say is that Donne, by contrast, writes where medieval mystics lived, within a world that perceived paradox as generative and truthful. On this, see Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–­1350, vol. 3 of The Presence of God (New York: Crossroad, 1998), 170. Moreover, if Sarah Coakley is right in her reading of the best way to understand the intent of the authors of the Chalcedonian definition, this means Donne writes with something of the same assumptions that informed the authors of that definition, who were, she argues, establishing a horizon of expectation for understanding Christ. In making this claim, Coakley rejects the ideas (1) that the definition is linguistically regulatory rather than ontological; (2) that its language is properly understood as metaphorical; and (3) that it understood its claims to be “literally” true in the sense of making specific, empirical assertions; see Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It Not?” 34. Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 244; and Lynne Magnusson, “Donne’s Language: The Conditions of Communication,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 183–­200, quote on 195. 35. Magnusson, “Donne’s Language,” 194. 36. This is akin to Arnold Stein’s conclusion, that Donne hereby af-



Notes to Pages 97–107 201

firms “the love of the finite for the infinite,” in John Donne’s Lyrics: The Eloquence of Action (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962), 158. 37. Magnusson, “Donne’s Language,” 195, 196. 38. The quote is from M. Hanmer’s translation of a work by Socrates Scholasticus, cited in Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “economy,” definition 5. The OED entry on “economics,” definition 2, gives some examples from the eighteenth century, but also the observation that it was not until the nineteenth century that the word appeared, without qualification, to refer to a branch of knowledge concerned with wealth and finance. 39. Jeffrey Johnson, “Donne, Imperfect,” John Donne Journal 27 (2008): 1–­20, quote on 10. Note also Johnson’s observation that “Donne conceives dilation in the commerce of relations and relationships” (17). This is meant to refute the suggestion that Donne operates according to the “principle of commodification” to satisfy the desire for “inclusion in the traditional established group”—­an argument made by David Aers and Gunther Kress, “ ‘Darke Texts Need Notes’: Versions of Self in Donne’s Verse Epistles,” in Critical Essays on John Donne, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), 102–­22, quotes on 120–­21, 113. 40. See the definitions in Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “mystery.” 41. Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 162–­164; see also 95. 42. Ferry, The “Inward” Language, 223, 233. 43. Shuger, Renaissance Bible, 190; see also 196. 44. Netzley, Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist, 110. 45. Ibid., 115. 46. For a brief but astute assessment of Donne’s contradictions, ending with a discussion of this sonnet, see Judith Scherer Herz, “ ‘By Parting Have Joyn’d Here’: The Story of the Two (or More) Donnes,” in Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Jeanne Shami, Dennis Flyn, and M. Thomas Hester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 732–­42. 47. In John Donne, The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985), 446. 48. Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-­ Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 103–­4. 49. Whalen says that both “profane and sacred love share the same

202 Notes to Pages 107–109

animating presence,” thus enabling Donne to “escape from subjective doubt” through “identification with an ultimately stable, nontransitory power”: Robert Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 159, 74; see Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica, 210. I would say that notably the presence conjured is the presence of two subjects, and so the poem inscribes a connection that both is assumed and must be sought. 50. Arthur F. Marotti, “Donne as Social Exile and Jacobean Courtier: The Devotional Verse and Prose of the Secular Man,” in Critical Essays on John Donne, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994), 77–­ 101; and John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 58–­59. 51. Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (London, 1658), 273–­74, quoted in Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 36. 52. Ibid., 36–­37. 53. The reader’s hope for a positive response to this rejection of both options the poem has offered up to this point is disappointed by the elusiveness of the poem’s concluding claims about the relationship between air and angels. One is less pure than the other, but it is not clear which (“Just such disparity / As is ’twixt Air and Angels’ purity, / ’Twixt women’s love, and men’s will ever be”; lines 26–­28). The differences claimed become so elusive they enable a dramatically different interpretation of the final line, summarized in Schoenfeldt’s argument that in this poem Donne renders the disparity between men and women a distinction without difference: Michael Schoenfeldt, “Patriarchal Assumptions and Egalitarian Designs,” John Donne Journal 9, no. 1 (1990): 23–­26. 54. “Sappho to Philaenis” is all about likeness, most critics contend. It has been read both as a celebration of the stability and self-­containment that love for another just like oneself engenders and as a contemptuous account of how love of likeness devolves into love of self. There’s not much left to say on the question of whether Donne’s account of female-­female desire is repressive or liberatory in this, his unique poem about female homoeroticism, but it is a paradigmatic example of how he navigates sameness and difference, self-­containment, and love for another by holding these oppositions together. John Carey calls it “the first female homosexual love poem in English” ( John Donne, 270–­71). Janel Mueller carefully demonstrates how it departs from the Ovidian



Notes to Pages 109–110 203

model in “Troping Utopia: Donne’s Brief for Lesbianism,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Turner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 182–­207. See also H. L. Meakin, John Donne’s Articulations of the Feminine (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1998); James Holstun, “ ‘ Will You Rent Our Ancient Love Asunder?’ Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton,” ELH 54, no. 4 (1987): 835–­67; Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), 132; Barbara Correll, “Symbolic Economies and Zero-­Sum Erotics: Donne’s ‘Sapho to Philaenis,’ ” ELH 62, no. 3 (1995): 487–­507, quote on 490; and Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 71–­72. 55. It is “not lesbian desire that Donne calls into question in ‘Sappho to Philaenis,’ ” Blank concludes, “but rather the homoeroticization of desire, the effort to re-­create the other as self and the self as another”: Paula Blank, “Comparing Sappho to Philaenis: John Donne’s ‘Homopoetics,’ ” PMLA 10, no. 3 (1995): 358–­68, quote on 364. 56. Critics are not wrong to pause over this judgment of “strange self flattery,” although the category of narcissism or the assumption that Donne is averse to identifying with a woman skews the interpretation. As Paula Blank writes: “Sappho’s narcissism is not autoeroticism because she desires her self as other. . . . Donne’s poem suggests that desire is always desire for another” (“Comparing Sappho,” 365–­66). Anthony Low, by contrast, argues that Donne displays a “shuddering revulsion at being forced to identify with the woman’s part”; see Anthony Low, The Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics and Culture from Sidney to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 82. 57. Saunders, Desiring Donne, 140. 58. It is notable, then, that the most evocative descriptions of how these two female figures fit together are phrased as questions, which recalls the questions about desire at the beginning of the poem: “Where is that holy fire, which Verse is said / to have? Is that inchanting force decai’d?” (lines 1–­2). The final lines of “Sappho to Philaenis” thus echo without committing to a familiar affirmation of transcendence. Moreover, as Janel Mueller points out, this lyric affirmation recapitulates an earlier climax, the point at which the praise of all Philaenis has to offer begins “Thy body is a naturall Paradise” (line 35). The eternal ideal is found in and through the body and likeness and difference are held together in the tensions of immanent transcendence.

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59. For background on Lanyer and her work, see Susanne Woods, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and see essays in Marshall Grossman, ed., Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998). 60. DiPasquale, Refiguring the Sacred Feminine; Kari Boyd McBride, “Sacred Celebration: The Patronage Poems,” and Barbara K. Lewalski, “Seizing Discourses and Reinventing Genres,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 64–­7 1 and 49–­59, esp. 52–­54, respectively; Elaine V. Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 4. 61. In “To the Lady Katherine,” Lanyer describes Christ as the lover who is “all that ladies can desire” (line 85), the one who is “more true” than any known “since the world began” (lines 52–­53); in the dedicatory poem “To the Lady Susan,” he is the “fair Bridegroom” that the female reader is directed to invite into “your soule’s pure bed” (line 42); and in “To the Lady Lucie,” he is the “true-­love of your soule” (line 6). Citing these and similar passages, Theresa DiPasquale argues, for example, that Lanyer presents Christ as the perfect male object of female desire: Christ is the “best lover” because what he offers is not only spiritual or emotional or intellectual satisfaction but also a “physically fertile eros”; in this way, Lanyer establishes a “perfect continuity between heterosexual women’s sublimated desires . . . and their sexual desire for the consummate male lover” (Refiguring the Sacred Feminine, 171, 172). Other interpretations, however, point out that Christ is often feminized in Lanyer’s text, not only in the way his body is described but also because he is positioned as a silent and marginal figure. Lanyer draws devotion and eroticism together, Michael Morgan Holmes observes, in the homoeroticism of women’s love. In these texts, “maternal and sisterly affection give way” to the erotics of “feminine desire” and the “engagement between a feminized Christ and ‘her’ female lovers.” Michael Morgan Holmes, “The Love of Other Women: Rich Chains and Sweet Kisses,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 167–­90. Compare Goldberg’s conclusion that Lanyer’s descriptions of Jesus “implicate a femininity that is not gender bound; they imply heterosexual relations and religious passion that coincide with female-­ female eroticism,” in Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: En-



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glish Renaissance Examples (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 34. 62. “Because the egalitarian eros she demands is resisted by the patriarchal discourse of difference she inherits,” Michael Schoenfeldt observes in an exemplary version of this argument, “Lanyer turns to homoerotic likeness rather than heterosexual difference as a principle of erotic attraction” (“Gender of Religious Devotion,” 221). For others, like DiPasquale, it is just as importantly a way of highlighting Lanyer’s distinctive expression of an incarnational theology and her contributions to the idea of a sacred feminine or a radical gospel that challenges Christianity’s heterosexual norms—­memorably described by Achsah Guibbory, “The Gospel According to Aemilia: Women and the Sacred” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 191–­211. Either way, the framework is one of normativity and subversion, with the focus on how Lanyer’s devotional eroticism intersects with socially normative visions of sex and gender. This framework has its limits. Consider, for example, Schoenfeldt’s observation that in her search for a “lexicon of desire” that is “uncontaminated by the hierarchies of gender and class”,” Lanyer “forces the discourse of devotional desire” to affirm her egalitarianism (“Gender of Religious Devotion,” 221). Schoenfeldt is celebrating rather than critiquing Lanyer’s forceful move; nevertheless, the underlying logic is that devotional desire and social mores are two ends of the same seesaw. So too when Wendy Wall comments that “Lanyer exhausts erotic possibilities within the sanctioned discourse of the Song of Songs,” she assumes that what Lanyer “exhausts” are the possibilities sanctioned by a discourse that presumes a gender binary; see Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 327. My point is that Lanyer plays within this space, arranging and rearranging what she has been given but content with the pieces at hand. From within this framework—­where homoeroticism is juxtaposed to heterosexual pairings and the affirmation of a community of women opposed to traditional gender roles—­it can be difficult to see an alternative to its binary structure. 63. This is my somewhat polemical version of a point made also in Declan Marmion and Rik Van Nieuwenhove, An Introduction to the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). The authors

206 Notes to Pages 112–114

argue that Trinitarian doctrine has unduly focused on the “immanent” Trinity, concerned with the “inner life of God” rather than the “economic” Trinity, which refers to the saving activity of God. In Western theology, in particular, Trinitarian doctrine became a “science of God’s self-­relatedness” rather than a “theology of relationship” (1, 24, 26). 64. Beilin, Redeeming Eve. 65. It’s like an apple, a student explained to me: the peel, the flesh, the core, three parts of the same entity. Caroline Oates, personal conversation, November 17, 2014. 66. Discouraged, perhaps, by theological technicalities, including the 5-­4-­3-­2-­1 formula reputedly mocked by Bernard Lonergan: five notions, four relations, three persons, two processions, and one nature—­and, he added, “Zero comprehension!” See Marmion and Van Nieuwenhove, Introduction to the Trinity, 16. 67. John Donne, Sermons, ed. George Reuben Potter and Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 3:144. On Donne’s Trinitarianism, see, above all, Johnson, Theology of John Donne. 68. Donne, Sermons, 6:81. 69. Following a well-­trod path, Donne also described how the Trinity is mirrored in each individual, in the three faculties of the soul (Sermons 2:72–­73), but he more clearly reflects the elements of the tradition important for my purposes in his emphasis on reciprocity. 70. Orations 29.16, cited in Kallistos Ware, “The Holy Trinity: Model for Personhood in Relation,” in The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology, ed. J. C. Polkinghorne (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 107–­29, quote on 115. Or, as Marmion and Van Nieuwenhove put it more formally, the three divine persons are “coordinate realities denoting relationships” (Introduction to the Trinity, 79). 71. Note that Augustine emphasized an interpersonal “trinity of love” as well as a psychological analogy when he wrote about the Trinity as love, lover, and beloved, but he is usually interpreted as more interested in the latter, understood as a “trinity of the mind,” and his notion of the Spirit as the love rather than a third person puts the primary focus on the relationship between two. On this, see Ware, “Holy Trinity,” 118–­21. 72. Richard St. Victor, On the Trinity 4.15, cited in Marmion and Van Nieuwenhove, Introduction to the Trinity, 101. 73. Ibid., 3.4, 3.6, 3.11. Note the emphasis in the text on “caritas”



Notes to Pages 114–115 207

throughout, but the discussion of God’s need to be the object of love (3.9–­3.14) and discussion of “burning love” shows why this should not be misinterpreted as a rejection of eros in a manner that Nygren’s strict separation between eros and agape might suggest. On the problems with Nygren’s dichotomy, see Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 74. In Lanyer’s own time, Trinitarian doctrine more often focused on the mystery of three in one—­and the corresponding lesson that the essential nature of God is communal and that the image of God in the human being is evident, for example, in the three faculties of the soul (the understanding, the will, and the memory), which enable communication between the believer and God. These are not the concerns evident in Lanyer’s poetry; her Trinitarian elements are instead evident in her focus on interpersonal expressions of love and on the way bonds between two manifest themselves in relations with a third. Donne’s own theology was strongly Trinitarian: “the sociablenesse, the communicablenesse of God” was the center of his conception of God. As Johnson points out, this understanding of Trinitarian theology shifts the focus from Calvin’s teaching about the primacy of God’s sovereignty to the primacy of the divine community. The problem of self-­regard or sinfulness was, of course, paramount for Luther and Calvin, both of whom showed little interest in the inherent reflexivity of the divine that so captivated earlier thinkers. According to Luther, the important thing to emphasize is that we encounter the Triune God only through Christ, whereas for Calvin, even Augustine’s psychological analogy is problematic insofar as it threatens to blur the clear distinction between human and divine: Johnson, Theology of John Donne, 15, citing Donne, Sermons, 6:154. 75. Jan van Ruusbroec, Opera Omnia, vol. 4, quoted from lines 1597–­ 1624, with amended translation, in Marmion and Van Nieuwenhove, Introduction to the Trinity, 101. 76. Ibid., 127. 77. In these interpretations, crucial distinctions are effaced. To gesture toward my conclusion, I’ll note that the most helpful comparison is with analyses that focus on how the encounter might undo or “deprehend” the self, as Donne puts it in a 1622 sermon—­the very effect he pursues in “Batter my heart.” Reading this in the context of a study of the prayer closet, Richard Rambuss observes that Donne here interprets the devotional encounter as one in which “the self is repetitively,

208 Notes to Page 115

almost ritually, undone” (Closet Devotions, 115). With similar interest in the way devotion might undo the self, Wendy Wall argues that by exerting “control” over the way Christ is depicted, Lanyer’s female speaker mixes objectification (of a male body) and identification (by feminizing that body). The effect is to “blend” subject and object and “collapse” the distinctions between “self ” and “other” (Imprint of Gender, 328). This accords with interpretations such as Yvonne Sherwood’s suggestion that the Passion is of interest especially for the way its conflation of absolute strength and “abject objecthood” presents Jesus as an “unfocused object/subject.” It is, she concludes, in the “overwhelming and undermining of the limits of ‘him’ that his passion resonates with the chaos of human passion in more than an accidental etymological sense” (“Passion—­Binding—­Passion,” 193). 78. Naomi Miller, “(M)other Tongues,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 143–­66, quote on 149. 79. Lanyer’s triangulation effaces difference, Michael Morgan Holmes argues, establishing a homosocial space. The textual encounter with the beloved creates a “shared” rather than a “competitive” discourse, Lorna Hutson concludes. See Holmes, “Love of Other Women”; and Lorna Hutson, “Why the Lady’s Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun,” in New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: Routledge, 1992), 154–­75, on 171. 80. There is emphasis on interactive dynamics, instead of the “call without a response,” as Kimberly Johnson defines devotional poetry in Johnson, “ ‘A Heavenly Poesie’: The Devotional Lyric,” in Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Poetry, ed. Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), xxx. And instead of what theologian Sarah Coakley describes as the purgative power of prayer, I would emphasize the mediating constraint and creativity of the poetic text. 81. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, 3rd ed. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), 73. Thus, when Lanyer’s narrator concludes her account of the Passion to address the reader directly and summarize the lessons learned, she insists on the coincidence, rather than transcendence, of apparent contradictions: “And here both Griefe and Joy thou maist unfold” (line 1171), for the miracle of Christ is to unite “death, life, misery, joy and care” (line 1179). The message is not that one should overcome particular



Notes to Pages 116–117 209

attachment and tragic implications of human finitude, death and grief above all, but instead that they can be experienced anew, experienced through attachment to Christ as Christ experienced them: O wonder, more than man can comprehend, Our Joy and Griefe both at one instant fram’d, Compounded: Contrarieties contend Each to exceed, yet neither to be blam’d   (lines 1217–­20) To love Christ, then, is to feel as Christ felt, passionate joy, unremitting sorrow, an excess the poem praises. 82. William Perkins, A Declaration of the True Manner of Knowing Christ Crucified (Cambridge, 1596), 22. 83. Ibid., 4. The goal, according to Perkins, is to be “touched with an inward and lively feeling” of one’s own sins; to grow to a “through dislike” of oneself and desire to reform; and to come to know Christ’s love in order to be “inflamed to love God againe” (1). 84. Nicholas Breton, The Pilgrimage to Paradise, Joined with the Countesse of Penbrookes Love, Compiled in Verse by Nicholas Breton Gentleman (Oxford, 1592), 162–­69. 85. Ibid., 78. 86. While Lanyer’s poetic meditation on Christ’s passion describes in detail his tortured and broken body, and references to his suffering are plentiful, the descriptions focus less on the eroticism of suffering apparent in Perkins’s quote than on the beauty of the body and the desire this beauty arouses. Finally, although faith is emphasized, as should be expected from a Protestant devotional text, the alternative to idolatry that Luther and others so adamantly sought to establish was associated in Lanyer’s text less with faith than with love. Significantly, the love endorsed was not exclusively with agape or God’s unmerited love for believers; instead, there is just as much attention to eros and believers’ love for God and Christ as well as, implicitly, the author’s desire for her deserving readers. 87. See editor’s gloss in Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, ed. Susanne Woods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 32. 88. Lanyer’s detail recalls Julian of Norwich’s Showings. See Kerilyn Harkaway-­Krieger, “Mysticism and Metaphor: Visionary Literature in Fourteenth-­Century England” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2014); and Nicholas Watson, “The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Nor-

210 Notes to Pages 119–122

wich’s Revelation of Love,” in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 61–­90. 89. Lloyd Gallagher compares interestingly to Fisher’s “surreal corpus-­text” to find a cipher for “the unplumbable relations between self and divine Other . . . and between self and others,” in “The Place of the Stigmata in Christological Poetics,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora K. Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 103. Here instead the focus is on surface dynamics rather than ciphers. Christ, like the Countess, has mix of joy and grief, and the Countess too can forgive sins; see Catherine Keohane, “ ‘That Blindest Weakenesse Be Not Over-­Bold’: Aemilia Lanyer’s Radical Unfolding of the Passion,” ELH 64, no. 2 (1997): 359–­89. See also Sarah Coakley’s recent theology of the Trinity: the Spirit, she writes, is point of contact with divine desire but also point of differentiation, so “simultaneously distinguishing and binding Father and Son,” in a way that offers a “perfect and harmonious balance between union and distinction.” Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 24. 90. Wall, Imprint of Gender, 324. 91. Ibid., 326. 92. Debora Shuger suggests that the need for an alternative to polemics and theological debates might explain the “great flowering of religious literature, both poetry and prose.” Instead of “curious questions and divisions” (Herbert, “Divinitie”), this literature focuses on “the interior life of the spirit,” characterized, Shuger suggests, by “the aestheticised spirituality of the Stoic sublime.” Debora K. Shuger, “Literature and the Church,” in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel M. Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 521. 93. See Rambuss: “This work of the self upon the self staged within the prayer closet is directed along increasingly introspective involutions . . . the self coming to awareness of itself in view of an ever-­expanding repertoire of internalized affective shadings” (Closet Devotions, 106). See also the discussion of “technologies of the soul” in Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 159, 163. But also, as Rambuss notes, Scripture plays a crucial role: “the personal rather takes its contours here from a particularized, “feeling” application of Scripture to the self ”



Notes to Pages 122–127 211

(Closet Devotions, 107). By contrast to those who would read this interpellation as the “pre-­constitution of the subject in its subjection” (quoting Francis Barker), he is interested in the heterotopic possibilities (107). Still, this is what it boils down to for him: “Closet devotion . . . is the technology by which the soul becomes a subject” (109). 94. Lanyer’s own text then stands where she places “fair Virtue,” gazing upon the Countess’s “lovely breast” (lines 1–­2). 95. Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing, 32. 96. Ibid., 33. 97. Ibid., 36. 98. Ibid., 37. 99. Janel M. Mueller, “The Feminist Poetics of “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” in Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon, ed. Marshall Grossman (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 99–­127, quote on 103. 100. This point is made by Susanne Woods in Lanyer, Poems of Aemilia Lanyer, 21, note to line 7. 101. John Donne, The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985), 108. 102. A. J. Smith, The Metaphysics of Love: Studies in Renaissance Love Poetry from Dante to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 187–­94; Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics; and Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul. 103. Carey, John Donne, 269–­70. 104. Just as Christians after Paul remained fascinated by the body that would be transformed, obsessed even with the physical attributes of the resurrected body—­W hat would be the age? Would deformities disappear? What about all the pieces of hair, of nails, that the body sheds during its time on Earth?—­theologians from Tertullian to Aquinas asked these questions, and so too Donne could not imagine just leaving the body behind. On this tradition, see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–­1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 105. Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to Lacan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Chapter Four

1. Jeannine Hensley, ed., The Works of Anne Bradstreet, (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 273. All citations

212 Notes to Pages 127–131

from Bradstreet’s poetry refer to this edition, with parenthetical references to line numbers followed by page numbers. 2. Taylor, Preparatory Meditations 2.115.1–­2. With the exception of “Huswifery,” all citations from Taylor’s poetry are from Daniel Patterson, ed., Edward Taylor’s Gods Determinations and Preparatory Meditations: A Critical Edition (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003), with parenthetical references to series, meditation, and line numbers. 3. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, updated ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19; see also Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 4. Sources on Puritanism’s covenantal theology are legion, but Perry Miller’s much-­debated account is still the best place to start; see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Janice Knight reveals the significance of the affective strain Miller minimized in Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). And I take the point about mutual obligation from Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 80. 5. Charles Lloyd Cohen, God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 47–­74. 6. Richard Sibbes, Two Sermons (London, 1638), 6, 12. 7. Miller quotes Sibbes’s description of the covenant of grace as representative in New England Mind, 377. On Puritan marriage, see the classic study by Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Family: Essays on Religion and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-­Century New England (Boston: Trustees of the Public Library, 1944); and, more recently, Edmund Leites, “The Duty to Desire: Love Friendship, and Sexuality in Some Puritan Theories of Marriage,” Journal of Social History 15, no. 3 (1982): 383–­408; and Belden C. Lane, “Two Schools of Desire: Nature and Marriage in Seventeenth-­Century Puritanism,” Church History 69, no. 2 (2000): 372–­402. 8. John Cotton, A Brief Exposition with Practical Observations upon the Whole Book of Canticles (London, 1655), 3, 4. Cotton’s relationship with Anne Bradstreet’s family is discussed in Rosamond Rosenmeier, Anne Bradstreet Revisited (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 6, 31–­36. 9. John Cotton, Christ the Fountaine of Life (London, 1651), 148, 36–­37. 10. Thomas Gataker, Marriage Duties Briefely Couched Together out



Notes to Pages 132–141 213

of Colossians, 3. 18, 19. (London, 1620), 35. See also Thomas Gataker, A Good Wife Gods Gift And, a Wife Indeed: Two Marriage Sermons (London, 1623), 11. 11. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (London, 1673), 520, 522. 12. Daniel Dyke, The Mystery of Selfe-­Deceiving (London, 1614). For this characterization of Dyke, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion & Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 163. 13. The obsessive concern with American identity is rooted in Puritanism’s obsessive concern with the self, Sacvan Bercovitch argues, with the ambivalent process of self-­discovery (through self-­denial) embodying God’s prophetic design for America (Puritan Origins of the American Self, 136). 14. Ibid., 17–­19; see Jeffrey Hammond, Sinful Self, Saintly Self: The Puritan Experience of Poetry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 19; Ivy Schweitzer, The Work of Self-­Representation: Lyric Poetry in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 23, 7. 15. “I have had great experience of God hearing my prayers and returning comfortable Answers to me . . . and I have been confident it hath been from him, because I have found my heart through his goodness enlarged in Thankfulness to him”; Joseph R. McElrath and Allan P. Robb, eds., The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), 216; Rosenmeier, Anne Bradstreet Revisited, 31–­32; Elizabeth Wade White, Anne Bradstreet, “the Tenth Muse” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 114. 16. Ramie Targoff, Posthumous Love: Eros and the Afterlife in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 17. Frances E. Dolan, Marriage and Violence : The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 3. 18. White, Anne Bradstreet; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–­ 1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). 19. John Winthrop, Winthrop’s Journal: “History of New England,” 1630–­1649, ed. James K. Hosmer (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), 2:239. 20. Hensley mistakenly transcribes “phere” as “peer.” Cf. Charles E. Hambrick-­Stowe, ed., Early New England Meditative Poetry (New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 70, lines 21–­22.

214 Notes to Pages 141–149

21. Peter Abelard and Heloise, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, ed. M. T. Clanchy, trans. Betty Radice, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2003), 14, and see 51; Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe: A New Translation, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Lynn Staley (New York: Norton, 2001), bk. 1, chap. 15. Cf. Dyan Elliott, Spiritual Marriage: Sexual Abstinence in Medieval Wedlock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 22. On the influences of the psalms in Bradstreet’s poetry, see Beth M. Doriani, “ ‘ Then Have I . . . Said with David’: Anne Bradstreet’s Andover Manuscript Poems and the Influence of the Psalm Tradition,” Early American Literature 24, no. 1 (March 1989): 52–­69. 23. Richard Baxter, The Saints Everlasting Rest, ed. Benjamin Fawcett, 7th ed. (London, 1798), 308. 24. John Gatta concisely explains the shared Augustinian tradition and the distinctive nature of Puritan meditation in Gracious Laughter: The Meditative Wit of Edward Taylor (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 50–­55. 25. The King James Version says “thine” husband, and the Geneva translation has “for he that made thee, is thine husband.” 26. Solomon Stoddard, “Arguments,” quoted in Michael Joseph Schuldiner, Gifts and Works: The Post-­Conversion Paradigm and Spiritual Controversy in Seventeenth-­Century Massachusetts (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1991), 132, 128. 27. Cohen, God’s Caress, 160, reads relations as a psychosocial process that binds society together; for the argument that they are best understood as a literary genre, see Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 28. Edward Taylor, Treatise Concerning the Lord’s Supper, ed. Norman S. Grabo (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966), 197, 179. See Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-­Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 69. 29. Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 154–­56; Solomon Stoddard, The Nature of Saving Conversion, and the Way Wherein It Is Wrought (Boston: Edmund Sawyer, 1770), 18–­19, 4, 72, 44, http://​opac​.newsbank​.com​/select​/evans​/11873; and Solomon Stoddard, A Treatise Concerning Conversion (Boston: James Franklin, 1719), 20, http://​opac​.newsbank​.com​/select​/evans​/2072.



Notes to Pages 149–165 215

30. For this poem, from Taylor’s occasional meditations, I have used the edition in Hambrick-­Stowe, Early New England Meditative Poetry. 31. Schweitzer, Work of Self-­Representation, 22. 32. Johnson, Made Flesh, 85, 87. 33. Diarmaid MacCulloch, ed., The Bay Psalm Book Imprinted 1640 (Oxford, UK: Bodleian Library, 2014), preface. For the argument that this oft-­cited line was defensive, see Hugh Amory, “ ‘Gods Altar Needs Not Our Pollishings’: Revisiting the Bay Psalm Book,” Printing History 13, no. 2 [24] (1990): 2–­14. The compilers defended their lack of polish because, as they conceded, the translated psalms were “not always so smooth and elegant as some may desire.” 34. Daniel Rogers, Matrimonial Honor (London: Philip Nevil, 1642), 146, 150. 35. Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 213. Coda

1. Even Donne’s admirers can find him maddening. T. S. Eliot, for example, who championed Donne’s poetry, contrasted the “simple, direct, and even austere manner of speech” in Dante to the “affected, tortuous, and often over-­elaborate and ingenious manner of speech” in Donne: T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 125. 2. Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), 3–­4, and see 127: “Now I want the ‘pure, clear word,’ . . . That I don’t believe in such a word only intensifies my desire for it.” 3. Ibid., 41–­42. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Ibid., 123. 6. Ibid., 67. 7. Ibid., 142. 8. Ibid., 123. 9. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 330. 10. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 202. 11. Wiman, My Bright Abyss, 164. 12. Ibid., 124. 13. Ibid., 28.

216 Notes to Pages 166–171

14. Ibid., 77. 15. Ibid., 59. 16. Ibid., 50. 17. Ibid., 25. 18. See, e.g., his reading of his own poem, “Posˆtolka,” 43–­45; see also 155. 19. Ibid., 28. 20. Charles Mathewes, “What’s God Got to Do with Religion?,” Features, June 17, 2014, http://​www​.the​-­­american​-­­interest​.com​/articles​ /2014​/06​/17​/whats​-­­god​-­­got​-­­to​-­­do​-­­with​-­­religion/. 21. See, e.g., Wiman, My Bright Abyss, 81, 142. 22. Ibid., 51–­53. 23. Ibid., 93. 24. Talal Asad, “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert A. Orsi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 36–­57, quote on 37. 25. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II–­II.5.2 ad. 1 and 2. 26. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “belief,” definitions 1–­2. 27. Luther differentiated faith and love not because he viewed love as secondary or unimportant but, on the contrary, because he wanted to free love from any human calculation of merit or gain. On this, see Luther’s Lectures on Galatians in the Weimar Ausgabe edition, 4.1:240 and 4.1:291, and the discussion in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 716–­21. 28. Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. and trans. John T. McNeill, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), III.2.41. 29. See, e.g., ibid., III.2.17 and III.2.21. Calvin, for example, said that faith involves “sure conviction” in accord with Hebrews 11:1 (faith is the “substance [hypostasis] of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen”). But he also says that God gives access to himself through faith, that the believer must take himself to the “bosom of God,” and that the mind cannot rise to the perception and foretaste of divine goodness “without being at the same time wholly inflamed with love of God”; see ibid., III.2.41. 30. Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2.

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Index Abelard, Peter, 141 absence: lamented in medieval texts, 141; modernity and, 4; and presence, in devotional poetry, 3, 43, 128, 134, 138–­43, 167, 191n19, 197n24 Aers, David, 201n39, 174–­75n13 Althusser, Louis, 12 Anderson, Judith, 199n32, 200n33 Arendt, Hannah, 12–­13, 18 Aristotle, on friendship, 86 Arnold, Craig: “Meditation on a Grapefruit,” 165–­66 Asad, Talal: on belief, 16, 169 Astell, Ann, 192n1 atonement, 44, 83 Auden, W. H., 18 Augustine of Hippo: on love, 141, 193n3, 196n14; seeking God, 144, 214n24; and Trinitarian theology, 113, 206n71, 207n74 authorship: gendering of, 23, 25–­26, 30, 56, 181n8, 182n10, 183n14; modern assumptions about, 22–­ 24, 29; and patronage, 6, 16, 24, 37–­40, 47–­49, 51–­55; and Protes-

tantism, 24, 26, 36–­40; and psalms, 28–­34, 47, 187n40; relational, 11, 17, 22–­30, 35, 37, 45, 55–­56, 57, 182n11, 183n13, 189n58; spiritual utility of, 22, 24, 26, 36, 47, 49, 51, 54; theories of, 23, 56, 181n7, 181–­82n9, 185n27; and women writers, 9–­10, 22, 25–­ 26, 36, 54, 56, 111, 133, 138, 140, 154, 182n12, 183n16, 185n27, 186–­87n39. See also Herbert, Mary Sidney; Lanyer, Aemilia; Lock, Anne Barthes, Roland, 56 Basil the Great, Saint, 28 Baxter, Richard, 132, 144 Bay Psalm Book, 137, 154, 215n33 Beilin, Elaine, 204n60, 206n64 belief: centrality to the study of religion, 16–­18, 170–­7 1, 173n8; defined, 170; and poetry, 161–­7 1; Protestant assumptions about, 11, 163–­64, 170–­71 Bell, Ilona, 183n17, 196n15 Bennett, Lyn, 175n15, 186n37 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 132, 212n4, 213n13

238 Index Bernard of Clairvaux, 87, 186n31 Blank, Paula, 109, 203nn55–­56 Blasing, Mutlu, 178n32 Book of Common Prayer, 46, 65, 72, 99 Bossy, John, 5, 176n19 Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, 213n12 Bradstreet, Anne, 6, 17, 127, 129, 133–­ 35, 155–­57, 160; “Another,” 140–­42; “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” 135–­37; concern with spouse’s absence, 135–­43; “For Deliverance from a Fever,” 155; “In My Solitary Hours in My Dear Husband His Absence,” 143; “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment,” 138–­ 40; poetic presence, in occasional meditations and devotional poetry, 155–­56, 213n15, 214n22; The Tenth Muse, 134–­35, 136, 154 Breton, Nicholas, 116 Bruno, Giordano, 89 Bryan, Jennifer, 174n13 Buber, Martin, 18 Burnaby, John, 193n3 Butler, Judith, 12–­13 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 174n13, 211n104 Caldwell, Patricia, 214n27 Calvin, Jean. See Calvin, John Calvin, John: appreciation of psalms and aversion to poetry, 9, 28, 175n15; on divine sovereignty, 199n32, 207n74; on faith and belief, 171, 216n29; influence on Anne Lock, 21, 24, 27; on rhetoric, 200n33. See also covenantal theology Calvinist subject, 70–­71, 83, 185n27, 190–­91n13 Calvinist theology, 6, 9, 10–­11, 71, 83,

174n9, 199n32, 200n33, 207n74, 216n29; and the English Reformation, 6, 28, 65, 174n9, 190n13 Carey, John, 107, 202n54 Cavanagh, Claire, 180n42 Cavell, Stanley, 128 Christ, 5, 7, 14, 68, 70, 75, 137, 164–­66, 171, 207n74, 209n83; beauty of, 111, 117, 209n86; church as the body of, 10, 16, 69; crucified, 26, 58, 87, 111, 114, 117, 123, 209n81, 209n86, 210n89; imitatio Christi, 26, 115; in poetic relations, 3, 48–­54, 73–­74, 81–­84, 88–­90, 98–­99, 101–­5, 112–­13, 115–­16, 118–­25, 127–­28, 131, 148–­49, 152–­53, 155–­56, 204n61, 207–­8n77, 208n81. See also Christology; Eucharist; sacrifice Christine de Pizan, 49 Christology, 17, 89–­91, 94–­95, 97–­98, 101, 199n30, 199n32 Clarke, Danielle, 180n3, 187n44 Clarke, Elizabeth, 180n3, 187n44 Coakley, Sarah, 95, 200n33, 208n80, 210n89 Cohen, Charles Lloyd, 214n27 Coles, Kimberly, 175n16, 183–­84n17 Colie, Rosalie, 88, 202n49 Contino, Paul, 178n30 conversion, Puritan emphasis on, 132, 148, 151 Correll, Barbara, 202–­3n54 Cotton, John, 130–­31, 212n8 Coulianu, Ioan, 194n11, 195n13 covenant of grace, 83, 129–­30, 155, 212n7 covenant of works, 129 covenantal theology, 17, 129–­133, 144, 212n4 coverture, 139 Crawford, Julie, 182n11, 183n17 Crewe, Johnathan, 55

Index 239 Cummings, Brian, 175n17, 176n20, 189n59 David (biblical), 10, 30, 31, 37–­38, 40–­ 41, 68, 187n43 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 183n13 Dawkins, Richard, 164 Day, John, 22 debt: as basis of reciprocal relationship, 69, 84, 106, 143; poetry’s capacity to pay, 36, 45; and salvation, 44, 79, 83–­84 Diamond, Cora, 95 DiPasquale, Theresa, 88, 197n24, 204n61, 205n62 Dobranski, Stephen B., 182n11 Dolan, Frances, 139 Donne, John, 1–­4, 113, 159–­60, 197n22, 201n46, 215n1; “Air and Angels,” 108–­10; “Batter my heart, three-­ person’d God,” 1–­2, 92, 207n77; “The Canonization,” 92, 98–­101; desire for transcendence, 94, 198n28, 200–­201n36; on divine and human love, 88–­93, 195–­ 96n14, 196nn15–­16, 197n23, 198n25, 201–­2n49; “The Ecstasy,” 19, 125–­26; “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward,” 91, 101–­4; “The Good-­morrow,” 78; “A Hymn to Christ, at the Author’s Last Going in Germany,” 89; “Lovers’ Infiniteness,” 95–­98; “Oh, to Vex Me,” 105; and relational theology, 201n39; and sacramental poetics, 93–­94, 197–­98n24; “Sappho to Philaenis,” 109–­10, 202n54, 203n58; “Show Me Dear Christ,” 105; “Since She Whom I Loved,” 88, 106–­8, 143; Trinitarian theology, 113, 206n69, 207n74. See also Christology

Drury, John, 190n6, 191n23, 192n27 Dubrow, Heather, 16, 178n32, 195n14 Dunn, Mary, 177n26 Dyke, Daniel, 132, 155, 213n12 Eden, Kathy, 182n11 Eliot, T. S., 215n1 Elizabeth I (queen), 23–­24, 28, 48, 56, 65; as patron and subject of poems, 34–­40, 43, 47, 55 English Reformation, 3, 5, 8–­11, 18, 28, 35, 99, 161, 174n9, 185n25 English Renaissance literature, study of, 15, 29, 195n14, 197n24 Eucharist, 5, 15, 49, 64–­65, 70–­72, 82, 84, 93, 99 121, 188n52. See also sacrifice Ezell, Margaret J. M., 181n4 Farina, Lara, 195n13 Ferguson, Margaret, 183n13, 189n58 Ferrar, Nicholas, 59, 60 Ferry, Anne, 200n34, 201n42 Fish, Stanley, 174n11, 189–­90n3 form, as the medium of relationality, 13, 135, 160 Foucault, Michel, 12 Freinkel, Lisa, 185n27 friendship: biblical, 66–­67, 68, 73; with Christ, 60, 65–­68, 72–­75, 82–­84; classical ideal of, 62, 69; and everyday intimacy, 67, 71, 79, 85; and reciprocity, 61–­66, 73, 79–­85; and sacrifice, 60–­63, 66–­70, 71, 74–­75, 77, 79–­81, 84; and social utility, 59–­60, 85–­86; and spiritual use, 22, 64–­65; theories of, 86 Furey, Constance M., 177n25, 193n2, 194n9 Gallagher, Lloyd, 210n89 Gandhi, Leela, 180n41

240 Index Gataker, Thomas, 131–­32, 212n10 Gatta, John, 214n24 Georgianna, Linda, 174–­75n13 Goldberg, Jonathan, 123–­24, 204n61 Greenblatt, Stephen, 15, 178n31 Gregory, Eric, 193–­94n3 Gregory of Nazianzus, 113 Griffiths, Jane, 181–­82n9 Guibbory, Achsah, 188n53, 196n15, 196n18, 198n24, 205n62 Half-­way Covenant Controversy, 134, 148–­49 Hamlin, Hannibal, 185n30 Hammill, Graham L., 178n30 Hammond, Jeffrey, 132, 213n14 Hannay, Margaret, 25, 181n5, 181n8, 183n14, 186nn34–­35, 186n39 Harkaway-­Krieger, Kerilyn, 209n88 Harman, Barbara, 77 Haskins, Dennis, 196n17 Heale, Elizabeth, 29 Heaney, Seamus, 168 Hegel, G. W. F., 12, 90 Heloise, 141 Hemingway, Ernest, 4 Hensley, Jeannine, 211n1, 213n20 Herbert, George, 59–­60, 160, 162–­63; “Affliction,” 58; “The Altar,” 70–­74; “The Church,” 70, 192n32; “The Church Porch,” 67–­70, 75, 85; “Clasping of Hands,” 57; Eucharistic poetics, 70–­72, 82, 84; “Holy Communion,” 58; “The Invention,” 75–­7 7; “Jordan II/Invention” 75–­7 7; “Love Unknown,” 58, 79–­84; “The Sacrifice,” 70, 72–­74; “Sin’s Round,” 7–­8; and spiritual reciprocity, 80; “Sunday,” 58, 74–­75; “The Temper (I),” 78–­79; “The Thanksgiving,” 57, 58; “Unkindness,” 19, 60–­66

Herbert, Mary Sidney, 6, 9–­10, 17, 35, 60, 160, 186n35, 186n39; addressee of Aemilia Lanyer’s dedicatory poem, 47–­50, 124–­25; “Even now that Care,” 36–­40; and the Sidney Psalter, 24, 26, 35–­36; “To the Angel Spirit,” 34, 41–­47 Herdt, Jennifer, 157 Herz, Judith Scherer, 198n24, 201n46 Hill, Christopher, 197n22 Hollywood, Amy, 195n11 Holmes, Michael Morgan, 204n61, 208n79 homoeroticism, 92, 109, 202n54, 203n55, 204nn61–­62 Hooker, Thomas, 132 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 162, 163 Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, 76n18 Hughes, Ted, 168 Hungerford, Amy, 179n38 Hutson, Lorna, 9, 208n79 identification: with biblical figures, 54–­55; and male model of authorship, 26; as relational process, 53, 111 identity and selfhood, in pre-­ Reformation poetry, 8 imitation: of Christ, 26, 115–­16; compared to dialogical relationship with the Word, 26; and desire, 115–­19, 122–­24; and textual authority, 183n14–­15 instrumentalism: absence of, 18; spiritualized, 19, 24, 27, 36 intimacy: as the goal of devotional poetry, 48, 56, 57; and obligation, 143; and subjectivity, 190n13 Jackson, Ken, 178n30 Jackson, Virginia Walker, 178n32 Jardine, Lisa, 182n11

Index 241 Johnson, Kimberly, 16, 71, 106, 152, 191n19, 201n48, 208n80, 214n28, 215n32 Johnson, Jeffrey, 98, 191n20 Julian of Norwich, 209n88 Kaufman, Peter Iver, 176n24 Kay, Sarah, 174n13 Keane, Webb, 177n27 Kempe, Margery, 141 Keohane, Catherine, 210n89 Kerrigan, William, 196n16 Knight, Janice, 212n4 Knox, John, 27 Krondorfer, Björn, 176–­77n8 Kuchar, Gary, 179n35 Kuczynski, Michael, 27 Lacan, Jacques, 99 Lane, Belden C., 212n7 Langer, Ullrich, 86, 185n27 Lanyer, Aemilia, 6, 24, 26, 48–­49, 111, 160, 194n9, 207n74; “To All Virtuous Ladies in General,” 54; “The Author’s Dream to the Lady Marie, the Countess Dowager of Pembroke,” 47–­50, 124–­25; on Christ’s beauty, 117, 209n86; “To the Countess of Kent,” 112; “To the Countess of Suffolk,” 119–­22; and desire for Christ, 89–­90, 112, 115–­19, 121–­22, 204n61; homoeroticism in, 111, 205n62; on the Passion, 208n81, 209n86, 210n89; poetic relations with Christ, 48–­54, 112–­13, 118–­19; Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, 47; “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum,” 88, 111, 117–­19; “To the Lady Katherine,” 204n61; “To the Lady Lucie,” 6–­7, 116, 118, 122–­24; “To the Lady Susan,” 204n61; “To the Virtuous

Reader,” 53–­54; triangulated love and Trinitarian theology, 89–­90, 113–­14, 119–­24, 207n74, 208n79, 211n94 Larkin, Philip, 162 Latour, Bruno, 171 Lear, Jonathan, 194–­95n11 Leclercq, Jean, 181n8, 208n81 Leites, Edmund, 212n7 Lemnius, Levinus, 202n51 Levinas, Emmanuel, 12 Lewalski, Barbara, 189n3 Little, Katherine C., 174–­75n13 Lock, Anne, 5–­6, 26–­28, 160; headnote to the psalm sonnet sequence, 21–­22, 24; “A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner” sonnet sequence, 21, 28–­34, 160; and questions of authorship, 19–­22, 24, 26–­28, 56 Loewenstein, Joseph, 182n10 Lonergan, Bernard, 206n66 love: caritas and cupiditas, 193n3; eros, 87–­89, 195n13; and friendship, 66; and immortality, 101; marital, 130; Platonic theory of, 124; in Protestant theology, 88, 193n3, 206–­7n73; sexual and spiritual, in Renaissance poetry, 88, 91, 196n15, 197n24, 202–­3n54; and textual authority, 48; and Trinitarian theology, 114, 206n71 Low, Anthony, 196n15 Luhrmann, T. M., 178n28 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 178n30 Luther, Martin, 9, 44, 62, 79, 85, 88, 170, 171, 199n32, 200n33, 207n74, 209n86, 216n27 lyric “I,” 3, 15, 17, 19, 34, 178n32 MacCaig, Norman, 168 Magnusson, Lynne, 98

242 Index Mandelstam, Osip, 162 Marmion, Declan, 205n63, 206n70 Marotti, Arthur, 107, 178n30 marriage: and covenantal theology, 129–­33; and obligatory love, 129–­ 32, 136, 140; and patriarchy, 129, 139–­40; Puritan, 130, 132, 135, 140, 156–­57, 212n7 Martz, Louis, 57–­58, 189n3 Masten, Jeffrey, 181n8 Mathewes, Charles, 168 Matter, E. Ann, 192n1 McGrath, Lynette, 188n53 Miller, Edmund, 189–­90n3 Miller, Naomi, 115 Miller, Perry, 212n4, 212n7 Miller, Shannon, 186n34 Milton, John, 139 Minnis, Alastair, 181n9 Modern, John Lardas, 177n27 modernity, 4 Montaigne, 86 Morgan, Edmund, 212n7 Moore, Brenna, 177n27 Mueller, Janel, 124, 204n54, 203n58 Murray, Molly, 174n12 mutuality, impediments to, 74 Nancy, Jean-­Luc, 18, 180n41 Netzley, Ryan, 16, 84–­85, 93–­94, 104, 179n37, 198n25 Nieuwenhove, Rik Van, 205n63, 206n70 Nygren, Anders, 193n3, 207n73, 216n27 Oberman, Heiko, 188n47 Orsi, Robert, 4–­5, 71 Otto, Rudolph, 197n22 Ovid, 38, 89, 91, 197n24, 202n54 Ozment, Steve, 188n47

patronage, 6, 16, 24, 37–­40, 47–­49, 51–­55, 123, 182n12 Perkins, William, 115–­16, 209n86 Perry, Nandra, 26 Petrarch, 89, 91, 98, 140 philia. See friendship Plath, Sylvia, 168 poetic form, as a relational activity, 36, 69, 90, 167 poetry, 2–­3, 10, 15, 36, 161–­62; Petrarchan, 29, 98, 195n14; political relevance of, 8–­9, 18–­19, 180n42; Protestant and Catholic debates about, 9–­10, 210n92; Protestant critiques of, 154, 215n33; Protestant defenses of, 36, 54–­55; and selfhood, 3, 8, 13, 70–­7 1, 76, 135, 155, 167, 174n11; usefulness of, 19. See also psalms Porterfield, Amanda, 214n29 possession, poetics of, 39, 41, 47, 77, 96, 128, 146, 151, 182n10 prayer, 36, 213n15; poetry as a form of, 35; solitary and communal practices of, 122, 208n80, 210n93 Prescott, Anne Lake, 31 presence, 4–­5; of Christ, 50–­52; divine, 155; Eucharistic, 5, 72; of friend, 76; poetics of, 16, 41; of reader, 40, 43; of spouse, 135–­43. See also absence print, 23–­24, 181nn4–­5, 182nn10–­12 Protestant paradox, 10–­11, 45, 55, 80, 176n20 Protestant poetics, 6–­8, 13, 26, 49, 55, 80, 101, 122–­23, 154, 175n17, 176n20, 185n27, 190n13 Protestant selfhood, 4–­6, 10–­11, 14–­15, 70, 160–­61, 169–­70, 177nn27–­28, 185n27, 195n13 Psalm 51, 21, 31–­32, 45, 72, 81

Index 243 psalms: and commodification of authorship, 33–­34; and development of English Reformation poetry, 10, 28–­34, 56, 175n17, 185n25, 187n40, 214n22, 215n33; and public devotion, 28, 31, 35, 186n37; relational dynamics in, 10, 24, 27, 33, 35, 46–­47, 186n37, 188n44; and subjectivity, 28, 31, 187n44, 188n49; utility of, 27–­28 Puritan lyric, 132–­33, 154, 157, 176n20 Puritans, 6, 59, 64, 133; concern with self-­examination, 213n13, 214n24. See also covenantal theology Puttenham, George, 55 Rambuss, Richard, 88, 92, 122, 197n22, 207n77, 210n93 reciprocity, 20, 61–­63, 65–­66, 79, 113, 206 redemption, 62, 101, 103, 141 relational selfhood: modern theories of, 12–­13, 18; Protestant models of, 176n19, 177n27, 186n37, 190n13; in Trinitarian theology, 114, 206n70 religion and literature, as a field of study, 13–­14, 16, 176n24, 178n30 Richard of St. Victor, 113–­14. See also Trinitarian theology Richie, Esther Gilman, 190n3 Rist, John, 193n3 Rogers, Daniel, 156 Rosenmeier, Rosamond, 212n8 Ruf, Frederick, 176–­77n24 Ruusbroec, Jan van, 114. See also Trinitarian theology sacrifice, relational dynamics of, 58, 60, 62, 65–­66, 71–­74, 81–­82, 151, 157, 163, 174n11, 198n29 Sagaser, Elizabeth Harriss, 188n49 sanctification, 79–­80

Sappho, 109, 202n54, 203nn55–­56 Saunders, Ben, 93, 110, 196nn15–­16, 197n23 Scarry, Elaine, 164 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 62–­63, 65, 108, 192n33, 194n9, 202n53, 205n62 Schreiner, Susan, 176n24 Schuldiner, Michael Joseph, 214n26 Schwartz, Regina, 15, 93–­94, 104 Schweitzer, Ivy, 86, 133, 151 Scott, Nathan, 16 Sebastian, Saint, 116 selfhood: modern notions of, 1–­5, 161, 197n22; philosophical and psychoanalytic accounts of, 11–­14, 18; premodern notions of, 8, 174–­ 75n13, 195n13. See also Protestant selfhood Selleck, Nancy, 15–­16, 179n36 Shagan, Ethan, 174n9 Shakespeare, William, 29, 46, 128 Sherlock, William, 153 Sherwood, Yvonne, 12, 176n21, 208n77 Shuger, Debora, 70–­7 1, 85, 104, 179n34, 191n16, 192n32, 195n13, 196n21, 197n22, 201n43, 210n92 Sibbes, Richard, 130, 212nn6–­7 Sidney, Philip, 6, 35–­36, 41–­47; “An Apology for Poetry,” 36, 55, 70, 191n15; Astrophil and Stella, 77 Sidney Psalter, 23, 26, 35, 186n38, 187n40 Smith, A. J., 211n102 Smith, Rosalind, 183–­84n17 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell, 173n8 Song of Songs, 87, 89, 111–­12, 117, 127, 130, 134, 145, 147–­48, 152, 186n31, 205n62 spiritual usefulness, 26 Staten, Henry, 211n105 Stein, Arnold, 200n36

244 Index Stevens, Wallace, 162, 166–­67 Stoddard, Solomon, 134, 148, 155, 214n26 Strier, Richard, 61–­63, 65, 179n35, 190n7 Sullivan, Winnifred, 177n27 Summers, Joseph H., 190n5 Summit, Jennifer, 188n51 Targoff, Ramie, 35–­36, 101, 186n36, 186n38, 197n28, 201n41, 213n16 Taylor, Charles, 4–­5, 173n3, 173n5, 212n2 Taylor, Edward, 6, 10, 17, 134–­35, 160; on Christ as his bridegroom, 127–­ 28, 145–­53; “Housewifery,” 148–­50; “Preparatory Meditations,” 127–­28, 134, 144–­47, 150–­53, 155; “Treatise on the Lord’s Supper,” 134, 155 Tertullian, 211n104 Thirty-­Nine Articles, 65, 94 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 170, 211n104 Tillich, Paul, 166 Trinitarian theology, 90, 98, 111, 113, 205–­6n63, 207n74, 210n89. See also Lanyer, Aemilia Turner, Denys, 192–­93n1 Tuve, Rosamond, 76–­77, 191n22 Tyndale, William, 9 use and utility: and the Eucharist, 64–­65; of poetry, 19, 21, 27, 36–­40,

154, 174n12; of relationships, 19, 21, 36–­40, 61–­62, 64, 115, 186–­87n39; spiritual, 24, 27, 61–­62, 64, 115, 182n11, 186–­87n39 Vendler, Helen, 78, 190n3 Walker, Greg, 9 Wall, John, 191n14 Wall, Wendy, 36, 38, 120–­22, 205n62, 208n77 Walton, Izaak, 60, 85, 189n1 Ware, Kalistos, 206n70 Warley, Christopher, 33–­34 Whalen, Robert, 201–­2n49 White, Elizabeth Wade, 213n18 Williams, Raymond, 183n13 Wiman, Christian: on belief, 161–­67, 171; My Bright Abyss, 18, 159–­7 1 Winthrop, John, 140, 213n19 women: as mediators, patrons, and objects of exchange, 25–­26, 39–­40, 47, 181n8, 183n17 women writers, liminality of, 25–­26, 56, 183n16, 185n27 Woods, James, 16 Woods, Susanne, 25, 183n14, 204n59, 211n100 Wyatt, Thomas, 9, 30 Zim, Rivkah, 184n23