Much critical energy has been devoted to trawling through the literary output of post-Reformation religious writers generally, and of Donne and Herbert especially, in order to determine whether the true theological allegiance of each author lies most properly with Catholicism, Anglo-Catholicism, crypto-Catholicism, high or low Anglicanism, via media Anglicanism, Protestantism, Calvinism, Puritanism, or some combination thereof. And while there is certainly more than a little slippage among these designations, owing in part to the hodge-podge nature of English church doctrine during the period and in part to inconsistencies of usage, it has occasionally seemed as if twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics were bent on perpetuating the confessional quarrels of Reformation and post-Reformation divines in their claims about early modern poets, imagining Renaissance views on the Eucharist as merely dichotomous (pitting the literalism of transubstantiation against bare memorialism) and reinscribing those binaries in their treatment of poetic texts. The modern debate is framed on the one hand by the intellectual heirs of Louis Martz, whose influential view of seventeenth-century religious poets located their greatest aesthetic sympathies with the practices of Catholic worship and meditation, and on the other hand by the school of “Protestant poetics,” whose view, seminally articulated by Barbara Lewalski, is that the work of those same devotional writers accomplishes a distinct departure from continental Catholicism in both style and substance.4 Not surprisingly, the Eucharist has come to serve for modern critics, as it did for early modern divines, as a kind of litmus test for confessional allegiance, as when Richard Strier’s Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry considers a passage from Herbert’s poem “Love Unknown.” Of his problematically hard heart, the speaker reports,
I bathed it often, even with holy blood,
Which at a board, while many drank bare wine,
A friend did steal into my cup for good,
Even taken inwardly, and most divine
To supple hardness.5
Strier writes that in these lines “Herbert goes out of his way to present a strongly receptionist view of the Eucharist,” which understands sacramental transformation as occurring through the exercise of the communicant’s faith rather than by means of priestly consecration, and he concludes that “the central point” of these lines is to declare Herbert’s Reformed conception of “the religious life as entirely a matter of ‘the heart.’ ”6 For Strier, in other words, the poem’s narration of its eucharistic encounter indicates Herbert’s decided rejection of the Catholic doctrine of works in favor of a brand of Protestantism inspired by Luther and Calvin in which man is justified by faith alone. The events of Herbert’s poem provide, in Strier’s reading, a key into the poet’s larger theological affinities, and disclose something about how Herbert defined his doctrinal position within the religious turmoil of the Stuart church.
But Strier’s effort to establish Herbert’s theology through the evidence in “Love Unknown” does not allow for the poem’s own complication of that theology, for even as the poem’s drama argues against the efficacy of labor—or, to use the theological terminology that Strier invokes, of “works”—in the pursuit of grace, its language foregrounds the labor of its own telling. The speaker’s tale, as he introduces it to an unidentified interlocutor in the poem’s first line, “is long and sad,” and the telling of it hard, for as the speaker importunes his audience, “in my faintings I presume your love / Will more complie then help” (2–3). Here, the term “faintings” collapses the speaker’s narrative of past afflictions into his present relation of that narrative, marking the tale itself as an effort, an exhaustion. This sense is reaffirmed throughout the poem, as the speaker interrupts his narrative with parenthetical expressions of its difficulty: “(I sigh to say)” (8), “(I sigh to tell)” (24), “(I sigh to speak)” (50), the tale and indeed the very regularity of the poem’s iambic pentameter disrupted by these short, gasping lines. Strier claims that the poem expresses “Herbert’s rejection of works,” and he seeks to extract from the poem’s apparent conviction about “the pointlessness of effort” a stable eucharistic theology for the poet: “Herbert does not want to present taking communion as either a good work in itself or a way of cooperating with God in suppling the heart,” Strier concludes, arguing that “Herbert’s insistence on the action of a friend in stealing the ‘holy bloud’ into the speaker’s cup eliminates all suggestion of cooperation” in a thoroughly Reformed sacrament.7 However, the ostentatious labor of the poetic utterance here works precisely in cooperation with the interlocutor’s response to achieve the poem’s redemptive lesson, which is offered in the poem’s concluding lines as an interpretation of the speaker’s recounted afflictions: the heart’s having endured being “washt and wrung” (17) is reframed in the interlocutor’s reading as a sign of baptismal renewal, the heart’s time in the “scalding pan” (35) served but to soften it, the bed of “thorns” (52) works in this new perspective to “quicken what was dull” (65), each and every challenge revalued by the speaker’s auditor as a gracious gift of God to make the soul “new, tender, quick” (70). That is to say, as the unnamed, unknown “Deare Friend” (1) explicates the narrative’s spiritually fraught picaresque, so difficult to be told, what that interpretation produces is an apprehension of grace: the work of utterance is a crucial activity toward apprehension, and this regenerate understanding of the self is produced in cooperation with the divine perspective of the unnamed friend.
I have focused on this poem and this critic not to posit a theological counter to Strier’s Calvinist reading of Herbert—not, that is, to claim “Love Unknown” for the theology of works set—but rather to indicate how such a doctrinally definitive approach may prevent even acute readers from appreciating how adaptable, porous, and sometimes inconsistent Christian worship was in the post-Reformation period, for both communities of worship and individuals alike. Studies that ground textual analysis within historical context have done much to illuminate the complexity of belief in the period, and have helped demolish any notion that post-Reformation doctrine, institutional or otherwise, was consistent. And yet the persistent assumption that a poem declares any given writer’s creed or that it presents a stable articulation of a doctrinal position threatens to reduce poetic utterance to a transparent referential instrument, a straightforward and aesthetically naïve expression of the spiritual life of the poet. But as we shall see, poetic utterance itself works ever against the referential impulse, emphasizing the surface of its discourse in a way that both invites and occludes a referential encounter. And in this quality, holding invitation and interruption in tension one with another, poetic utterance corresponds to nothing so much as the sacramental event of the Lord’s Supper.
My concern here is to chart the ways in which poetic