Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England

Abstract

The Reformation changed forever how the sacrament of the Eucharist was understood. This study of six canonical early modern lyric poets traces the literary afterlife of what was one of the greatest doctrinal shifts in English history. Sophie Read argues that the move from a literal to a figurative understanding of the phrase 'this is my body' exerted a powerful imaginative pull on successive generations. To illustrate this, she examines in detail the work of Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan and Milton, who between them represent a broad range of doctrinal and confessional positions, from the Jesuit Southwell to Milton's heterodox Puritanism. Individually, each chapter examines how Eucharistic ideas are expressed through a particular rhetorical trope; together, they illuminate the continued importance of the Eucharist's transformation well into the seventeenth century - not simply as a matter of doctrine, but as a rhetorical and poetic mode.

“In forgetting thou rememb’rest right”

“…While this poem is not explicitly concerned with religion, other scholars have also noted that "the ideas about language and materiality [in it] are consequent on thinking about sacramental substitution in verse." 44 The speaker begins, in this poem, by musing with satisfaction on the capacity of the glass into which he has carved his name to reflect his beloved's face, since he is able to read the fusion of face and name in the reflection as a metaphor for the everlasting union he hopes for: "here you see me, and I am you" (12). 45 Yet his satisfaction is tempered with an uneasy sense that such metaphoricity also potentially renders that union vulnerable, a sense apparent in his anxiety that should his beloved find a new object for her affections, she has only to "write again" to banish the old:…”

The Passional Dynamism of Milton's Phoenix Simile

“… For more on the eucharistic dimension of this episode and the entire epic, see Read, who aptly refers to this meal as “the last Lunch” (191). Also see Netzley, and Schwartz's three studies, …”