SOURCE: Schoenfeldt, Michael. “‘That spectacle of too much weight’: The Poetics of Sacrifice in Donne, Herbert, and Milton.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 3 (fall 2001): 561-84.

[In the following essay, Schoenfeldt considers the theme of sacrifice as developed by post-Reformation religious poets, including Donne, suggesting that seventeenth-century writers imagined sacrifice as an interior experience rather than a physical event.]

But how then shall I imitate thee, and
Copie thy fair though bloudie hand?

—George Herbert

If you can't imitate him, don't copy him.

—Yogi Berra

This essay began with a question that has been rattling around in my head since I first began studying devotional poetry: Why did the scenario of the Christian sacrifice prove such a vexed and perplexing subject for lyric poetry in seventeenth-century England? Why, that is, did the Passion shift from being a site of the deepest imaginative engagement for medieval Catholic writers to a comparatively marginal subject, which challenges and defeats the best efforts of mortal devotees? As Donne in “Goodfriday, 1613, Riding Westward” deliberately rides away from the east, the scene of the sacrifice, so does Protestant lyric devotion in seventeenth-century England move away from identification with the spectacularly gruesome suffering of the crucified Christ toward the apprehension of the extravagant mercy ensuing from Jesus' victory over sin and death on the cross. There are many reasons for this change, but a central reason is a renewed emphasis in Reformed religion on the Davidic and Pauline notions that the only sacrifice God desires occurs neither in sanctified architectural space nor in explicit corporeal suffering but rather in the interior spaces of the believer. Sacrifice is not so much a ritual action as a devotional state achieved in the temple that is the heart of the devout.

In The Poetry of Meditation, Louis Martz helped revive the study of seventeenth-century religious lyrics by locating a range of these poems amid the practices of Catholic, and specifically Ignatian, meditation. Martz demonstrates how Ignation meditational structures urge devotees to exercise their imaginations in order to envisage the Passion of Jesus, and to position themselves emotionally in relation to this vivid scene of profound suffering.¹ To exemplify this process, Martz cites texts such as Luis de la Puente's Meditations, a work which enjoins the believer to

set before mine eyes Christ Jesus crucified, beholding his heade crowned with thornes; his face spit upon; his eyes obscured; his armes disjoincted; his tonge distasted with gall, and vineger; his handes and feete peerced with nailes … and then pondering that hee suffereth all this for my sinnes, I will drawe sundrye affections from the inwardest parte of my heart, sometimes trembling at the rigour of God's justice.²

Martz argues cogently that “such practices of ‘composition’ or ‘proposing’ lie behind the vividly dramatized, firmly established, graphically imaged openings that are characteristic” of poets such as Donne and Herbert.³

If these writers look toward the scene of the Passion, however, they do so through squinting eyes amid slumping postures, as if they were glimpsing a trauma too immense for human comprehension. The poems explored in this essay—Donne's “Goodfriday, 1613,” Herbert's “Sacrifice” sequence, and Milton's “Passion”—are not so much vivid dramatizations of the sacrifice as they are performances of the enormous difficulty of apprehending what is, in Donne's words, a “spectacle of too much weight for mee.”⁴ These writers ask how the immense suffering of the Christian sacrifice can be represented in poetry, free of the inevitable anesthesia of memory and the distorting fictions of the imagination. They record not just the immense spiritual benefits that ensue from the sacrifice of the suffering Jesus but also the prodigious psychological costs of that beneficent sacrifice for the mortal worshipper. They offer a way of engaging with the Passion that is not so much a poetry of meditation as it is a poetry of immolation.

Passion is in this context an enormously rich and elusive term, designating both the enormous agony of Jesus and the swirl of emotions that this suffering instills in the individual believer. What becomes for these poets the central subject of the Passion, then, is not the tortured body of Jesus but rather the ethical, intellectual, and finally emotional difficulty of accepting unequivocally the extravagant mercy achieved by the extravagant agony at the center of the Christian dispensation. By looking at the suffering Jesus, these writers confront the excruciating paradox of a religion of love whose central symbol is an instrument of torture and death. As Herbert remarks in his poem “The Crosse,” this symbol is a “strange and uncouth thing” that makes him “sigh, and seek, and faint, and die.”⁵ For Herbert, the cross, emblem of Christ's suffering, spurs a series of contradictory emotions that ultimately embody in the individual believer a harrowing if diminished version of the original passion of Jesus.

Donne's poem of the same name entails by contrast a breathless flow of conventional if clever quandaries, dispersing its concern about corporeal suffering into the proliferation of intellectual paradox. Even this poem dedicated to the central symbol of Jesus' suffering asserts the superiority of spiritual to material agony, announcing that the former is far more salutary for the afflicted soul.

Materiall Crosses then, good physicke bee,
And yet spirituall have chiefe dignity.
These for extracted chimique medicine serve,
And cure much better, and as well preserve;
Then are you your own physick, or need none,
When Still'd, or purg'd by tribulation.

(25-30)

Whereas physical suffering functions like Galenic medicine, aiming at health by restoring a healthy humoral balance, spiritual suffering works like Paracelsan chemical distillations, which drive out the seeds of disease through the introduction of antagonistic alchemy.⁶ For Donne, the homeopathic paradoxes of the cross prescribe terrestrial tribulation as a cure for spiritual disease.

Debora Shuger has recently argued that “Christ's agony provides the primary symbol for early modern speculation on selfhood and society. The tortured and torturing males who supply the dramatis personae of the Crucifixion … also haunt the interior landscape of the Puritan automachia.”⁷ For Shuger, passion narratives “attempt to produce a specific version of Christian selfhood—a divided selfhood gripped by intense, contradictory emotions and an ineradicable tension between its natural inclinations and religious obligations.”⁸ Donne, Herbert, and Milton certainly discover a kind of Reformed subjecthood in the attempt to come to terms with the Crucifixion. Whereas the goal of Catholic meditational writers is to imagine the self in the scenario of the Passion in order to cultivate the extreme passions it arouses, Donne, Herbert, and Milton discover the difficulty of that act of imagination, and stumble upon the corollary truth that the fitting object of sacrifice is the tacitly arrogant self that would claim to be able to respond appropriately to this event. Whereas the Catholic meditational writers emphasize the emotional affect the event stirs, Donne, Herbert, and Milton focus on the psychological effect of the Passion.

These poets, then, engage in a poetics of interior sacrifice, one that relocates the sacrifice from the rituals of liturgy to the labyrinths of psychology. The Reformed rejection of the Mass as an efficacious sacrifice and nonconformist criticism of the sign and symbol of the cross together signal a move away from Christ's suffering as the central devotional focus of the believer.⁹ Much of the Reformation, particularly in England, entailed a series of questions about how to reconfigure in one's own conduct the bloody sacrifice at the core of the Christian belief in the atonement. Should one focus on the intense suffering of that sacrifice, and attempt to recreate it imaginatively? Should one focus on the ritual meal of communal love that reenacts that sacrifice? Or should one explore the immense pressures that the sacrifice places on quotidian ethical conduct? How might the sacrifice best assume a real presence in the devotional life of the individual believer?

Part of the problem has to do with a misleading early modern definition of sacrifice as it applies to the violent suffering of Jesus. In A Christian Dictionary, Thomas Wilson defines sacrifice as “A sacred action, wherein the faithfull Jews did voluntarily worship God, by offering some outwarde thing unto his glory, thereby to testifie his chiefe dignity and dominion over them, and their servitude and submission unto him.” When applied to Christianity, though, this definition is complicated, because as Wilson writes, “Christ Jesus beeing the trueth and substance, who in the offering of himselfe once upon the crosse, hath fully apeased Gods wrath.”¹⁰ The term that had been used to describe an action that humans perform on behalf of God now designates an act of divine suffering performed on behalf of humans. It is a word, then, that assumes the burden of human obligation to God while describing a unique action that God took on behalf of humanity. Christ's unique status, as human and God at once, only complicates the definition further. Christian sacrifice entails the stunning idea that God incarnated himself into the creation so as to experience the pain of being one of his own creatures, and so to regenerate a mode of intimacy between creature and creator. As such, sacrifice obligates mortals to respond to God in a way that is by definition unavailable to them.

Sacrifice had always possessed something of an interior trajectory in the Judeo-Christian tradition. In its original meaning sacrifice was a sacred meal eaten either by the deity alone or by both deity and worshipper together. The early sacrifices were thought to provide God with his necessary food; an animal was burned on the altar so that Yahweh could enjoy its sweet savor. But in the Davidic Psalms, the psalmist bestows a symbolic and internal meaning on what had been an external ritual action: “O Lord open thou my lips, and my mouth shall shew foorth thy praise. For thou desirest not sacrifice: else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (51:15-17).¹¹ Sacrifice here is located in the believer's heart and emotions. In Romans 12:1, Paul develops this internalization of sacrifice into an ethics of self-control—“Beseech you therefore brethren, by the mercies of God, that yee present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable sacrifice.” In Psalm 51 we see sacrifice taking place in the believer's emotions; in Paul, it is the believer's self-regulating actions. Sacrifice, then, can designate a ritual performance, an interior state, or a principle of self-regulation.

Reformed practice in England tended to deemphasize ritual and to reemphasize the affective and ethical components. In The Saints Humiliation, for example, Samuel Torshell glosses the passage from Psalm 51 in order to demonstrate the full nature of the internal sacrifice that the Christian God demands:

The heart is naturally strong, proud, stiffe, and rebellious, but it must be beaten from its owne height, and layd levell and flat before Gods foot-stoole; it must be wounded and lie bleeding before God, it must shake and tremble at his presence. … Such humiliation … is called Gods sacrifice, because God himselfe is the Author of it, he onely breaks us and fits us for his owne Altar. …

Wee must be waxe in the hand of God … a piece of soft waxe might be moulded to any fashion. … If ever wee have Comfort wee must be of ductible, following dispositions, to be … fashioned by his rod unto humilitie and submission. … To be, not what wee are, or of our selves would be but willingly what he will have us be. … A perfume smells sweetest when 'tis bruised or crusht, and when wee are stamped before God in the sence before declard, wee yeeld a pleasant savour to his Nosthrills.¹²

Self-fashioning here is explicitly opposed to the process by which one labors to make oneself a fitting sacrifice to God. The devotional goal is to render the self as wax in the hand of God. As a perfume releases its odor when pounded and bruised, so are God's forceful manipulations of his creatures the occasion for their becoming a pleasing sacrifice to him.¹³ Where Catholic devotional writers tended to emphasize the careful composition of the place of Jesus' original sacrifice, Reformed writers stressed the necessary decomposition of self that would internalize the energies of that sacrifice.

Both Catholic and Reformed writers emphasize the immense importance of welcoming the fashioning afflictions of God; in doing so, they give the experience of pain a central place in the spiritual imagination. Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain has taught us to understand the cruel calculus by which the imposition of pain is an exercise of power intended to destroy the subjective world of the sufferer.¹⁴ While this model works wonderfully for the texts of twentieth-century torture that Scarry explores, it works less well for the early-seventeenth-century accounts of sacrificial suffering examined here. These writers, and Donne in particular, imagine pain as constitutive rather than destructive of the subject.¹⁵ Part of the reason for this is a profound difference about where spiritual authenticity might reside. Where we imagine selfhood to reside in the experiences, memories, and desires that produce the quirks we call personality, early-seventeenth-century English writers imagine such quirks as encrustations that must be purged if true selfhood is to emerge. What is solicited, even demanded, is the complete and overwhelming imposition of affliction so intense that the caprices of fallen personality might be completely consumed.

It is important that we not pathologize as masochism such aspirations to corporeal suffering, however aberrational they may seem to us. It is also important that we attend to them, since these aspirations supply the scale by which we can gauge the full weight of the Passion on Donne's religious imagination. Donne's remarkable poem “Goodfriday, 1613, Riding Westward” is a marvelous example of the difficulty that Donne experienced in coming to terms with the sacrifice, as well as the corollary difficulty that readers have had in coming to terms with Donne's abiding interest in corporeal suffering. Most critics have been so impressed by the rich intellectual heritage of the dazzling opening conceit, which likens the speaker's own terrestrial motions to those of the planets, that they have largely ignored the equally stunning corporeal terms in which the poem ends. This self-consciously brilliant opening has provided a consummate field on which both an older historicism in search of intellectual lineage and a new criticism in search of metaphorical ingenuity could strut its stuff.¹⁶ About halfway through the poem, though, Donne finds himself guilty of precisely those procedures in which so much criticism of Donne is complicit—subordinating that body whose movement is the subject of the opening conceit to an obsessive concern with discursive rationalization of its motions. The poem begins with a cogent if inevitably inadequate comparison, likening a human soul to a sphere:

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
Th'intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne,
Subject to forraigne motions, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure of businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules form bends toward the East.

(1-10)

The very facility with which Donne prosecutes this vigorous analogy, though, arouses suspicion; indeed, Donne subsequently envisages his Savior's body as encompassing, literally and metaphorically, those spheres whose soul-like motions initiated the poem. The speaker asks with a trepidation that belies the confident metaphors of the opening:

Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And tune all spheares at once pierc'd with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag'd and torne?

(21-28)

As Donald Friedman has argued, “The physical reality of pain, blood, and torn flesh will [finally] supplant the self-protecting conceptual intricacies of spheres, intelligences, and irrational motions.”¹⁷ The grandiose opening is reimagined as a glorious but misleading fiction that dissolves under the stare of his suffering Savior. But even Friedman's compelling reading of the poem as a movement from “ratiocinative bloodlessness” to the Savior's blood seems unwilling to consider the speaker's ultimate turn from the suffering body of his Savior to the fervent demand that his own body suffer in like fashion. Arguing that “the light and clarity of ‘remembered’ wisdom” rather than the intense pain of corporeal punishment is the subject of the poem's end, Friedman allows the cerebral art of memory to supplant the corporeal discipline the poem invokes.¹⁸

In “Goodfriday,” though, the speaker concludes not by recollecting in tranquility his Savior's suffering but by asking that the suffering of his own body ultimately replace the process of rationalizing his geographical trajectory away from the direction of his suffering Savior:

I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity. …

(37-40)

At the end of “Goodfriday,” then, the speaker no longer addresses himself but rather a God he does not look at, yet who watches him. Heartfelt supplication supplants meditative rationalization.

The poem's conclusion pointedly juxtaposes the speaker's horrified refusal to look at God with a sense of the mortal subject's complete visibility before God. The speaker cannot return God's gaze, he says, until God has properly punished him. Although both Foucault and feminist film theory have taught us to conceptualize the gaze as an inherently intrusive, even oppressive phenomenon, Donne was fascinated by a contrary notion: the immense comfort that can emerge from a sense of complete visibility before God, and the corollary fear that God will not deign to bestow such a gaze upon him. The ultimate terror, Donne argues in a sermon, is

that that God, who hath often looked upon me in my foulest uncleannesse, and when I had shut out the eye of the day, the Sunne, and the eye of the night, the Taper, and the eyes of all the world, with curtaines and windows and doores, did yet see me, and see me in mercy, by makeing me see that he saw me, … [that that God] should so turne himself from me.¹⁹

As the fabrics of privacy are rendered a transparent fiction before the penetrating gaze of the omniscient God, Donne finds consolation rather than paranoia in visibility, even in the moments of his “foulest uncleannesse.” His greatest fear is not that his sins will be seen, but rather that God will turn away from him, just as he turns from God in “Goodfriday, 1613, Riding Westward.”

In a sermon praising the “extraordinary austerity” of John the Baptist, Donne links images of riding and corporeal punishment in ways that illuminate the dilemmas of his “Goodfriday” poem:

he that uses no fasting, no discipline, no mortification, exposes himselfe to many dangers in himselfe … my body is the horse I ride … my business lies at Jerusalem; thither I should ride … my horse over pampered casts me upon the way, or carries me out of the way … must not that be my way, to bring him to a gentler riding, and more command, by lessening his proportions of provender. S. Augustine meanes the same that S. Paul preached, I beat down my body, says he, and bring it in subjection; And, (as Paulinus reades that place) Lividum reddo, I make my body blacke and blue; white and red were not Saint Pauls colours.

(Sermons, 4:152-53)

As in “Goodfriday,” corporeal punishment compensates for the innate misdirections of the body. The black and blue of bruised flesh are the colors under which the devout Christian rides.

As Donne turns away from his God in “Goodfriday,” moreover, we need to glimpse not just a spiritual trajectory but also a profound violation of social decorum, since in the liturgy of bodily demeanor, one was never supposed to turn one's back on a superior. To say “I turne my back on thee” to a figure of authority is an act of overt defiance. Indeed, when Queen Elizabeth failed to approve the earl of Essex's nomination for the position of commander of the English forces in Ireland. Essex “turned his back upon her in such a contemptuous manner as exasperated her to such a high degree, that she gave him a box on the ear, and bid him go and be hang'd.”²⁰ Donne attempts to render this contemptuous posture as covert solicitation of a far more severe form of physical punishment than the box on the ears that Essex received. “When the Lord comes to us,” Donne remarks in a sermon, “though he come in corrections, in chastisements, not to turne to him, is an irreverent and unrespective negligence” (Sermons, 5:370). Donne, though, never turns around in the poem. Relatedly, even the speaker's wish to be punished is stated as a command—“punish mee, / Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, / Restore thine Image.” As such, it offers an unstable blend of command and submission to the superior to whom the speaker desires to submit unconditionally.²¹ Punish me, the speaker says, and only then will I offer you, the highest superior, the common respect of showing my face rather than my backside.

Donne's speaker is nevertheless able to recreate in painstaking detail the somatic details of the Passion he cannot visually confront, and in doing so participates, albeit provisionally, in the Catholic meditative practices Martz describes. Christ's hands are “pierc'd with those holes,” his copious outpouring of blood makes “durt of dust,” his “flesh” is “rag'd, and torne.” When turning to the prospect of his own suffering, however, the speaker initially opts for euphemism: “I turne my back to thee, but to receive / Corrections.” Authoritarian periphrasis, though, soon gives way to a graphic language which does not flinch from the excruciating pain it implores: “O think mee worth thine anger, punish mee, / Burne off my rusts, and my deformity.” Instruments of torture are imagined as tools of purification.

While we read these lines, we need to keep in mind the linkages that Donne would have felt acutely between Catholic religious practice and bodily punishment. The poem's fervent attention to Mary involves a proto-Catholic mode of devotion that Protestant authorities discouraged. In “The Litanie,” Donne certainly had exalted Mary's role in salvation in ways that could be construed as Catholic: Mary is “That she-Cherubin, / Which unlock'd Paradise”; she is likewise a figure who can be addressed in prayer: “As her deeds were / Our helpes, so are her prayers; nor can she sue / In vaine, who hath such titles unto you” (38-39, 43-45). In a sermon, though, Donne argued against such Mariolatry: “God forbid any should say, That the Virgin Mary concurred to our good, so, as Eve did to our ruine. … The Virgin Mary had not the same interest in our salvation, as Eve had in our destruction; nothing that she did entred into that treasure, that ransom that redeemed us” (Sermons, 1:200). To describe Mary as “Gods partner here, [who] furnish'd thus / Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us” (31-32), was to risk sounding like the proscribed and persecuted religion he had ostensibly left. The poem's final request to be thought worthy, moreover, nudges it into the realm of Catholic theology, which emphasized merit rather than grace as the avenue to salvation, even if it is only a worthiness to be punished, not to be saved. Although Donne dares not glance eastward until properly punished by his God, then, he does dare to speak in theologically risky ways, both to his God and to those of his contemporaries who were privileged to see the poem in one of its many manuscript versions.

As John Carey has reminded us, Donne's own family had suffered greatly for espousing just the kind of proto-Catholic sentiments displayed in “Goodfriday.”²² As Donne remarks in Pseudo-Martyr, “no family … hath endured and suffered more in their persons and fortunes, for obeying the Teachers of Romane Doctrine, then it hath done.”²³ Carey imagines Donne poised precariously between two horrible prospects of punishment: on the one side, he was threatened by the severe corporeal sanctions against Catholics of the English government, and on the other he was confronted with the even more terrifying prospect of eternal hell as the punishment for apostasy.²⁴ His success at avoiding these punishments depends, in so many ways, on how he responds to the sacrifice. In one of his sermons, Donne imagines acutely the terrifying moment in which a damned soul experiences “a sodain flash of horror first, and then he goes into fire without light” (Sermons, 2:239). “Goodfriday” hopes for a very different kind of fire, one that will “Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,” but Donne nevertheless remains anxious about the similar caloric medium shared by the purifying fires of God's mercy and the horrifying fires of eternal damnation.

Purification and punishment, furthermore, are imagined in these poems as media of self-fashioning. The fires will not consume the speaker but rather will restore God's image in him in order to occasion God's recognition of him; he will be punished “that thou mayst know me.” This is a peculiar thing to say to an omniscient being, quietly placing limits on that being's capacity to know his creatures.²⁵ At the same time, it implies that Donne has the perverse power to make himself unrecognizable to his maker. The poem longs for God to use pain to sacrifice the congenitally perverse subjectivity of its speaker in order to reveal a more authentic if less individuated self within. Original sin, Donne suggests in a sermon, “hath banished me out of my self” (Sermons, 6:116-17). God's attentive afflictions, he hopes, will end this exile. Although the opening gambit of the speaker of “Goodfriday” is to divorce soul and body as an explanation of his own divided will, his solicitation of punishment intends to reunite them, since torture is an action imposed on the body but perceived in the mind. He longs to experience the pain that would wean him from the pleasant world that draws him away from his God.²⁶ An emphasis on how Christ suffered for humanity precipitates a devotional mode in which humanity longs to suffer for God.

Where Donne's account of the Passion concludes with a focus on the salutary and constitutive violence that God directs toward humans, Herbert's account of the Passion explores the spiritual and psychological vertigo that issues from the attempt to internalize an impossible sacrifice. Where Donne could not bear to look at his suffering Savior, Herbert ventriloquizes the bitter laments of his. In doing so, Herbert draws on a vast medieval tradition based in Jeremiah. Herbert's “The Sacrifice” has in fact been the subject of one of the major critical debates of the last century: where William Empson finds the poem exemplary of his final type of ambiguity, in which completely opposite sentiments are held in uneasy suspension, Rosemond Tuve argues that Empson's ingeniously ambiguous readings evaporate in the harsh light of the scholarly tradition. While the initial battle seems to have gone to Tuve, Empson appears to have won the war. While Tuve is correct that many of the phenomena that Empson explores are traditional, what is significant is Herbert's particular amplification and contextualization of them. As J. A. W. Bennett, no friend to Empsonian ingenuity, observes, the tone of Herbert's “Sacrifice” is “harsher and more ironic than that of any medieval antecedent, or of any contemporary presentation.”²⁷ It is this harsh irony that Tuve would dampen, and that Empson has given us ears to hear.

Herbert, moreover, lays out such traditional liturgical patterns at the threshold of his temple of devotion in order to stage an aggressive dialogue with them. He does this first of all through sequence. The preceding poem is “The Altar,” a shaped poem that welcomes the reader into the lyrics of “The Church,” and which identifies through its form the symbolic place whereby the sacrifice of Jesus is reenacted in the liturgical practices of the Church of England. But it also signals the pressures of sacrificial interiorization—the altar looks like an “I,” and the substance of the altar is revealed to be the hard stones of a mortal heart, stones that only God can cut. As such, the poem uses the psalmic internalization of sacrifice to align Hebraic sacrificial rituals with the sacrifice of Jesus, and with the contemporaneous liturgical practices designed to replicate that sacrifice. The speaker prays in the poem's conclusion that God will “let thy blessed Sacrifice be mine, / And sanctifie this Altar to be thine” (17-18). The final couplet of “The Altar,” then, advertises the purpose for which the altar was constructed—it is a place where humans can reenact the sacrifice of God.

But the subsequent poem, “The Sacrifice,” demonstrates just how difficult it is for a mortal to feel secure in the performance of this sacrifice. Its interrogatory refrain—“Was ever grief like mine?”—reiterates the uniqueness of the event it dramatizes, and so haunts the injunction to respond to it. There is a profound structural irony in the existence of a poem in which a mortal poet assumes the voice of the suffering God telling his creatures that they cannot appropriate the sacrifice represented therein. Throughout the poem, bitter irony underscores the vast distance between God's behavior toward his creatures and those creatures' cruel treatment of their maker. Herbert's Jesus proves quite the ironist, turning it repeatedly against the creatures who mock and torture him. “The princes of my people make a head / Against their Maker” (5-6), he laments, punning bitterly on the aggressive and creative meanings of make. Similar syntactic patterns and linguistic puns run throughout the poem: “They use that power against me, which I gave” (11); “At their commands / I suffer binding, who have loos'd their bands” (46-47); “Then from one ruler to another bound / They leade me” (53-54). Jesus, moreover, is charged with just the kind of violent impertinence that his creatures so grotesquely display: “Then they accuse me of great blasphemie, / That I did thrust into the Deitie” (61-62). His torturers will prove guilty of just the gesture for which they accuse Jesus, thrusting quite literally into the deity: “Nay, after death their spite shall further go: / For they will pierce my side, I full well know” (245-46).

Herbert's Jesus seems particularly offended by the social indecorum to which he is made subject:

Herod in judgement sits, while I do stand;
Examines me with a censorious hand:
I him obey, who all things else command.

(81-83)

Though commanding “all,” Jesus is forced to defer to a petty mortal lord. Mortal treatment of Jesus here resembles the disrespect Donne performs in turning his back on his superior. Herbert's Jesus, moreover, is subjected to abuse by those creatures who are lowest on the social hierarchy—“Servants and abjects flout me” (141). He announces that

A King my title is, prefixt on high;
Yet by my subjects am condemn'd to die
A servile death in servile companie.

(233-35)

Herbert's Jesus here announces the political dimension of his sacrifice; rather than creatures offering a gift of gratitude to their creator, here the creator and king is sentenced to death by his subjects and creatures. The universe is maliciously turned upside down.

This total ontological reversal produces a hidden propriety in the pathetic attempts of Jesus' torturers to engage in corrosive irony:

They bow their knees to me, and cry Hail King:
What ever scoffes or scornfulnesse can bring,
I am the floore, the sink, where they it fling:
                                                                                Was ever grief like mine?
Yet since mans scepters are as frail as reeds,
And thorny all their crowns, bloudie their weeds;
I, who am Truth, turn into truth their deeds:
                                                                                Was ever grief like mine?

(173-80)

Mortals mock this figure who claims he is king, yet the joke is on them, because the object of their mockery is the celestial king. As the mob urges Jesus to use his power to help himself—“Now heal thy self, Physician; now come down”—Jesus again transubstantiates their mockery into truth by describing the kenosis as an occasion when he had already performed the descent they urge: “Alas! I did so, when I left my crown / And fathers smile for you, to feel his frown” (221-23).

“The Sacrifice,” then, indicates repeatedly that the event which the speaker of “The Altar” prays to appropriate is unfathomable and unreachable by humanity. The final stanza of “The Sacrifice” emphasizes this point through a bitter ambiguity that renders promise and threat, gratitude and revenge, indistinguishable:

But now I die; now all is finished.
My wo, mans weal: and now I bow my head
Onely let others say, when I am dead,
                                        Never was grief like mine.

(249-52)

Is the final statement direct or indirect discourse? As Empson brilliantly argues, the last two lines contain an excruciating ambiguity.²⁸ Are these “others” to suffer for their sinful treatment of their Savior so that they too will lament “never was grief like mine”? Or are these others to acknowledge the uniqueness of Christ's sacrifice, and the subsequent inability of mortals to make it their own? Are the “others” his torturers, or his followers, or is this distinction sustainable in the face of indiscriminate mortal arrogance? If it is taken as direct discourse spoken by others, then the poem's final utterance is Jesus' vengeful promise that others shall suffer for the way that he has been made to suffer. If it is indirect discourse, then the poem's final utterance depicts the inimitable uniqueness of Christ's sacrifice. Either through terror or incapacity, mortal responses to this stunning event are quailed.

Rather than resolving the ambiguity, the poem opens out into the next poem, “The Thanksgiving,” in which a mortal attempts to respond to the voice of the suffering Christ, to fulfill the wish expressed at the end of “The Altar” to make Christ's sacrifice his own. What emerges is a deeply sincere but implicitly ludicrous imitation of the “King of griefs.” The speaker of “The Thanksgiving” proposes to respond to the voice of his suffering lord by imitating him: “But how then shall I imitate thee, and / Copie thy fair though bloudie hand?” (15-16). He slowly comes to realize, though, that the imitatio Cristi is from a Reformed perspective an impossible and ultimately misguided form of devotion that arrogates to the self the prerogatives of God alone. As Martin Luther had proclaimed at the beginning of the Reformation,

all hypocrites and idolators essay to do those works which properly pertain to divinity and belong to Christ solely and alone. They do not indeed say with their mouth: I am God, I am Christ, yet in fact they arrogate to themselves the divinity and office of Christ. And so, in fact, they say: I am Christ, I am saviour, not only of myself, but also of others.²⁹

By staging the voice of the sacrificial Christ and his own wish to imitate it, Herbert deliberately installs the furnishings of Catholic meditation in a deeply Reformed temple. As Ilona Bell observes, “much as Sidney and Donne raided and exploded the Petrarchan conventions, Herbert used and doomed the familiar images, postures, and goals of Catholic meditation.”³⁰ Herbert performs a devotional imitation whose aggressive failures entail a heartfelt act of sacrifice and praise.

The speaker of “The Thanksgiving” begins as if he has just finished reading a text of the last stanza of “The Sacrifice,” and is meditating upon the ambiguities contained therein. “O King of grief,” he asks, “How shall I grieve for thee, / Who in all grief preventest me?” (1, 3-4). The word prevent here, like the ambiguity at the end of “The Sacrifice,” looks in two directions at once: the word means not only “to act before, to anticipate,” but also “to forestall, balk, or baffle. … To cut off beforehand, debar, preclude.”³¹ Christ's immense sacrifice prevents the speaker not only chronologically but also qualitatively; it is a grief that is both prior and unparalleled. Linked to prevenient, the theological term for the manner in which God's grace anticipates human needs, prevent infers the way that God's sacrificial mercy places an infinite burden on the mortal devotee. The speaker of “The Thanksgiving” suggests that Jesus' moment of greatest despair—when he had cried, “My God, my God, why dost thou part from me?”—was “such a grief as cannot be” (10). He nevertheless proposes to match God's beneficence with his own pious yet misguided good works as a way to “revenge me on thy love”:

If thou dost give me wealth; I will restore
          All back unto thee by poore.
If thou dost give me honour; men shall see,
          The honor doth belong to thee.
I will not marry; or if she be mine,
          She and her children shall be thine.
My bosome friend, if he blaspheme thy name,
          I will tear thence his love and fame.
One half of me being gone, the rest I give
          Unto some Chappell, die or live.
As for thy passion—But of that anon,
          When with the other I have done.

(19-30)

As is the case so frequently with Herbert, the verse-form participates actively in the meaning: the alternating long and short lines represent the pulse of poverty and wealth that would be part of this false spiritual economy, even as the sing-song rhythm suggests the glibness of the speaker's response. When he turns to the subject of the Passion, though, the meter falters, as the speaker stutters into authenticity, realizing that humans can never offer a sacrifice that would in any way match that of Jesus.

Among the more ridiculous proposals is the speaker's suggestion that he can imitate God's foreknowledge:

For thy predestination I'le contrive,
          That three yeares hence, if I survive,
I'le build a spittle, or mend common wayes.

(31-33)

The very claim depends upon the contingency of his survival, a contingency that completely undoes the parallel between his own actions and God's. The poem concludes with the speaker stammering at his inability to find any mode of response to Christ's sacrifice: “Then for thy passion—I will do for that—/ Alas, my God, I know not what” (49-50). His broken syntax represents the internal violence the sacrifice demands. The poem in some sense ends where it begins, wondering how to grieve for a figure who prevents all grief.

It is appropriate that part of the battle between Empson and Tuve over “The Sacrifice” had to do with just how original the poem is, because the speaker of “The Thanksgiving” confronts the issue of originality head-on when he asks, “How then shall I imitate thee, and / Copie thy fair though bloudie hand?” (15-16). Is the follower of Christ to parrot the words of Christian tradition, or is he or she to engage in a creative imitation which will attempt to emulate Christ's sacrifice? In “The Crosse,” Herbert's poetic confrontation with the symbol of the suffering figure that utters “The Sacrifice,” the speaker complains about the excoriating contradictions of his mortal existence before discovering the essence of the cross in his own psychological agony:

                    Ah my deare Father, ease my smart!
These contrarieties crush me: these crosse actions
Doe winde a rope about, and cut my heart:
                    And yet since these thy contradictions
Are properly a crosse felt by thy Sonne,
With but foure words, my words, Thy will be done.

(31-36)

His momentary conformity with God's will is expressed not only in the submissive sentiments of the last four words but also in their origin in the Lord's Prayer. Embracing the excruciating paradoxes of mortal existence as an interior version of Christ's suffering precipitates a viable response to the symbol of Christ's sacrifice. In the Ancilla Pietatis, Daniel Featley, a moderate conformist, had asserted the productive discipline of assimilating the phrases of the Bible into one's devotions:

For in these we ought most of all to denie our selves, and to captivate, not onely our thought to the conceptions, but our tongs to the words and phrases of the inspired Oracles of God.³²

Although imitating the sacrifice of God entails for Herbert a misguided mode of devotion, imitating the words of God, making them your own, entails the ultimate sacrifice—that of the self and its language. In the self-immolation of a fully biblical stylistics, Herbert points to what it might mean to “copie thy fair though bloudie hand.” The poem thus serves as a provisional answer to the devotional dilemma uncovered in “The Thanksgiving.”

Although Christ announces in the last stanza of “The Sacrifice” that “all is finished,” the problem of responding devoutly to this vexed historical moment has only just begun. The poem that follows “The Thanksgiving,” “The Reprisall” (originally entitled “The Second Thanks-giving”), demonstrates that the only sacrificial offering the speaker is capable of making is surrendering any illusions he might have about his capacity to imitate Christ's sacrifice. He begins by conceding that “There is no dealing with thy mighty passion” (2) and says that even if he would die for his Savior, he would be in arrears, since Christ was blameless and died for all: “Though I die for thee, I am behind” (3). He complains bitterly that God has chosen to “outgo” him both in “eternal glorie” and in corporeal agony:

                    Ah! Was it not enough that thou
By thy eternal glorie didst outgo me?
Couldst thou not griefs sad conquests me allow,
                    But in all vict'ries overthrow me?

(9-12)

Herbert here allows the implicit competition of sacrificial gift-giving to emerge. It is a potlatch that mortals can never win. The conclusion, though, promises that through “confession” the speaker will “come / Into thy conquest” (13-14). He offers to turn his agonistic and competitive energies inward, bifurcating the self in order to “overcome / The man who once against thee fought” (15-16). In doing so, he inaugurates an unending division of the sinful self that becomes, ultimately, a lyrically productive liturgy of interior sacrifice.

The lyrics of The Temple are in many ways an extended series of such reprisals. Herbert's poem entitled “Goodfriday” begins in the interrogative mode, wondering what mode of response a mortal can generate to this scene of suffering:

                    O my chief good,
How shall I measure out thy bloud?
How shall I count what thee befell,
                    And each grief tell?
                    Shall I thy woes
Number according to thy foes?
Or, since one starre show'd thy first breath,
                    Shall all thy death?

(1-8)

The last twelve lines of this poem, written in a different meter and originally comprising in the Williams manuscript a separate poem entitled “The Passion,” transform the speaker's effort to compose a response to the sacrifice into a prayer to be made the vehicle of divine writing:

Since bloud is fittest, Lord, to write
Thy sorrows in, and bloudie fight;
My heart hath store, write there, where in
One box doth lie both ink and sinne:
That when sinne spies so many foes,
Thy whips, thy nails, thy wounds, thy woes,
All come to lodge there, sinne may say,
No room for me, and flie away.
Sinne being gone, oh fill the place,
And keep possession with thy grace;
Lest sinne take courage and return,
And all the writings blot or burn.

(21-32)

Herbert wittily hopes that by assimilating the sacrifice of his God into the marrow of his being, he will at once crowd out sin and invite that God to enter and to write the story of his passion in his subject's own blood. Where Donne on Good Friday interrogates the possibility of beholding his bleeding God, Herbert longs on that day to have God compose his own story in Herbert's blood.

I would like to conclude this symptomatic study of seventeenth-century sacrificial poetics by glancing at Milton's surprisingly pathetic attempt at a Passion poem, and to suggest that it has more in common with Donne's and Herbert's deservedly canonical lyrics than we might think. The poem was probably intended as a companion-piece to Milton's gorgeous “Nativity Ode”; it is written in the same meter and rhyme scheme as the opening stanzas of that poem. The precocious twenty-one-year-old poet obviously planned in these two poems to cover the birth and death of his Savior. While the subject of Christ's birth brought out the best in the young poet, the subject of his suffering and death brought out his worst. While he could strut proudly into Bethlehem, he could only steal disconcertedly around Golgotha. “The Passion” consists of eight stanzas that swaddle the subject with ludicrous clichés before the poet abandons the effort entirely. Milton begins “The Passion” by describing the subject and style of the “Nativity Ode”—

Ere-while of Musick, and Ethereal mirth,
Wherwith the stage of Ayr and Earth did ring,
And joyous news of heav'nly Infants birth,
My muse with Angels did divide to sing.(33)

This lyric exaltation is a striking contrast to the “sorrow” and “notes of saddest woe” he must now sing, a lugubrious subject he experiences as undesirable and constraining: “These latter scenes confine my roving vers, / To this Horizon is my Phoebus bound” (22-23). Milton seems to be trying to urge his muse to transport him to the scene of the Passion, perhaps by borrowing Ezekiel's chariot, or by asking “som transporting Cherub … / To bear me where the Towers of Salem stood” (39-40). But it is as if his muse were riding westward on what is probably Good Friday, 1630, and will not allow herself to be directed toward that ponderous subject. The poem ends in a bathetic image of the poet's tears impregnating a cloud; Milton here sounds like Crashaw on a bad day:

Or should I thence hurried on viewles wing,
Take up a weeping on the Mountains wilde,
The gentle neighbourhood of grove and spring
Would soon unboosom all thir Echoes milde,
And I (for grief is easily beguild)
Might think th'infection of my sorrows loud,
Had got a race of mourners on som pregnant cloud.

Milton then appends an explanatory note to the poem: “This subject the author finding to be above the yeers he had, when he wrote it, and nothing satisfi'd with what was begun, left it unfinisht.”

Yet Milton carefully printed the incomplete poem in both the 1645 and the 1673 editions of his poems, as if the fragment had some meaning for him. Moreover, any poet who could compose Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and perhaps Samson Agonistes while blind and in political defeat, could have completed a comparatively slight lyric on the highly conventional subject of the Passion if he had wanted to. But he did not, and the sacrifice recedes from the horizon of this decidedly religious poet. In Paradise Lost, the suffering of the cross is mentioned only briefly as an abstract figure (12.413-25); Milton is in this epic far more interested in moral rectitude than in salvific suffering. When Abdiel is welcomed back into heaven, for example, the angels salute him as one who “for the testimonie of Truth hast born / Universal reproach, far worse to beare / Then violence” (6.33-35), Paradise Regained is likewise focused on the Son's rejection of temptation, not on his carnal suffering. It is “one mans firm obedience fully tri'd / Through all temptation” (1: 4-5) that allows paradise to be regained. In both epics Milton deliberately relocates the atonement from a scenario of corporeal martyrdom to a moment of ethical decision. Only in the vivid suffering of Samson Agonistes do we get some of the attention to corporeal affliction that had been a crucial element in earlier Passion narratives, and here it is far removed from a sacrificial context. With Milton, the Passion drops away as a subject of religious and poetic inquiry; its energies are absorbed by the ethical pressures of temptation and the continual persecution experienced by the one just man in a world of woe.

I want to argue that Milton cherished this short and flawed lyric in part because it participates in a subgenre of works dedicated to the idea that the sacrifice inevitably defeats human response. It is not just that Milton could not finish the poem, but that its unfinished and unsuccessful nature represents something substantial and meaningful. The subject was not just beyond the poet's years, but beyond the capacity of any Christian to fathom. In its very incompleteness, then, and even in its aesthetic inadequacy, the poem offers a formal version of the stuttering inability to respond to Christ's sacrifice that concludes Herbert's “The Thanksgiving,” or of the willed avoidance of the Passion that structures Donne's “Goodfriday” poem.

Golgotha, then, proved a particularly difficult hill for seventeenth-century English devotional poets to climb. Donne saunters away from it, Herbert stammers his inability to deal with it, and Milton incompletely circles it before turning his attention to other matters. If a poetics of sacrifice emerges from these poems, it is in the realization that Christ's sacrifice ultimately defeats poetry. As a poetic subject, the sacrifice demands that one perform the inexpressibility topos writ large. In the work of these three very different poets, we can see how the subject of the Passion at once elicited and discouraged lyric response. If subsequent English poetry largely follows the trajectory of Milton in pursuing other subjects for religious verse, we can nonetheless prize the remarkable lyric achievements of Donne and Herbert as they produce riveting aesthetic documents from their own spiritual and poetic impediments.

Notes

1. Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954; rev. 1962).

2. Luis de la Puente, Meditations (1605), 1:59-60; quoted from Martz, Poetry of Meditation, 49. See also Anthony Raspa, The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1983); A. D. Cousins, Catholic Religious Poets from Southwell to Crashaw (London: Sheed and Ward, 1991); and Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

3. Martz, Poetry of Meditation, 31.

4. “Goodfriday, 1613, Riding Westward,” line 16, cited from The Divine Poems of John Donne, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). All citations of Donne's sacred poems are from this edition, given by line numbers. I am not suggesting, of course, that these works are the only available lyric engagements with the Passion; rather, I wish to treat them as symptomatic of a larger trajectory of seventeenth-century devotional writings from corporeal suffering to ethical injunction. Notable poetic engagements with the Passion that I do not explore here include Amelia Lanyer's Salve Deus Rex Iudaeorum (1611), which I discuss in detail in “The Gender of Religious Devotion: Amelia Lanyer and John Donne,” in Religion and Culture in the English Renaissance, ed. Debora Shuger and Claire McEachern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 209-33; and Nicholas Breton's “The Countesse of Pembroke's Passion” (n.d.).

5. “The Crosse,” lines 1-2, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941). All subsequent references to Herbert's poetry are from this edition given by line numbers.

6. Donne's medical metaphor may be chosen with great care here, since the Millenary Petition, which had asked that “the cross in baptism … may be taken away,” cited the king's own Galenic model of the king as physician to his people: “For, as your princely pen writeth: ‘The king, as a good physician, must first know what pecant humours his patient naturall is most subject unto, before he can begin his cure,’” (The Stuart Constitution, 1603-1688: Documents and Commentary, ed. J. P. Kenyon [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966], 132). The dispute over the sign of the cross in baptism is analyzed in David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 124-48.

7. Debora Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 127.

8. Ibid., 7.

9. See Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, 124-48.

10. Thomas Wilson, A Christian Dictionary (London, 1616), 505.

11. All biblical quotations are from the Authorized Version.

12. Samuel Torshell, The Saints Humiliation (London, 1633), 102-3, 111.

13. Tellingly, Herbert uses the same image of fragrance released by violent manipulation both to depict his own devotional longings in “The Odour” and to describe God's delicious sacrifice in “The Banquet.”

14. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

15. In Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563-1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9, John Knott argues similarly that in Foxe's martyrology “pain does not have the obliterating effects described by Elaine Scarry. Foxe's Marian martyrs affirm their identity as true Christians by gestures, such as clapping their hands in the flames, and memorable last words.”

16. I am thinking here particularly of the erudite essays of A. B. Chambers, “Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward: The Poem and the Tradition,” English Literary History 28 (1961): 31-53; and Chambers, “‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’: Looking Back,” John Donne Journal 6 (1987): 185-212.

17. Donald Friedman, “Memory and the Art of Salvation in Donne's Good Friday Poem,” English Literary Renaissance 3 (1973): 431.

18. Ibid., 426.

19. The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953-62), 5:266. Further citations are given in the text by volume and page numbers.

20. Thomas Birch, Memoirs of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, 2 vols. (London, 1754), 2:384.

21. The gesture is, to borrow the terms of Wilbur Sanders's discussion of a similar moment in “Batter my heart,” so “fiercely willed that it destroys the possibility of its own fulfillment” (John Donne's Poetry [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971], 130).

22. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

23. Quoted in Carey, John Donne, 20.

24. Donne's residual Catholicism is explored by Richard Strier, “John Donne Awry and Squint: The ‘Holy Sonnets,’ 1608-1610,” Modern Philology 86 (1989): 357-85; and by Dennis Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

25. In his “Hymn to God the Father,” Donne would engage in a similarly outrageous version of this topos, reminding God that “when thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For I have more.”

26. In Sonnets 50 and 51, Shakespeare explores a similar topos, imagining a speaker who is riding away from a friend and into affliction: “My grief lies onward, and my joy behind” (Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977]).

27. J. A. W. Bennett, Poetry of the Passion: Studies in Twelve Centuries of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 158-59; Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 19-99.

28. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York: New Directions, 1947), 226-33.

29. D. Martin Luthers Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. J. C. F. Knaake, et al. (Weimar, 1883), 40:404; quoted in Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 702 n. 1.

30. Ilona Bell, “‘Setting Foot into Divinity’: George Herbert and the English Reformation,” Modern Language Quarterly 38 (1977): 222.

31. Ibid., 228.

32. Daniel Featley, Ancilla Pietatis: Or, The Hand-maid to Private Devotion (London, 1626), 107.

33. The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), lines 1-4. All citations of Milton are from this edition.