CHAPTER 5 - POETRY AND THE PASSION OF CHRIST IN CRASHAW AND LANYER

Summary

In the previous chapters we saw that the Passion poetry of William Alabaster voices a longing for unity with the suffering Christ also encountered in numerous contemporary Catholic devotional works : human pain serves as a form of imitatio Christi. The work of Donne, by contrast, is informed by a profound sense of the impossibility of such compassion with Christ. This sense of inadequacy in the face of Christ's Passion is also a recurrent issue in the poetry of George Herbert. While Donne's use of poetic form points to the incompatibility of competing Reformed and Catholic models of suffering, however, Herbert employs poetic form to forge a theologically more hybrid understanding of pain. In Herbert, furthermore, there is the suggestion that poetry itself can serve as a site of imitatio Christi through suffering. In the work of both Donne and Herbert, the meaning of pain also serves as a conduit for a more general reflection on the role and relevance of bodily sensation in spiritual experience.

This chapter explores the meaning of suffering in the poetry of Richard Crashaw and Aemilia Lanyer, especially in relation to the Passion of Christ. As we will see, Crashaw and Lanyer are not so much troubled by the question of whether humans can take part in the Passion, but proceed from a belief that this is both an ethical duty and a human possibility.