A child is boren amonges man
And in that child was no wam
That child ys God, that child is man
And in that child our life began.
ALTHOUGH SCHOLARSHIP is shifting the paradigm, many English medieval religious lyrics are still often thought of, in general terms, as treating doctrine in a simplistic way expressive of a rudimentary faith. The achievements of conspicuously brilliant medieval poems, such as The Dream of the Rood or Pearl, ensure that we recognize that theological poetry in English does not emerge fully formed in the seventeenth century with the great metaphysical poets. Nevertheless, many medieval poems—particularly shorter poems—still tend to be classified as didactic, or affective, or are selectively mined for choice imagery, in ways that threaten to marginalize them, ultimately characterizing them as, at best, simple, at worst, simpleminded; the “Long Charter,” for example, has sometimes been treated this way. Yet the writings I have drawn together here compellingly testify that the work of fourteenth-century English religious writing relies in part on modes of reading that can make considerable demands on readers and writers alike, demands that are not always obvious or intuitive, perhaps.1 I have maintained that for writers interested in Christ’s humanity, the Incarnation necessitates a special formal awareness, and that late medieval English writers both engage and enact modes of thought that acknowledge an important role for poetics as well as for theology, for poetics as theology. In an important contribution to the growing body of work on formalism in medieval studies, Vance Smith has pointed out that “Form in medieval texts is neither merely aesthetic nor aesthetically disinterested; it is always tuned to a purpose.”2 I have argued that the work of Incarnation theology may be in play even where Incarnational issues are not the main topic, that being attentive to form illuminates what writers are saying “pleynly,” and that such attention can further shed light on theories of cognition. By taking advantage of a certain elasticity in the linguistic system, writers engaging an Incarnational poetic expansively explore the nature of language and thought; the elision between the concrete and the abstract; the complex relationship between acting and being; the work done by poetry itself, in and through time; and the expressive potential latent in large-scale poetic structural forms. Here at the close of my study, I wish to offer a few further thoughts on the work of Incarnational poetics in relation to other sorts of poems, whether medieval or modern.
In the epigraph to this chapter, a stanza from the earliest of English nativity carols (c. 1350), the stark simplicity of the verse’s form anticipates the far-reaching consequences of its message. Simple faith is not necessarily simple-minded, of course, and the wonder this stanza seeks to engage and amplify is no mere didacticism, nor is it coincidental that the poem conjoins wonder, strongly marked poetic form, and the topic of the Incarnation. The verse’s power lies most strongly in the profound simplicity of its last line as it follows on from the pervasive repetition of “that child.” The foundational double-beat of “that child” puts the focus throughout the stanza on the very beginning of life, which the poet emphasizes to give the last line of the verse its compelling force as he yokes “that child”’s new life with “our” new life. That birth is our birth, and the cogency of that thought turns on both particularity and generality, how each of us is related to all of us, that one to this one. “How are we like him?” the poet encourages us to think, and “how is he like us?”. Articulating a message of hope in a new beginning, each line offers the familiar and the extraordinary, yoked together. That same yoking is replicated in the metre, which draws attention to the astonishing mystery of the Incarnation, with the hypostatic union nestled between repetitions of “And in that child” that unite Christ and humanity, and God and humanity. The metre reinforces both the middleness of the hypostatic union and the balance of parts, suspending the regular four-beat rhythm of the other lines by subdividing four into a balanced duple of two-beats, two-beats: “That child ys God, that child is man.” The third line thus sets its two halves on equal terms, while the suspension of the regular four-beat rhythm over two-and-two drives additional energy and power into the anticipated fulfillment of metre in the concluding four-beat line, which both wraps up and speaks back to the stanza’s beginning. Like linguistic dilation, the metre here fleetingly enacts a certain making-concrete, analogous to the emanation linguistically expressed in the Johannine “Word made flesh.” All this suggests to me that, like the works I have been examining, verse of this sort calls on specific reading habits that seek to engage a complexity of thought, off-the-page, prompted by formal juxtapositions, attuned to issues that coalesce around the conceptual challenge of the hypostatic union.3
While so far as I know the music for this carol does not survive, there is a special aptness to thinking about such complexity in musical terms, or even in dramatic ones, that consider the performative work of thought over time, and perhaps the social work of thought as well. Just as reading the text of a play can be so different from experiencing a performance, the same can be true of song. The experience of a sung carol is complex, not just because of the melodic element but also because the performance in, through, and over time encourages participants and listeners alike to dwell within the experience. Medieval carols and songs make use of long melismatic melodic lines that sometimes pleasingly cross one another, or cross-rhythms, dissonances, and the group-singing of refrains against solo-singing of verses. There is no way to skip ahead, in music, and where the melody lingers over a word or thought, so must the singer. Song of this sort can be deeply meditative. Christmas carols naturally capitalize on the wonder of Christ’s nativity, the magnitude of the divine and human brought together with joy, and the action of love’s spectacular leap. In an Incarnational poetic, wonder—both amazement and questioning—is also inherent to the experience; the focus is on the “how” of the Incarnation, not just the “what” of it.
“A child is boren” prompts wonder through its focus on humanity (rhyming “man” with “man,” for example). The promised growth implicit to “that child” and “our life began” engages further elements that are also characteristic of an Incarnational poetic: action, not stasis; the shift from “now” to “not yet.” The generative force of the quatrain is reinforced by its refrain, which speaks of the “joye” and “blisse” that “we” “shulle” “make,” with “make” being taken up again with the marriage of “Godes Sone” and “ous,” “Godes Sone” becoming “oure make [mate].” The bringing-together implicit to marriage comes across the more strongly for the leave-taking of “the deuel of elle [ from hell],” who “haght forsake[n]” humanity. In a similar way, in the following fifteenth-century lyric, where balance is key to the poem’s effect, wonder is compellingly linked to the topic of the Incarnation, and the poem’s meditative force aligns it more closely with the metaphysical poets, perhaps, than with what we generally expect to find in medieval lyric:
A God and yet a man?
A mayde and yet a mother?
Witt wonders what witt Can
Conceave this or the other.
A god, and Can he die?
A dead man, can he live?
What witt can well replie?
What reason reason give?
God, truth itselfe, doth teach it;
Mans witt senckis too farr vnder
By reasons power to reach it.
Beleeve and leave to wonder!4
In its direct appeal to wit, this poem is not a simplistic call to stop thinking, despite its culminating call to “leave [cease] to wonder.” These sorts of “wit” poems do not dwell in the serenity of didacticism; they call attention, clarion-like, to the active work of wonder. In their quality of working through a puzzle, wherein the solution, insofar as it is attained, lies in part in the reaching of it and in part in experience of poetic form, they have a real affinity with Incarnational poetics of the sort I have been describing. They suggest, to my mind, that we do well when we ponder carefully what form of reading makes this sort of poem productive. The poem turns on several meanings of wonder: to be amazed, surprised, curious, puzzled, to feel admiration, to speculate. The third line fleetingly acknowledges reason’s limit (“Witt wonders what witt can,” or “only as far as wit can”) before the enjambment admits the capability of an intellect beyond the human, the sort of “wit” that “can conceive.” The bounding (limitations) of human wonderment shifts over to bounding (leaps) of a sort of wonderment that can be fulfilled (“I wonder what sort of wit could conceive this”), at least in the abstract. The poet further invites us to link ideas by sound (man/mayde/mother; Witt/witt; Can/conceave; this/the other; and the culminating conspicuous witticism of beleeve/leave, which connects back to Can/conceave). The poem is all about wonder, then: thought (our action), pleasing astonishment (our response), the marvelous (God’s action). It prompts us to consider active possibilities, the working-through of thought in form. Time, and the development of thought over time, generates a productive tension as we are encouraged to consider there/then versus here/now, or there/then as here/now. The word “leave” in the final line both prescribes and permits: if we are prompted to stop wondering, in one sort of way, we are conspicuously pushed into wondering in another; despite the last line’s prescriptive force, the poem does not shut down the process but opens it up.5
Beyond such a focus on the work of wonder, the carol verse I initially quoted further models divine simplicity, which is, in a sense, its topic, and does so by inviting both participation and wonder, of several sorts. As in the works I have been discussing throughout this book, the nature of God and the nature of Christ’s humanity are to be sought within the work of engaging with systemic possibilities latent in poetics, in poetical form and language. With its emphasis on Christian community (the refrain begins, “Honnd by honnd we schulle ous take / And ioye and blisse schulle we make . . .”), the carol affirms both humility and charity, “us” not “me.”6 It is not primarily didactic, but leaves work for its participants to do.
Formal analysis of the sort I have just offered has proven exceptionally fruitful for later theological poetry, as in the work of Donne, Herbert, or Crashaw. It is worth thinking carefully about how our responses to the metaphysical poets might be applied in our reading of medieval ones, and how our approaches to lyric verse such as this carol stanza might correspondingly enhance our readings of other sorts of writing. I am thinking in particular of George Herbert here, because he repeatedly speaks to divine simplicity as a devotional model that can counter the potential dangers of caring too much about the work of being a poet. In “The Quidditie,” for example, Herbert ultimately and surprisingly expresses that turn to simplicity in enigmatical metaphor. His focus is on the work of poetry, poetry as a mode of connection to God. That connection is sustained during the process of work, whether writing or reading (“use,” Herbert calls it), not in its completion:
But it [a verse] is that which while I use
I am with thee, and, Most take all.7
While, like Capgrave, Herbert does not write “The Quidditie” in the form of an Incarnational poetic, it is from Herbert that I would like to take the cue for the “how” of an Incarnational poetic: it is in the work of poetry, Herbert suggests, that he meets and dwells with God. In “The Quidditie,” a poem’s use is both means and way. As with Hilton’s search for Jesus in the house of the self, when you see the glimmer, then you have found your drachma—but it is the search that enables that sight, and in Herbert’s mode of thought, as in Hilton’s, the glimpse of God in this world is only fleetingly to be maintained, in this world. Herbert’s strategies further and compellingly align with topics I have argued are of special interest in an Incarnational context. He begins by listing what poetry is not, a range of objects or abstractions to be sought, striven for, possessed: a crown, a point of honor, a gay suit,8 hawk, banquet, renown, good sword, lute. Shifting to ways in which verse is not like a person, he focuses on actions: it cannot vault, dance, play. He notes particularities of time and place: it “never was in France or Spain.” He evokes social, economic, and political spheres of communal action via synecdoche (“Exchange,” “Hall”). The final lines, which I quoted above, signal a strong shift from lack to its emphatic fulfillment: “But it is . . . ,” yet a fulfillment that is fleetingly momentary, the “not yet” of earthly life. Like Capgrave, Herbert implies a fullness of thought in the culminating enigmatical metaphor that aspires to express the momentary union with God brought about by reading and writing poetry: “But it is that which while I use / I am with thee, and Most take all.” He signals the high stakes he associates with poetry not only through the trump of “most take all,” an expression associated with a card game, but also through the title, which punningly refers both to the insignificance of the worldly things poetry is not, and also to the essential quality of what poetry is.9 For a poet so caught up with divine simplicity, it is suggestive that here simplicity is to be found in Capgrave’s sort of “pleyn” speech that conveys more than it can say directly: in simplicity, Herbert turns not just to poetry but to metaphor.
As I have begun to suggest, an Incarnational mode of thought, with theological implications, may perhaps be found even in late medieval English works that are not structured around an Incarnational poetic. Further, while the proof and ramifications of my next thought stand outside the bounds of this study, the claim holds true even for works that lack a strongly religious or devotional orientation. More remains to be done on Incarnational thought of the period, in poetry but also more broadly. Yet the cognitive component of Incarnational thought, so central to poetical thought experiments of the sort I have examined here, ensures that the work of an Incarnational poetic, evocative of wonder in many senses, well repays the effort of following such conceptual leaps.