Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England

Chapter 2. Edward Taylor’s ‘‘Menstruous Cloth’’: Structure as Seal in the Preparatory Meditations

C h a p t e r 2 Edward Taylor’s ‘‘Menstruous Cloth’’: Structure as Seal in the Preparatory Meditations George Herbert’s influence on the poetry of Edward Taylor is readily apparent , sufficient to prompt Louis Martz to remark that ‘‘Edward Taylor appears to have had a mind saturated with Herbert’s poetry.’’ Martz’s observation refers primarily to Taylor’s devotional subject, numbering among the ‘‘thousand tantalizing echoes of Herbert’’ resonances of The Temple in the latter poet’s lexicon along with a similar fear of inadequacy in attempting to praise God.1 Taylor’s great twentieth-century editor Donald Stanford expands the catalogue of Herbert’s influence to include ‘‘An interest in typology, the frequent use of ‘mixed’ figures, a devout piety, and scores of verbal echoes and parallels.’’2 And just as the pious content and the homespun posture of Herbert ’s poems undoubtedly authorize Taylor’s own experiments in devotional verse, the earlier poet’s formal innovations likewise provide for Taylor a sense of the kinds of communication that might be possible in the structures of poetic utterance. Taylor inherited from Herbert not merely the six-line stanza of The Temple’s long opening poem ‘‘The Church-Porch’’ but also a conception of poetic form’s potential to produce immanent presence, to lineament that which is perceptually absent. For Taylor as for Herbert, God’s absence is a matter of urgent concern, but in Taylor’s case, God’s perceptual unavailability redounds to a corollary uncertainty about the status of one’s own soul. In Taylor’s religious observance , the occasion that precipitates the most harrowing awareness of these vacancies is the monthly event that he calls the Lord’s Supper. Taylor, a nonconforming Calvinist who left England for the American wilderness, where he lived out his days as minister in the town of Westfield, Massachusetts , would have resisted any sacramental formulation that admitted the 64 Chapter 2 objective physical presence of the body of Christ in the ordinance. Nevertheless , he held the Supper to be a ‘‘seal’’ of God’s covenant to save the elect. In a passage from one of his Preparatory Meditations, Taylor takes pains to distinguish his theology of that ordinance from the popish error of Christ’s bodily presence: What feed on Humane Flesh and Blood? Strang mess! Nature exclaims. What Barbarousness is here? And Lines Divine this sort of Food repress. Christs Flesh and Blood how can they bee good Cheer? If shread to atoms, would too few be known, For ev’ry mouth to have a single one? This Sense of this blesst Phrase is nonsense thus. Some other Sense makes this a metaphor.3 Taylor insists that rather than effecting any kind of essential transformation of the sacramental elements, the Lord’s Supper is a ritual in which Christ communicates through a figure, using, as Taylor prayerfully describes it, ‘‘This Metaphor to make thyselfe appeare’’ (2.101.8). Here and elsewhere, Taylor stresses that the bread and wine must be understood as representational elements, not sites of miraculous action: ‘‘God Chose no Ceremonies for their sake / But for Signification did them take’’ (2.103.65–66). Still, its status as a sign does not deprive the Lord’s Supper of its spiritual significance. As a seal, the ritual manifests in the worshipper as a sign and assurance of God’s covenant to redeem his elect. Taylor explains the sealing work accomplished by the ordinance as an instrument not for producing a regenerate spirit but for revealing the grace that inhabits the already regenerate worshipper: The Supper of the Lord (Choice Feast) to seale The Covenant of Grace thus, even so The Ceremoniall Cleaness did reveale A Spirituall Cleaness qualifying all That have a Right to tend this Festivall. (2.103.44–48) It is this capacity of the Lord’s Supper to reveal the ‘‘Spirituall Cleaness’’ that proves the worshipper worthy to participate in the ordinance that is, Edward Taylor’s ‘‘Menstruous Cloth’’ 65 for Taylor, its great blessing—and its great vexation. For as Taylor’s homiletic writings bear out, whether grace and true regeneracy are indeed present in a worshipper’s soul proves maddeningly difficult to determine. And as Taylor wrestles in his lyrics with his own inconstant soul—a soul that sometimes glories and sometimes despairs, sometimes hopes and sometimes rages—he must confront the...