ABSTRACT

The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation focuses, as the etymology of the word indicates, on the process of the revelation of the divine in fleshly form, the crucial biblical text of the doctrine being in the prologue to the fourth Gospel: “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us” (John 1:14). Especially in Catholic teaching and devotion, through the centuries this doctrine (incorporated into the ancient creeds of the Church) has excited special reverence. Accordingly, traditionally, in the recitation or singing of the Nicene Creed in the liturgy, when the words “et incarnatus est … et homo factus est” are intoned, priest and people genuflect – and, again, at the end of the Mass in the reading of the last Gospel, at “et Verbum caro factum est.” Similarly, in musical settings of the Mass, this text has also been a focus of special artistic elaboration or striking contrast, as, for example (among numerous others) in Beethoven’s Missa solemnis. And so, too, in the poetry of writers of Catholic persuasion (whether Anglo-Catholic or Roman Catholic), the doctrine of the Incarnation and its rich implications for the nurturing and expressing of Christian spirituality has been a central preoccupation. We see this in T. S. Eliot’s only poem devoted exclusively to the Virgin Mary, the lyric in the third of the Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” (1941), and a few years later, in a similarly lyrical section, “Our Lady of Walsingham,” in Robert Lowell’s elegiac sequence The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket (1946), where the image of the Virgin at the shrine in Walsingham is the subject. As the editors of this volume point out, the literary manifestations of Walsingham, so prominent in the late medieval and post-Reformation periods, have been revived and renewed in striking ways in the past century and, in relation to the matter of incarnational poetics, what has been written about Walsingham reflects a theme found more generally in religious poetry (such as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins written in the nineteenth century, but not published until the twentieth, and, more recently, T. S. Eliot’s). Poetry about Walsingham needs to be placed in this broader context.