Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Introduction 34
record of human interaction and discussions with God, and because of this Herbert can
also converse with God through the risen Lord; he can exchange his words with the Word
and know that he will receive a response because God has a human voice which was
recorded in text.
Robert Herrick’s Hesperides becomes an attempt to redeem the world. In
Herrick’s poems one finds him attempting to use the festival and all of its earthly delights
to create moments of paradise. Herrick looks to the world that God came down and
resided in and participated in and seems a physical realm that can be celebrated through
the physical. He emphasises the flesh of the Word, and in this sees in the celebration of
the body and nature a way to celebrate the world created by the Word, and the world who
knows it is loved by the Creator because he has said so; he has created the world and said
that ‘It is good’ and that at this point of the creation of the physical was the Word, because
‘In the beginning was the Word, & the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The
same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was
not anything made that was made’. Herrick then uses his Hesperides to make a world
through words, and in so doing he incarnates his world through joyous celebrations of
creation.
Finally, with Crashaw one finds that words can be used to experience Christ at the
point of his death and our salvation. The Word becomes incarnate in the poetry of
Crashaw as he attempts to bring the body and blood of Jesus to his readers, not images of
it, but the actual body and blood. His poetry becomes more than sacramental because he
does not try to recreate the Communion meal for his readers; rather, he attempts to bring
his readers to the body of Jesus on the cross, and he desires them to feast and drink upon
the wounds of the body of Christ when it is open and transgressed – this then will