SOURCE: Schoenfeldt, Michael. “‘That spectacle of too much weight’: The Poetics of Sacrifice in Donne, Herbert, and Milton.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 3 (fall 2001): 561-84.

In the following essay, Schoenfeldt considers the theme of sacrifice as developed by post-Reformation religious poets, including Donne, suggesting that seventeenth-century writers imagined sacrifice as an interior experience rather than a physical event.

But how then shall I imitate thee, and Copie thy fair though bloudie hand? 

—George Herbert

If you can't imitate him, don't copy him. 

—Yogi Berra

This essay began with a question that has been rattling around in my head since I first began studying devotional poetry: Why did the scenario of the Christian sacrifice prove such a vexed and perplexing subject for lyric poetry in seventeenth-century England? Why, that is, did the Passion shift from being a site of the deepest imaginative engagement for medieval Catholic...