A Cup on a Table in the Shadow of the Infinite: On the Incarnational Possibilities of Poetry

In this short essay, I argue that Marie Howe’s poetry is both revelatory and constitutive of Christ’s incarnation. More specifically, I attempt to demonstrate the ways in which poetry sometimes functions as a crucial part of those processes through a close reading of Marie Howe’s “The Teacher.” I make this argument by drawing on Austin Farrer’s image-based conception of revelation, David’s Brown’s treatment of Farrer, and Paul DeHart’s Christological semiotics. I position the revelatory possibilities of poetry as a constitutive part of the Church’s imaginative interrogation of the infinite Christ. Put differently, I argue that post-apostolic poetry—when it engages with the Biblical witness—is therefore a crucial component of the ongoing process of Christ’s incarnation precisely because it enables the church’s further reception of the excessive, necessarily interpretive meaning of revelatory images themselves. The poetic re-workings of those revelatory images are thus part of the incarnation process.