Early modern theologians such as William Perkins, William Ames, Jeremy Taylor, and Richard Baxter see the rectified conscience as a syllogism worked out in partnership with God, which compares actions to the law, and comes to a conclusion. It is thus a linguistic act. John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan focus on the points where the conversation breaks down. In their poems, hearts refuse to confess, laws are forgotten or mixed up, and judgements are omitted. Between them, God and the poets take decisive action, torturing, inscribing, fragmenting, and writhing the heart in a set of tr ... More

Early modern theologians such as William Perkins, William Ames, Jeremy Taylor, and Richard Baxter see the rectified conscience as a syllogism worked out in partnership with God, which compares actions to the law, and comes to a conclusion. It is thus a linguistic act. John Donne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan focus on the points where the conversation breaks down. In their poems, hearts refuse to confess, laws are forgotten or mixed up, and judgements are omitted. Between them, God and the poets take decisive action, torturing, inscribing, fragmenting, and writhing the heart in a set of tropes (turnings of meaning) which get the right response: subjectio (answering your own question), enigma, aposiopesis (breaking off speech), antanaclasis (altering the meanings of words), and chiasmus (redoubling meaning).