A focus on the meaning of “wit” and its function in the devotional poetry of John Donne and George Herbert, exploring the possibilities and problems created through the intersection of theology and poetics. While formally understood to be the human faculty of consciousness and intellectual powers, wit among the early moderns also came to mean the ingenious use of language. As such, wit constitutes a fundamental stylistic literary concern for the period, particularly among many English poets of the seventeenth century, whose inventive and often paradoxical figures of speech invite a primarily intellectual contemplation of metaphysical realities, both sacred and secular. The power of language to articulate a co-presence between the metaphysical and the physical, however, bears a striking resemblance to sacramental theology, which makes visible the invisible grace of God. This parallel is particularly evident in early modern devotional poetry, and much of its prose, where wit often appears to conflate with divine “Logos” and the poem itself is fashioned as a sacred space.