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

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Donne’s Incarnating Words 94<br />

tells his followers to remember him through the sacrament of communion (a thoroughly<br />

physical act which would involve touching, smelling, tasting, consuming, and eventually<br />

expelling the body of Jesus) the poet then has an excellent venue to present his case for<br />

why the body and soul together create the human and why he is justified in loving his<br />

physical life and why he wants it to continue on when the physical world ceases to be and<br />

he has long since died.<br />

In addition to the fact that the incarnation gives worth to the physical as well as to<br />

the spiritual, there is also the belief that the created can now approach the creator. If God<br />

became human and was dependent upon and was cared for by humans, and said that he<br />

was going ahead of his followers to prepare a place for them in heaven because they are<br />

now children of God, then his followers can likewise approach God and petition him as a<br />

child would a parent. This ability to approach and talk to God in a way that is sometimes<br />

combative serves Donne well in his poems. He can then argue, accuse, question, demand,<br />

and repent while talking to God without the worry that he is moving himself beyond grace,<br />

because he has been led to this position by God, by Jesus – by the Son of God who is the<br />

Son of Man.<br />

Finally, and more problematically, the inability to know with complete assurance<br />

what happens after death and the need to have a bodily resurrection which will also bring<br />

about perfect and unending communion of all creation between itself God, can bring about<br />

the desire to try to create ways, on one’s own, which might provide the guarantee that all<br />

that is hoped for will indeed come to pass. Donne illustrates relationships in the Songs and<br />

Sonnets that use incarnational, scriptural, and alchemical means to try to create and hold a<br />

lasting union between two lovers which can, at best, only be a temporary togetherness, and<br />

then some form of separation must occur. There is the idea that the imago dei of each<br />

person will allow for a small or incomplete incarnation and communion to exist between

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