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

Introduction 33
humanity through the flesh and the word allows these poets to meditate, through words,
upon flesh and find God.
In the poetry, both secular and sacred, of John Donne the use of words to try to
create lasting unity between flesh and spirit – his, his and his lovers’, his and God’s – can
be understood as using the language, imagery, and theology of the Incarnation to try to
overcome separation. His poetry appropriates the Word for his flesh and the redemption of
his body and soul as he attempts to guarantee permanent relationships both on the earth
and in the heavens, and he desires these relationships to be both physical and spiritual.
In the work of Aemilia Lanyer, the reader finds that meditation upon the trial and
death of Jesus becomes a locus through which to understand one’s place in society, and
that place is one of equality for all humanity. Lanyer finds that the life of Jesus justifies
women and places them on equal ground with men. She understands and presents the
Incarnation in such a way that one must view the actions of Jesus – and society’s response
to them – as also being the actions of God, and in this she recognises that Christ’s Passion
was not just a tale that tells believers how they were saved, but also how they must live.
She finds that when God became human, every human action he performed and every
action performed to him became a theological statement, and so her statement in her poetry
becomes the recognition of Jesus’s response to the sexes and their response to him – the
Word made flesh remakes society through the words of her verse.
George Herbert recognises the access that the Incarnation gives him to God, and so
he can often be found in The Temple conversing with God as he would a fellow human.
There is reverence given to God because of his exalted status, but there is also the
acknowledgment that as the Son came down and was flesh in the person of Jesus, so too
his rising in the flesh exalted the flesh to heaven. Furthermore, the Gospels contain the
conversations of Jesus with his family, friends, followers, and enemies, which are then a