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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 40
In Donne’s hands the doctrine of the Incarnation becomes an active symbol in both
his secular and sacred verse. While the Incarnation in the sacred verse is hardly
unexpected, it is Donne’s much discussed habit of the erotic in the sacred and the sacred in
the erotic that has been given most recent critical attention. The fluidity in his poetry
which transgresses these boundaries between the sacred and the profane has been
remarked upon by Robert Whalen when he states that ‘these poems are exemplary of the
Incarnation’s claim not only to imbue creation with divinity, to invest sublunary realities
with celestial significance, but also to subject the Logos to a body, mutability, and
death’. 13
And yet it is the death of God in the crucifixion of Christ, without the
annihilation of God, that can give Donne confidence in his determination to use the
Incarnation’s underlying theme of permanent unification of separate parts, whether he uses
it in his erotic desires for union with a lover or in his devotional desires for union of his
body and soul in the Trinity.
As this chapter begins to look at the incarnational nature of John Donne’s verse,
what becomes apparent is Donne’s placing himself, or others, in incarnational roles in
order to examine his fears of separation, a concept that is briefly commented on, though
not developed, by J. Mark Halstead. 14
In the Songs and Sonnets this can be seen by
Donne’s use of positive incarnational imagery when the union of two individuals is
realised and negative incarnational imagery when lamenting a separation that cannot be
overcome. This sought-after union, the combining of the erotic with the sacred, has been
described by Raymond-Jean Frontain as ‘the recognition that love is not polarized between
body and soul, or between the erotic and the spiritual, as it is in Petrarchan and neoplatonic
thought, but is capable of uniting the two, the physical being the typological adumbration
of the spiritual, in an understanding of human sexuality that depends heavily upon
13 The Poetry of Immanence, p. 59.
14 J. Mark Halstead, ‘John Donne and the Theology of Incarnation’, in Liam Gearson (ed.), English
Literature, Theology and the Curriculum (London, 1999), p. 166-7.