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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 41
incarnational theology’. 15
As the chapter moves on to the ‘Divine Poems’, the use of
incarnational imagery takes on greater significance as it is often the vehicle through which
Donne tries to ensure his redemption and salvation; the greater significance is that in God
he will have eternal unity with self, others, and God.
The reason for beginning the discussion of Donne’s use of incarnational imagery in
his poetry with the Songs and Sonnets is twofold. Firstly, though few of Donne’s poems
can be dated for certain, it is generally agreed that most of the poems in the Songs and
Sonnets were composed before those in the Divine Poems, so by treating the Songs and
Sonnets first, there is a rough sense of chronology provided in this discussion of Donne’s
use of the incarnation. Secondly, Donne’s use of incarnational imagery in the Songs and
Sonnets informs and anticipates many of the ideas found in the Divine Poems. Therefore,
there will be a cyclical nature to the discussion which mirrors much of Donne’s
presentation of the Incarnation, in that in seeing the divine in the erotic and the erotic in
the divine, this chapter will show that the soul must exist in the flesh and that the flesh
must then be carried back up into the soul, or by putting it yet another way, the divine must
move into the human and the human must be taken into the divine.
With the Songs and Sonnets, this chapter will begin by looking at the positive
incarnational imagery found in ‘Air and Angels’, ‘The Ecstasy’, and ‘A Valediction: of
My Name in the Window’. These poems show the Incarnation working through a deified
Love taking on flesh as the poet’s beloved, two lovers’ souls needing to act through their
bodies in order to experience love, and the transubstantiation of a name on a mirror as an
attempt to create real presence in lieu of a departed lover with these three poems using
incarnational language to convey a unity of poet and his beloved. ‘Twickenham Garden’
and ‘A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day’ will then be used as a counterpoint to this
15 Raymond-Jean Frontain, ‘Introduction: “Make all this All”’, in Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances M.
Malpezzi (eds.), John Donne’s Religious Imagination (Conway, AK, 1995), p. 5.