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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 45
So thy love may be my love’s sphere,
Just such disparity
As is ’twixt air and angels’ purity
’Twixt women’s love and men’s will ever be.
Much of the trouble in these lines has arisen from the fact that the images and conceits
used regarding air and angels are obscure and up for debate. More recently, attempts to
figure out the exact relationship between the poet, the lover, the air, and the angel have
taken place in an article written by Peter De Sa Wiggins, which was then responded to by
R. V. Young. 21 Although they differ as to which characters take on which characteristics,
they are both equally assured of the incarnational meaning of the imagery found in the
poem’s discussion. Regardless of which character is the air and which the angel, what is
generally agreed upon is the idea that angels and air are both pure entities, though of
differing degrees of purity. Furthermore, as has been pointed out by A. J. Smith, there was
a Renaissance belief that angels manifested their presence physically by way of taking on
air and using this substance to give them form. 22
Therefore, this image returns to the
initial discussion in the poem, and the reader finds that the angel must once again take on
physical form in order to act; however, where the initial image was of Love needing to
take a physical body in order to interact with the poet, here an angel incarnates itself
through air, so the poet (or lover) is becoming incarnate through the substance of the other.
In this, the incarnation is the indwelling of one lover in another, and the relationship is
moved from two separate and distinct beings into a union in which the two have become
one. Yet, there is still the issue of the ‘disparity’ ‘’Twixt women’s love and men’s’, which
means that this is a frustrated union. While Donne is able to overcome the divide between
21 Peter De Sa Wiggins, ‘“Aire and Angels”: Incarnations of Love’, English Literary Renaissance 12.1
(1982), 87-101; R. V. Young, ‘Angels in “Aire and Angels”’.
22 A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: The Complete English Poems (London, 1996), p.354, note for lines 23-4.