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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 47
drifting above their bodies, rather he forces the souls back into the bodies because it is
through the unified soul and body that an individual can find communion with another. It
is a poem that seems to support a Neoplatonic ideal of a rarefied love between the essences
of two lovers unencumbered by their bodies, but as Raman Selden says ‘“The Ecstasy”
cannot be labelled unequivocally “Neoplatonic”, or “Christian” without being grossly
oversimplified: its poetic idiom acquires its distinctive contours from the pressures of
interacting metaphors. A close reading of the poem suggests that the metaphor of
incarnation is structurally determining at the deepest level’, 23 a point reiterated by Felicia
Wright McDuffie. 24
So the reader finds that ‘Human nature is itself inherently mixed,
after all, the soul necessarily dwelling in the body, coming to know and love other souls
through the body’s senses’. 25
In addition to the incarnational work of bodies needing the indwelling of the spirit
in order to function properly in a relational manner, Donne also explicitly uses the
language of alchemy to describe the pursuit of a higher knowledge or experience being
sought by these lovers. Walker and Abraham have both argued convincingly that the
actions described in the ‘The Ecstasy’ mirror the process by which it was believed that
alchemists could create a philosopher’s stone. 26
As Abraham reminds us, the
philosopher’s stone ‘could transmute metal into gold, or earthly man into divine’. 27
It is
this second aspect of the philosopher’s stone that Donne is interested in with ‘The
Ecstasy’. He seeks, by way of the philosopher’s stone, to possess the divine power needed
to create the incarnation of incorporeal into the corporeal; however, the poet’s use of
alchemical imagery in the poem is not an affirmation of alchemy, rather it is another
23 ‘John Donne’s “Incarnational Conviction”’, p. 64.
24 To Our Bodies Turn We Then, p. 8.
25 John Donne and the Rhetorics, p. 205.
26 Lyndy Abraham, ‘“The Lovers and the Tomb”: Alchemical Emblems in Shakespeare, Donne, and
Marvell’, Emblematica 5.2 (1991), 301-20; Julia M. Walker, ‘John Donne’s “The Extasie” as an Alchemical
Process’, English Language Notes 20.1 (1982), 1-8.
27 ‘“The Lovers and the Tomb”’, p. 302.