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

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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.
Donne’s Incarnating Words 48 method of highlighting the incarnational requirements of the communion of body and soul between the lovers. As Edgar Hill Duncan says of Donne’s use of alchemical imagery, ‘the value of the concept for Donne lies in its aptness for illustrating, explaining, or intensifying the idea which it embodies or to which it is juxtaposed’. 28 The ‘The Ecstasy’ begins with the lovers seated on ‘a pregnant bank’. (2) Their hands ‘were firmly cemented’, (5) and With a fast balm which thence did spring; Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string. So t’ingraft our hands, as yet, Was all our means to make us one, And pictures on our eyes to get Was all our propagation. As ‘twixt two equal armies Fate Suspends uncertain victory, Our souls (which to advance their state Were gone out) hung ‘twixt her and me. And whilst our souls negotiate there, We like sepulchral statues lay; (6-18) 28 Edgar Hill Duncan, ‘Donne’s Alchemical Figures’, ELH 9.4 (1942), 262.
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Postscript 244 POSTSCRIPT The parad
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Bibliography 246 BIBLIOGRAPHY Abrah
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Bibliography 248 Bush, Douglas. Eng
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Bibliography 250 Creeds of the Chur
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Bibliography 260 Kessner, Carole.
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Bibliography 274 Siegfried, B. R.
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