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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 50
This cry relates to the reader that there is a pain but an importance in returning. They have
reached a form of union, but they are not complete, just as the reader sees the declaration
that ‘they are not we’, the bodies are not the union, but the bodies are the ‘spheres’, and as
the spheres move through the heavens, so must these heavenly beings move through their
spheres. A. J. Smith sees in this that ‘The tone of their outcry speaks of a grievous
deprivation while their bodies remain inactive’. 29
And so there must be a return to their
bodies, as the poem says:
‘As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can,
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot which makes us man,
‘So must pure lovers’ souls descend
T’affections and to faculties
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.
‘T’our bodies turn we, then, that so
Weak men on love revealed may look:
Love’s mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book. (61-72)
29 A. J. Smith, The Metaphysics of Love (Cambridge, 1991), p. 191.