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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 55
’Tis much, that glass should be
As all-confessing and through-shine as I;
’Tis more, that it shows thee to thee,
And clear reflects thee to thine eye.
But all such rules love’s magic can undo:
Here you see me, and I am you. (7-12)
The incarnating work begins as the woman looks through her window and cannot help but
see the name of her lover. Though the window may cast up her own reflection, it is in this
reflection that the lover is combined with her, because he is now within her, and he is her.
The ‘[w]ord [is] made flesh’ through her eyes, and she is completely herself and him. In
this she is both the incarnation of their love, and the believer taking in the sacrament of the
poet to her, and he is transubstantiated into her, a point that Michael Schoenfeldt briefly
touches on when he states of the poem, that it ‘attempts to find some sort of material
correlative that will defeat the psychological devastations of material absence. The
speaker fantasizes that engraving his name in the window of his mistress can create a kind
of real presence, in his absence, in his mistress’s mind’, 39 yet, despite the religious
language, as Targoff notes, ‘his purpose is not to create a spiritual bond, but a physical
union’. 40 This physical bond that is being pursued takes on greater significance as the name
that is sacramentally presented to the lover by the poet is described in language that
mirrors Jesus’s words to his followers. In the third stanza Donne writes,
As no one point nor dash,
39 Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘Thinking Through the Body’, Graat 25 (2002), 29.
40 John Donne, Body and Soul, p. 68.