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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 57
and wine, the Word become flesh that is the conceptual heart of Christianity – is not unlike
the violations of decorum in which Donne allows sacramental topoi to inform and be
contaminated by profane texts’, 42 yet as the reader looks at the ‘profane texts’ the
contamination is similar to the contamination experienced by the lover as she, through text,
takes in the poet. So it is not enough to see the poem as only being sacramental (a view of
the poem that has been well discussed, especially by Theresa M. DiPasquale), 43 but it is
also one that is scriptural. In this poem the poet is God because he gives her a sacrament
of remembrance, and a text that appears to promise his return. However, the poem does
not end at the third stanza; rather, the poet continues in his musings, and ends not on a note
of triumphal return, but in the despair of an impotent sacrament and text.
Although the poem begins with confidence that the name in the window will
suffice as a means to impart the poet into the lover, guaranteeing with it a triumphant
return, as the poem continues, the poet acknowledges that his lack of true physical
presence may be eclipsed by another suitor who can be physically present with his love. At
first the confidence remains, though there is a sense of pleading to be found in the verses
that follow.
So, since this name was cut
When Love and Grief their exaltation had,
No door ’gainst this name’s influence shut:
As much more loving as more sad
’Twill make thee; and thou shouldst, till I return,
Since I die daily, daily mourn. (37-42)
42 The Poetry of Immanence, p. 23.
43 Literature and Sacrament, pp. 201-04.