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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 61
As the reader now finds, this garden ‘may thoroughly be thought | True Paradise’, and so it
is in an Eden where the poet begins his corruption. The poet here does not identify as the
Devil, as he is not ‘the serpent’, rather he introduces ‘the serpent’ into ‘Paradise’ and so is
a ‘self-traitor’. This act of treason takes place with language that shows the corruption of
God’s food of life into the poet’s offerings of death. First there is the ‘spider love which
transubstantiates all’. As Robin Robbins points out in his notes to the poem, spiders were
‘supposed to convert [their] food to a powerful poison’, 45 which in turn shows that the
‘food of life’, or ‘balms’, the poet seeks do not bring forth life through divine love
changing the elements of the ‘balms’ into a divine, incarnate being, rather his ‘spider love’
changes the ‘balms’ into poison. He does not transubstantiate bread into the body of God
to bring spiritual nourishment, instead he ‘transubstantiates all’, including this garden, a
symbol of life, to death.
The next image is that of the poet being able to ‘convert manna to gall’. And while
this reference is most often glossed as turning the sweet manna into the bitter gall, there
are also biblical references here that not only show a movement from sweet to bitter, but
once again reveal the poet converting a gift from God that is life-giving into a cursed
offering for death. Manna was the food in the Old Testament that God gave the Israelites
while they were wandering in the desert, and in the New Testament, Jesus identifies
himself as manna given to the Israelites. 46 So Jesus is both the Eucharist and manna. He is
the sustenance that the devoted need for their spiritual life, and as Jesus ties himself to the
bread and the manna, the poet in ‘Twickenham Garden’ identifies himself as the corrupter
of this divine food. He is the transubstantiating ‘spider love’, and he is also the ‘gall’
offered to Jesus as he hung on the cross at the point of redemption for all humanity. And it
45 The Complete Poems of John Donne, p. 254.
46 John 6:35