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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 64
compare the taste of his tears to the tears of those they love, ‘For all are false that taste not
just like mine’. (22) However, the fidelity that is contained within the taste of his tears is
no source of comfort because he says that none will taste like his as ‘none is true but she’.
(26) Once again the sacrament of Communion is found to be a curse when used by Donne.
It is not an incarnation of Christ to provide nourishment and comfort to believers; rather it
is a polluting substance that curses those who consume it because they realise their lover is
untrue. The negative imagery of the incarnation is not only found to express loss and
separation, it is found to pollute everything. He is now, through his anti-incarnation, not
the creator and saviour but the destroyer and killer.
These themes of anti-incarnational and death-bringing actions of the poet can also
be found in ‘A Nocturnal upon Saint Lucy’s Day being the Shortest Day’, a poem that is
similar to ‘Twickenham Garden’. In ‘A Nocturnal’, the poet takes on attributes of power
that are relegated to the divine (especially those of creation, recreation, and redemption),
and through the language of incarnation and alchemy, shows himself to be inadequate for
the task at hand. The use of incarnational and alchemical imagery in the poem has led
Raman Selden to describe it as a poem which ‘embodies the negative counterpart of that
incarnational conviction, which is expressed in its most positive form in “The Ecstasy”’. 53
And this holds true, because as the reader moves through ‘A Nocturnal’, he finds that the
imagery of two lovers being united is not one of unmoving pregnancy, but of constantly
moving death.
As in ‘Twickenham Garden’, ‘A Nocturnal’ is situated in nature in the dead of
winter. As the poem begins, the reader is greeted with the following stanza that reads as
being very similar to sentiments found in ‘Twickenham’:
53 ‘John Donne’s “Incarnational Conviction”’, p. 68.