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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 65
’Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s:
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk:
The general balm th’hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interred; yet all these seem to laugh
Compared with me, who am their epitaph. (1-9)
The poet is now seeing dead creation as joyous in comparison to him. He is then in a
worse state than is found in ‘Twickenham’, and yet he continues to offer instruction to
lovers. While ‘Twickenham’ had the poet instructing lovers to taste his tears, here in ‘A
Nocturnal’ they are instructed to
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, as at the next Spring,
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy (10-13)
No longer are lovers invited to a parodic sacrament, instead they are entreated to study
what the poet has become, which is ‘every dead thing’ and through whom ‘Love wrought
new alchemy’. The ‘dead thing’ that he is and the ‘new alchemy’ that is ‘wrought’ in him
prove to be acts not of creation, but of destruction and annihilation. The following lines
and stanzas move through alchemical and supernatural acts that do not bring forth life and