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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 66
divinity but reverse creation to the point that the world, the poet, and his lover, cease to
exist. In this he becomes the anti-incarnate, the anti-creator, and the anti-philosopher’s
stone. The poet embodies an anti-incarnational form to such a degree that creation is
overturned and reversed, so that through the separation of himself and his beloved the
reader is moved backwards from creation to a state of chaos and eventually nihilo. As
Raymond-Jean Fronatain says, ‘The speaker becomes the antithesis of the creating Word
of God that first animated the universe; he is “Of the first nothing, the Elixer”, the
alchemical element needed to effect the process of de-creation’. 54
Through this portrayal
of the poet’s reverse incarnation, we also see Donne using alchemical imagery to describe
a failed ability to create life through the same process used successfully in ‘The Ecstasy’.
The combination of alchemy and incarnation in negative modes are intertwined as
the poem continues. The poet writes that Love has created
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations and lean emptiness.
He ruined me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death – things which are not. (15-18)
Rather than using metals and the earth to create an alchemical ‘quintessence’, Love has
done so from ‘nothingness’. Furthermore, this is not the ‘only begotten son’ of Love who
brings forth life and redemption, instead we see a man ‘re-begot | Of absence, darkness,
death – things which are not.’ Here the poet is using the language of Christian salvation, of
being reborn with Christ into new life with God; however, his rebirth is the antirebegetting
as he becomes what is not. Instead of becoming a part of the incarnation
54 ‘Introduction: “Make all this All”’, p. 4.