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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 70
This hour her Vigil and her Eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is. (42-45)
The Songs and Sonnets contain poems of love that lament the lovers’ inability to
create a lasting union. There is always the possibility of unfaithfulness, the reality of
departing from one another, and the inevitability of death. Although love in Donne’s
poems requires a body through which it can act, it is a mortal body which must cease to
exist in its present form at some point in time or another, and so Donne must now look to
the resurrection of the body and the soul as a means to transcend death and time, and he
must look to God to ensure the possibility of this permanent resurrection which will allow
for perfect and unending unity between God and all of creation. With this in mind then,
Achsah Guibbory’s statement is helpful
These love lyrics embraced the positive valuing of the body and love that could be
seen as represented by the Incarnation, while distinguishing the transcendent
passion of his lovers (as it integrates the spiritual and physical dimensions of
existence) from the exclusively sensual love of the profane, idolatrous world. 58
This comment offers an insight into how the Incarnation plays a role in the attempt to
bring the bodies and souls of two lovers together, but Donne is unable to find a permanent
transcendence through his attempts at eternal human relationships. Guibbory is correct in
seeing the use of the Incarnation as a way to attempt transcendent love, but she is incorrect
because the attempts for transcendent love between two people must exist in the sensual.
Furthermore, it is the sacred and transcendent that is taken into lovers as their incarnational
58 ‘Fear of “loving more”’, pp. 212-13.