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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 71
attempts at union are entirely profane and idolatrous because they do not seek to bring
each other closer to God, but closer to each other, and the lasting union that is grasped at is
not a union with the divine, but the use of the divine for a worldly union. They worship
each other and themselves, and they seek union human to human, the divine only exists to
provide the language and template for their love. The attempts at human transcendence
then continue to fail. But as the reader turns to the sacred poetry that Donne wrote, there is
an interesting play with the body and soul that takes place between Donne and the
Incarnation. It is in the Incarnation that Donne finds a divine body that he can love,
commune with, express himself into, and receive into himself. It is in the sacred verses
that Donne finds the means to use the language of human love as a means of finding union
with the incarnational Christ, rather than the Incarnation as a language for human love.
However, there is a problem for Donne, because, while he believes in God and the
resurrection of the body and soul, he desires a guarantee that he will be amongst those who
are raised to life eternal and not cast into oblivion in hell.
Donne’s search for unity between individuals and his attempt to appropriate aspects
of the Divine in order to attempt to create these acts of unification, which were previously
discussed with regard to the Songs and Sonnets, find their religious counterpart in the
Divine Poems. It is in the Divine Poems that the reader is shown a Donne whose fear of
being alone takes on its greatest urgency when he anxiously contemplates how to
guarantee his salvation, because, as Donne sees it, hell is the separation of the individual
from God, or as Charlotte Clutterbuck says of the ‘Holy Sonnets’, ‘all the anguishes . . are
subsumed into one overwhelming anguish – the anguished desire for a loving God who is
always just out of reach’. 59
For Donne, to be completely isolated from God is to be
isolated from all other creation, and the true damnation, the true horror of hell, is to be
59 Charlotte Clutterbuck, Encounters with God in Medieval and Early Modern English Poetry (Aldershot,
2005), p. 138.