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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 72
irretrievably alone. It is as Donne tries to find eternal security in God that the reader sees
him using various techniques to negotiate with God; the reader observes him use an
incarnational understanding of a Christian’s relationship with God to debate with God, and
at times even tells God what to do. Even the famous invitation to rape that occurs in ‘Holy
Sonnet XIV: Batter my heart’, while seeming like an act of submission is only Donne
being submissive to God if God submits to Donne’s calls for his salvation. Helen C.
White puts it nicely when she states that, when it comes to Donne’s religious verse, ‘It is
of himself alone that he is thinking as he argues with himself, strives to reassure himself,
cries to his God for mercy, in happier moments gives thanks to his Saviour for his
patience’. 60
There is often a power struggle between Donne and God, and the struggle is
in terms of Donne’s need for communion between self and God and all other life. This is
not to say that the Divine Poems does not contain pieces that reflect a Christian who
accepts God’s authority in his life; rather, the poems display a complicated and complex
relationship between a believer and God, and this is one of the strengths of the collection
as devotional verse, because it does show the conflicts and contradictions that would be
involved in a relationship between a human and the divine.
Donne is using the verses in the Divine Poems as constructions that will provide
him with documents that he can present to God as a means to guarantee his salvation; as
Charlotte Clutterbuck argues, ‘Much of the tension in Donne’s poetry arises from his
depiction of the individual’s desire to claim for himself the promises of salvation
history’. 61
It is in these attempts to claim ‘the promises of salvation history’ that Donne
uses the Incarnation and God made flesh as a way in which to argue for the unity of the
human (body and soul) with the divine, because it is in the Incarnation that this has already
been accomplished. The use of the Incarnation of Jesus and its physical and spiritual
60 Helen C. White, The Metaphysical Poets (New York, 1956), p. 124.
61 Encounters With God, p. 115.