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

Donne’s Incarnating Words 84
Weaker I am, woe is mee, and worse then you,
You have not sinn’d nor need be timorous,
But wonder at a greater wonder, for to us
Created nature doth these things subdue,
But their Creator, whom sin, nor nature tyed,
For us, his Creatures, and his foes, hath dyed. (9-14)
Donne admits that it is his sin, humanity’s sin, that has caused creation to suffer, and so
why must the creatures suffer, and since they are unable to sin, why must they be
subservient to humans? Falleness creates disorder, but Donne points to ‘their Creator,
whom sin, nor nature tyed, | For us, his Creatures, and his foes, hath dyed’. It is important
to note here that Donne has asked a question that he is unable to answer (another divine
mystery?), and this puzzle points him back to Jesus and the work of the incarnational
sacrifice; however, in this construction, the beasts are ‘his Creatures’, but humanity is ‘his
foes’. Donne cannot explain the hierarchy in nature, but he can acknowledge the disparity
between humans and beasts as is found in the responsibility for sin and the death of the
‘Creator’. Nature is fallen through sin, but it is redeemed through Jesus, and while
humanity may forget or overlook this from time to time, nature has been so strongly
imprinted by this divine drama of loss and redemption that it cannot help but show the
work of the supernatural in the physical realm of the world. Donne makes this explicit in
his meditation on the image of the cross, ‘Of the Cross’, where all of creation reflects and
mirrors the image of the cross and presents a constant reminder of the work performed for
nature by God, but the poem also implies that this image is constantly overlooked by the
world. The unifying work of God through the Incarnation seems to only have been
overlooked by humanity, and there is a conflict between the submissive movements of