"My Name Engrav'd Herein": John Donne's Sacramental Temporality

Abstract

A new belief in time as more fully successive and teleological emerges in conjunction with the sacramental hermeneutics of the Reformation. No longer invested in the synchronism of the doctrine of real presence, or in the icons and relics that purported to figure Christ, early modern humanists embraced absence in place of presence, past in place of present. Protestant sacramental theory, specifically Calvin's reinterpretation of the Eucharist, similarly revises the early modern understanding of time. This revision is complicated and even challenged in English poetry, with John Donne's poetry exemplifying this dynamic. By eroticizing the sacrament, as apparent in "Valediction: of My Name on a Window" and "The Relique," Donne reworks the relationship between abstinence and eros, absence and presence, and diachronicity and synchronicity that had been created by the schism within Christianity. Donne's poetry produces absence as a mode of presence, rather than as an opposing term. These poems also illuminate Donne's critique of Reformation temporality as contained within the very successive temporal mode that aims to disavow it.

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