Being Through Becoming : RethinkingDonne’s Process of Sublimation

Abstract

Being Through Becoming : Rethinking Donne’s Process of Sublimation

This study examines the journey that in Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon S. Lucy’s Day, being the shortest day,” the speaker achieves his desired sublimation. It is epitomized as the process enacted in relationship between full being and becoming, physical love and spiritual love. In the face of his beloved’s death the speaker is confronted with the issue of how he can achieve a new identity and be transformed to full being. To solve this problem he chooses his own quest of attaining the quintessence from the first nothing, not something or ordinary nothing, but a way unlike the traditional method. The speaker discovers his course of sublimation through the valiant strategy of dissolving his physical body. Interestingly enough, this approach is bound up with the process of leading to full being through becoming. Because he has experienced his own way of rebirth, and at the same time other lovers’ mode of existence too, the speaker understands completely the self-shaping way he himself should take. He concludes that physical love contains a seed of sacred spiritual refinement and that becoming as the world of change holds an innate compelling power growing directly into full being as the ultimate purpose of sublimation. The speaker responds to his “nocturnal” state by spiritually re-creating himself and reaching final refinement on the basis of this world of becoming.