Bodily Formations and Reading Strategies in John Donne’s Metempsychosis

Abstract

This essay argues that the textual/sexual ethos of Metempsychosis is most evidenced in Donne's use of rhetorical strategies and mnemonic devices to engage the reader. Metempsychosis is about sex, poetry and ethics, and incorporates notions of both spiritual transcendence and physical immanence. In this poem Donne narrates the soul's various erotic exploits in its metamorphic journey "from her first making when she was that apple which Eve eat [sic], to this time when she is he, whose life you shall find in the end of this book" (Epistle 34-9). The strategies of reading Donne inscribes in Metempsychosis encourage the ideal (male) reader to recognize the soul's appetitive bodily exploits as part of his own bestial heritage. This recognition, which depends on the reader's acceptance of the interdependence of body and soul in the formation of self, has salvationist possibilities. However Donne's depiction of the soul's physical adventures manifests a deep, if ambivalent, commitment to the sexual body that challenges, but does not obliterate, the spiritual ethos of his poem.