Alchemical augmentation and primordial fire in Donne's "The Dissolution"

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2005 by Roberta Albrecht

Donne's male lover complains that "those things whereof I consist, hereby / In me abundant grow, and burdenous, / And nourish not" (lines 6-8). Abundance has been understood as a reference to the alchemical flood, when the black waters of dissolution threaten to cover all. (19) But "nourish" is also a code indicating the process whereby matter is eventually brought to the stage called rubedo, when the crowned king emerges from his grave. (20) The emblem for this final stage is the phoenix, which traces its etymological origins back to Phoenician crimson (see Figure 2).

We should not be surprised to discover the phoenix lurking behind Donne's argument, for as emblem, it embodies Heraclitus's idea that the world is "born from fire and again resolved into fire in fixed cycles to all eternity." (21) As code, "nourish" anticipates the rubedo because attached to the alchemical phoenix is the nourishing worm, which feeds the chick from the deathbed of ashes. (22) But before the chick can arise, its parent must die. "The Dissolution" is Donne's way of poking around in these ashes in order to discover how to die.

Alchemists generally thought semen to contain a worm that forms the foetus. (23) However, the process of dissolution is here, as elsewhere, complicated by the presence of two worms: the devouring worm of corruption and "the nourishing worm of life which feeds the alchemical chick." (24) Donne's invention is to attribute this latter worm to the female agent, whereby resurrection occurs. Lurking beneath his text is the familiar alchemical emblem of mercurial worms in the alembic (Figure 3).

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

His sermon on the churching of the Countess of Bridgewater, delivered either in 1621 or in 1623, provides another example of distinctions between male and female agents in the process of dissolution: "I shall say to corruption, Thou art my father, and to the worme, Thou art my Mother, and my sister." (25) The occasion for Donne's sermon was to celebrate the safe delivery of a son, whose birth served as consolation for two (if not three) sons already in the grave. If the sermon was preached in May or June of 1623, the Earl and Countess of Bridgewater had just buried their then only son the month before. (26) Naturally, the image of the grave loomed large over those gathered for this churching, and naturally, Donne used that image in order to express the process whereby resurrection takes place. What seems to be Donne's invention, however, is the idea of masculine corruption joining with feminine nourishment in order to accomplish this miracle.

As in the sermon, Donne's poem contrasts the male impulse to die with the female impulse to revive. The images in both the sermon and the poem imply a female phallus. Since the very nature of the phoenix is bisexual, it follows that the lovers in Donne's poem will be the same. So far, the overstuffed man has complained of his wretched state; why he is in this condition is a matter yet to be studied. Levine says only that "the man has served to 'smother' himself by adding to his unreleased store of sperm." (27) But he fails to explain how this scenario occurs. One logical explanation (at least in terms of the logic of alchemy) is that the male lover cannot die because his "losse" is prevented by the female lover's "repaire" (line 13). Here Donne defines the two-fold nature of fire.