John Donne, the Instant of Change, and the Time of the Body

In "The Sun Rising," John Donne pits the time of the living body against the "motions" of the sun that direct worldly time.¹ Why, the speaker asks the sun, should it think its "beames so reverend and strong?" (D, 166.11). After all, "I coulde ecclipse and cloude them with a wincke, / But that I would not lose her sight so Long" (D, 166.13–14). By asserting that he "coulde" eclipse the sun with a "wincke" were it not for a desire to keep his beloved in view, Donne attempts to create a lyric moment in which love evades the temporal regimes of both sun and body, a moment in which "Love, all alike, noe Season knowes, nor Clyme, / Nor houres, Dayes, Months, which are the raggs of Time" (D, 166.9–10). Acknowledging but passing up on the opportunity to "wincke" the sun away, Donne jokingly seeks to replace the temporal power of the sun's "motions" with the voluntary "motions" of his own body. The impossibility of this exercise is most obvious in the egotistical and comic confusion between the first-person perspective and a state of affairs pertaining in the world itself. Yet this impossibility is also manifest in the word "wincke," a term that could refer either to the voluntary closing of one's eyes or to the involuntary, constantly repeated act of nictitation.² Donne considers winking and then decides against it. But his beloved will nevertheless disappear, however briefly, behind eyelids that cannot help but close. Donne suggests that the time of the world—structured around the "motions" of the sun according to which "Schooleboyes" (D, 166.6), "Prentises" (D, 166.6), "Court huntsmen" (D, 166.7), and even the "King" (D, 166.7) organize their lives—is subtended by the unavoidable temporality of the body. The present moment is grounded in bodily presence.

Donne's obsession with the present moment is well known, but his habit of linking time to the living, sentient body has gone all but unexplored.³ Scholars such as Robert Ellrodt have argued that although Donne's focus "on the here and now" has some precedents in Roman elegy, in Francesco Petrarca, and in Philip Sidney, "Donne's arresting of the present tenuous instant is peculiar," something deeper than "a mere characteristic of his art."⁴ Indeed, Donne experiments repeatedly with representations of the present moment.⁵ He attempts to pause, slow down, or accelerate temporal passage. He works to discover eternity or aeviternity—an angelic state of being between time and timelessness—in the fleeting, ephemeral now. He strives to inhabit the eschatological moment when time itself will cease. In this essay, I argue that Donne grounds such temporal experiments in what I am calling the felt time of the body—in blinking eyes, beating hearts, and all of the myriad, nearly insensible events that take place within the recesses of the living body and generate a temporality peculiar to the body. For Donne, the embodied self changes just as quickly as the mutable world, a fact highlighted in The Second Anniversary, where lovers become rivers: "she" and "thou," who

        did begin to love, are neither now.You are both fluid, chang'd since yesterday […]So flowes her face, and thine eies[.]⁶

Heraclitus is here dressed in Petrarchan garb; you never kiss the same lover twice. Subject to the laws of motion that govern all physical entities, sentient bodies flow, changing in time. Yet as the image of the winking eye in "The Sun Rising" suggests, although the time of the body must intersect with the time of physics in general, it is nevertheless distinct—precisely because it is felt.

Throughout his career, Donne sought to invent a rhetorical decorum adequate to the lived time of bodily change. In this essay, I reconstruct how Donne thought his way inside changes too swift for human beings to perceive.⁷ I take as my guiding thread Donne's exploration of a puzzle from the ancient Greek physics of time known as the "instant of change."⁸ The crux of...