That John Donne is deeply concerned with bodies is without question. Displacement of courtly distance by sensuality consummation, and even a post-coital tone place the body at the center of his love poetry.¹ From classic arguments like Helen Gardner's reading of Platonism and Aristotelianism in "The Extasie/' to John Carey's account of Donne as a visceral cartographer, the history of Donne criticism has always validated Blaise Greteman's assertion that his "engagement with bodies forms a consistent creative thread."² The most recent turn in this inter- pretative history has historicized a specifically early modern body: one set within an ecology of membranes and humors. It is more permeable and fluid than the enclosed locus of physical se If-identity assumed by later centuries.³ Building on the pioneering work of critics like Michael Schoenfeldt and Gail Kern Paster, the complexity and flexibility of the humoral scheme; the role of diet, exercise and regulation; and the flesh's porosity to the outside are all now familiar concepts.⁴ Nancy Sellek made an early gesture in applying this kind of body to Donne's poetry, arguing that a flux-like corporeality was no pathology, but a datum for an early modern embodiment that expressed high degrees of interpénétration and interdependence. As she suggests, "humoral theory can ... suggest a field-based identity: who you are is determined by your physical context as well as by the unstable content of your body, and changes as a result of that involvement with context'.⁵