Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one double string;
So to entergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

These lines come from John Donne’s elegy “The Ecstasy,” a metaphysical love poem likely written in the 1590s–early 1600s and circulated in manuscript before posthumous print publication. The poem stages two lovers sitting together, hands “entergrafted,” their gazes interlaced, while their souls seem to leave their bodies and converse. Donne uses contemporary ideas about vision (the notion that “eye-beams” connect lovers) and the Renaissance language of grafting and propagation to dramatize an intense, quasi-mystical union that is nevertheless grounded in physical presence. The quoted passage occurs early, establishing the lovers’ bodily stillness and the charged intimacy of touch and sight.

Donne depicts erotic union as beginning not with overt action but with a subtle circuitry of sight and touch: their “eye-beams” twist into a single cord, and their hands are “entergrafted” like living branches. The lovers’ “pictures in our eyes” suggests that each carries an image of the other, so that reproduction (“propagation”) is first imagined as a mutual imprinting rather than literal procreation. The passage exemplifies Donne’s metaphysical method—fusing bodily detail with abstract speculation—to argue that love is neither purely spiritual nor purely physical. The lovers’ still bodies become the necessary medium through which a deeper, soul-level communion can occur.