Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV - Batter my heart, three person'd God

Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV - Batter my heart, three person'd God

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you

As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, 'and bend

Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.

I, like an usurpt towne, t'another due,

Labor to 'admit you, but Oh, to no end,

Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue,

Yet dearely'I love you, and would be lov'd faine,

But am betroth'd unto your enemy,

Divorce me, 'untie, or breake that knot againe

Take me to you, imprison me, for I

Except you 'enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. --John Donne

The analogous language of romantic passion ("I am my Beloved's and my Beloved is mine" [Song Sol. 2.16, New International Version]) and intellectual paradox ("Whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it" [Matt. 10.39, NIV]) has always seemed natural to those seeking to understand and speak of spiritual mysteries. Even so, John Donne's image of the Divine Rape in the "Holy Sonnet XIV," by which the victim becomes, or remains, chaste is at first startling; we are not accustomed to such spiritual intensity.[1] Previous explications have attempted to downplay this figure; for example, Thomas J. Steele, SJ [The Explicator 29 (1971): 74], maintains that the "sexual meaning" is "a secondary meaning" and "probably not meant to be explicitly affirmed." Moreover, George Knox [The Explicator 15 (1956): 2] writes that the poem does not "require our imagining literally the relation between man and God in heterosexual terms" and that "the traditions of Christian mysticism allow such symbolism of ...

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... as he tears down, possesses as he frees, is as honorable as passionate--that is, in him all paradoxes find their supra-rational resolution, resolution not only presented in the imagery of the closing couplet, but reflected in the sudden tranquillity of the completely regular iambic pentameter.

Thus Donne links content to form throughout the "Holy Sonnet XIV." His aesthetic presentation of the relationships "implicit in the ancient theological conceit of the righteous soul's marriage to God"[3] is therefore doubly moving.

NOTES

1. John Donne, "Holy Sonnet XIV," John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (New York: Penguin, 1984) 314-315.

2. William Karrigan, "The Fearful Accommodations of John Donne," John Donne and the Seventeenth-Century Metaphysical Poets, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986) 44.

3. Karrigan, 40.