Right now I am sitting in my dorm room. Now, I know, that is a pretty boring place to be, but there is freedom here. I haven’t showered yet this morning. I am still only in my underwear. Best of all, however, is the fact that I have access to all sorts of free food and drink. I am currently jamming to Eisley’s album “Room Noises.” It is excellent.
In my British Literature class we read the above poem, “Holy Sonnet 14” by John Donne. It is fast becoming my favorite poem ever, which is saying quite a lot. What I really wanted to do here is go through the poem and explain just how awesome and amazing it is. I am afraid that I am about to get fairly technical with the poem, so if such things bore you, you might want to move on to bigger and better things.
Here is the text of the poem:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
The poem begins with a command addressed to none other than all three persons of the trinity. This, in itself, is interesting. He is ordering God to do something. It is not a request, it is a demand. I think this betrays, and we will discover this later in the poem, the need that Donne has to submit to God. If Donne is giving God a command, then something is wrong. Donne is not fully submitted to God’s will. The nature of this command is also of note. He orders God to batter his heart. He emphasizes that all that God does currently is knock, breathe, and shine on his heart in an effort to mend it. Now, these three actions correspond to the three persons of the trinity. God the Father knocks on his heart. God the Spirit, the breath of life, breathes on his heart. God the Son, light of the world, shines on his heart. Note that these actions are done by God in an effort to mend that which is torn or broken that is, Donne’s heart. In Donne’s mind, however, these gentle actions of knocking, breathing, and shining are not sufficient to accomplish the end goal that is, Donne’s full and complete submission to God. The next two lines explain what God must do to make Donne submit to God. God the Father must break the door down rather than merely knocking on it. God the Spirit must blow away the barriers around his heart, rather than merely breathing on them. God the Son must burn and scorch Donne’s heart, not merely shine on it. The end goal of these three violent acts as compared to the end goal of the three gentle acts is a destruction and then reconstruction of Donne’s heart. Donne doesn’t want God to just fix him; he wants God to make him new, to re-create him.
The next two lines use the metaphor of a captured town to describe Donne’s relationship to God. Donne is described as a town, though created by God, which has been taken captive by an enemy. Not only has the enemy taken the town captive, but the town has pledged its allegiance to the usurper. Donne says that he is working as hard as he can to let God into his town/heart, but he is completely unsuccessful by his own efforts. It is going to take God coming in with his battering ram or perhaps God burning the town’s defenses to the ground in order for God to come inside. The next two lines state that the ability to reason or to think rationally is not man’s greatest asset; indeed reason is “weak or untrue.” In the time when this was written it was argued, and philosophers argue this today as well, that it is the ability to think is what separates us from animals. It is this ability to reason which allows us to be moral agents. Donne concludes that reason, the supposed awesome gift from God, indeed God’s “viceroy” in man, is also made captive by the usurper.
Donne goes on to state that, despite the current situation of his captivity to sin/Satan, he still loves God and desires that God love him. Donne next uses the metaphor of marriage and unfaithfulness to describe his relationship to God. He states that he is “betrothed unto your enemy” IE: Satan or sin, and so unless someone comes in to break up the marriage, he is going to end up married to Satan or sin. Again we have Donne’s appeal to violence. He wants God to break or destroy the marriage knot which has been tied that is, the knot which has tied him to Satan or sin.
Finally, in the last three lines of the poem, Donne makes use of two paradoxes. The first is that to be truly free, he needs God to imprison and enthrall him. He will never be free of the sinful desires of his heart, he will never be free from Satan, he will never be free from this world, etc…unless God puts him in prison that is, if God imprisons Donne inside of God. The other paradox reaches back to the marriage metaphor. It states that Donne will never be chaste, which not only means free from sin in the general theme of this poem but takes on another meaning because he is a priest, unless God ravishes him. The word ravish is best translated rape. Unless God forces himself inside of Donne, unless God rapes Donne’s heart, then Donne will never be pure and chaste. He will never be white as snow.
Now, I hope you see why I love this poem. I love it because it is so descriptive of me and all the rest of humanity, just as much as it describes Donne. My constant prayer is that I submit my will to God’s. I pray that he overwhelms me and forces himself into my heart using his battering ram to knock down my door, using his breath to flatten my soldiers, and uses his fire to burn all of my defenses to the ground. We are children in rebellion and we will never willingly choose to submit to him, all that we can pray and hope for is that he forces us to submit to him.
