John Donne (1572-1631) is regarded by many critics as the greatest poet of the "metaphysical"

school, who used language in new ways to express emotion and meaning at the same time.
Donne's poetry falls into two main groups, namely that written before he "got religion" (he
ended his life as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral) and that written after that event. Among his
earlier works are the "Songs and Sonets", a set of love poems written over a period of time and
which include "The Good-Morrow".

"The Good-Morrow" consists of three 7-line stanzas with an ABABCCC rhyme scheme, although
some of the rhymes read as half-rhymes in modern diction.

It is typical of Donne's poetic method in that it opens with a line (or several) that grabs the
attention and then develops the theme through the poem. It also takes the form, used quite
often by Donne, of posing a direct question either to himself or the subject of the poem. In this
case it is both:

I wonder, by my truth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved; were we not weaned till then,

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den?

(The "Seven Sleepers" refers to a legend of the miraculous survival of seven Christians who fell
asleep in a cave during the reign of the Roman Emperor Decius and were walled up, only to
come to life when the cave was opened nearly 200 years later)

The question is therefore posed and answered: "Twas so". Donne then develops the "conceit"
that being in love distorts one's sense of reality to such an extent that what went before was
unreal. This is expressed by his statement that any woman who had taken his fancy in the past
was "but a dream of thee".

In the second stanza the poem's title is explained by love having given rise to a "Seven
Sleepers" miracle, and also adding a completely new dimension to the lovers' perception:

And now good morrow to our waking souls,

Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere.

Modern readers might see that last line as almost a "Doctor Who's Tardis" concept, in that
what seems small at the outset can contain a universe once opened. In Donne's view, the love
of two people for each other can outweigh all other considerations and be as all-encompassing
as they want it to be. The explorations of "sea-discoverers" (at a time when Europeans were
still ignorant of large portions of the world) are irrelevant to the lovers who: "… possess one
world, each hath one, and is one".

The third stanza introduces a new conceit that further develops the themes of re-awakening
and discovery of new worlds:

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,

And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp North, without declining West?

To be awake, eyes must be open, and, as each lover looks fully into the eyes of the other, they
see themselves, and their "true plain hearts" reflected. The eyeballs thus become hemispheres
that, for the lovers, are just as wide-ranging and wonderful as those of Planet Earth. They are
indeed superior to the geographical ones as they lack the coldness of "sharp North" and the
sunset of "declining West".

Donne then throws in another idea, namely that lasting love must come from equal sharing
between the partners, because "Whatever dies, was not mixed equally". The concluding
couplet stresses this point:

If our two loves be one; or thou and I

Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.

Love therefore conquers all, is the only thing that matters, and is a rebirth to immortality. This
is the "pre-religious" John Donne, but the Christian belief of spiritual rebirth is very close to
what is being presented here.

In "The Good-Morrow", as with some other "Songs and Sonets", the poet is sincere and
passionate, which suggests that the object of the passion could be Anne More, who became
Donne's wife.

As a poem, "The Good-Morrow" is an example of something that was quite new to English
poetry by beginning with a conversational and startling opening and projecting the reader into
the poem in a way that holds their attention through a complex development of thought that
preserves the passion rather than letting it cool. This was not always successfully done by the
"Metaphysicals" (Donne included) who often let their delight in conceits and cleverness get in
the way of the emotional content of their poems. "The Good-Morrow" is a good example of a
John Donne poem in terms of its development but it is first and foremost a powerful love poem
that never loses sight of its goal.

"The Sunne Rising"

The poet asks the sun why it is shining in and disturbing him and his lover in bed. The sun
should go away and do other things rather than disturb them, like wake up ants or rush late
schoolboys to start their day. Lovers should be permitted to make their own time as they see fit.
After all, sunbeams are nothing compared to the power of love, and everything the sun might see
around the world pales in comparison to the beloved’s beauty, which encompasses it all. The
bedroom is the whole world.

Analysis

“The Sunne Rising” is a 30-line poem in three stanzas, written with the poet/lover as the speaker.
The meter is irregular, ranging from two to six stresses per line in no fixed pattern. The longest
lines are generally at the end of the three stanzas, but Donne’s focus here is not on perfect
regularity. The rhyme, however, never varies, each stanza running abbacdcdee. The poet’s tone
is mocking and railing as it addresses the sun, covering an undercurrent of desperate, perhaps
even obsessive love and grandiose ideas of what his lover is.

The poet personifies the sun as a “busy old fool” (line 1). He asks why it is shining in and
disturbing “us” (4), who appear to be two lovers in bed. The sun is peeking through the curtains
of the window of their bedroom, signaling the morning and the end of their time together. The
speaker is annoyed, wishing that the day has not yet come (compare Juliet’s assurances that it is
certainly not the morning, in Romeo and Juliet III.v). The poet then suggests that the sun go off
and do other things rather than disturb them, such as going to tell the court huntsman that it is a
day for the king to hunt, or to wake up ants, or to rush late schoolboys and apprentices to their
duties. The poet wants to know why it is that “to thy motions lovers’ seasons run” (4). He
imagines a world, or desires one, where the embraces of lovers are not relegated only to the
night, but that lovers can make their own time as they see fit.

In the second stanza the poet continues to mock the sun, saying that its “beams so reverend and
strong” are nothing compared to the power and glory of their love. He boasts that he “could
eclipse and cloud them [the sunbeams] with a wink.” In a way this is true; he can cut out the sun
from his view by closing his eyes. Yet, the lover doesn’t want to “lose her sight so long” as a
wink would take. The poet is emphasizing that the sun has no real power over what he and his
lover do, while he is the one who chooses to allow the sun in because by it he can see his lover’s
beauty.

The lover then moves on to loftier claims. “If her eyes have not blinded thine” (13) implies that
his beloved’s eyes are more brilliant than sunlight. This was a standard Renaissance love-poem
convention (compare Shakespeare “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” in Sonnet 130) to
proclaim his beloved’s loveliness. Indeed, the sun should “tell me/Whether both th’Indias of
spice and mine/Be where thou lef’st them, or lie here with me.” Here, Donne lists wondrous and
exotic places (the Indias are the West and East Indies, well known in Donne’s time for their
spices and precious metals) and says that his mistress is all of those things: “All here in one bed
lay” (20). “She’s all states, and all princes I”(21). That is, all the beautiful and sovereign things
in the world, which the sun meets as it travels the world each day, are combined in his mistress.
This is a monstrous, bold comparison, a hyperbole of the highest order. As usual, such an
extreme comparison leads us to see a spiritual metaphor in the poem. As strong as the sun’s light
is, it pales in comparison to the spiritual light that shines from the divine and which brings man
to love the divine.

The strange process of reducing the entire world to the bed of the lovers reaches its zenith in the
last stanza: “In that the world’s contracted thus” (26). Indeed, the sun need not leave the room;
by shining on them “thou art everywhere” (29). The final line contains a play on the Ptolemaic
astronomical idea that the Earth was the center of the universe, with the Sun rotating around the
Earth: “This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.” Here Donne again gives ultimate
universal importance to the lovers, making all the physical world around them subject to them.

This poem gives voice to the feeling of lovers that they are outside of time and that their
emotions are the most important things in the world. There is something of the adolescent
melodrama of first love here, which again suggests that Donne is exercising his intelligence and
subtlety to make a different kind of point. While the love between himself and his lover may
seem divine, metaphorically it can be true that divine love is more important than the things of
this world.

The conflation of the earth into the body of his beloved is a little more difficult to understand.
Donne would not be the first man who likened his female lover to a field to be sown by him, or a
country to be ruled by him. Yet, if she represents the world because God loves the world, is
Donne really putting himself, as the one who loves, in the position of God?

What we can say with some firmness is that the sun, which marks the passage of earthly time, is
rejected as an authority. The “seasons” of lovers (with the pun on the seasons of the earth, also
ruled by the sun) should not be ruled by the movements of the sun. There should be nothing
above the whims and desires of lovers, as they feel, and on the spiritual level the sun is just one
more creation of God; all time and physical laws are subject to God.

That the sun, of course, will not heed a man’s insults and orders is tacitly acknowledged. It will
continue on its way each day, and one cannot wink it out of existence. There is nothing that the
poet can do to change the movements of the sun or the coming of the day, no matter how clever
his comparisons. From his perspective, the whole world is right there with him, yet he knows
that his perspective is limited. This conceit of railing against the sun and denying the reality of
the world outside the bedroom closes the poem with a more heartfelt (and more believable)
assertion that the “bed thy center is.” It can be imagined that here he is speaking more to himself,
realizing that the time he has with his lover is more important to him than anything else in his
life in this moment, even while the spiritual meaning of the poem extends to the sun’s relatively
weak power compared with the cosmic forces of the divine.

"Song: Goe, and catche a falling starre"

The reader is told to do impossible things such as catching a meteor or finding a "true and fair"
woman after a lifetime of travels. The poet wishes he could go and see such a woman if she
existed, but he knows that she would turn false by the time he got there.
Analysis

The poem simply titled “Song” is often referred to by its opening line, “Goe, and catche a falling
starre” to distinguish it from other poems published as Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. This 27-line
poem is deceptively light, upon first reading, as so much of Donne’s poetry appears. On the
surface, it suggests attitudes about love and the relations between the sexes, but once again
Donne’s poem carries a spiritual metaphor. The tone is lightly satirical, with deeper truths
peeking out from underneath the poet’s assumed worldliness and cynicism.

The meter for this poem is slightly unusual for Donne. It is not a typical “song” meter, even
though that is its title. The title “Song” also gives a certain lightness and flippancy to the poem
which is matched by the early lines about doing impossible things. The early lines prepare us for
a cynical perspective that calls to mind the attitude of the jaded courtier singing to a collection of
adults who are well-schooled in the vagaries of love.

The meter—tetrameter punctuated by monometer iambic lines—creates excellent and interesting

pauses in the middle of stanzas. It is typical of Donne to surprise his reader, but usually not with
tricks of meter that are so blatant. The short lines, which introduce the final line of each stanza,
add greatly to the musical quality of the poem. One might imagine a male singer accompanying
himself, perhaps, with a lute, and pausing to strum “And sweare/No where” or “Yet shee/Will
be” with a wry or joking look towards his audience. The short lines act like a caesura (a poetic
pause or breath) for the stanzas, setting up the surprising final lines. For example, “Serves to
advance an honest minde” is surprising because it reverses the frivolous tone of the earlier lines
about impossible tasks. Near the end of the stanza the poet suddenly asks serious questions: what
can cure the sting of envy, and how can an honest mind advance?

On the surface, the three stanzas progress to a cynical assertion of the nature of womankind. The
poet begins with a series of impossible orders to an unseen actor (who can be interpreted as
another young man, or perhaps the poet himself), such as, “catch a falling starre,/Get with child a
mandrake root” (1-2). A mandrake root was a mythical root in medieval lore, said to grow under
hanged men, and also to be useful somehow with witchcraft. It would scream when pulled up.

But then the poet becomes more serious and says, “Tell me, where all past yeares are” (3),
suggesting sadness in the mention of the loss of past years. Like meteors, moments of one’s life
whiz by and are lost forever, although the most weighty meteors will leave remnants on earth.
That this solemnity creeps into the poem at this early point is a foreshadowing of the conclusion
in the third stanza.

While hearing “mermaids singing” may not be a universal human desire, the next line’s desire to
keep away “envy’s stinging” (6) is one almost everyone has shared. These strange juxtapositions
of fantastic desires and real human longings are jarring, which leads into the desire to find out
how to separate fantasy from reality, that is, how to “advance an honest mind” (9). Yet, as part of
the same list, is this goal just another impossibility?

Also part of the list is finding a woman who is “both true and faire.” Is a beautiful and faithful
woman possible to find, even if one travels for 10,000 days and, significantly, nights? The poet
would go to her; “Such a pilgrimage were sweet” (20), but the poet cannot believe that such a
woman exists. The poet goes so far to say, in the wry ending of the last stanza, that even if the
traveler were to find such a one, and she were as close by as next door, that by the time the
traveler’s letter was written to Donne telling him of her beauty and loyalty, she would have
become unfaithful to two or even three men. The fantastical constructions in the beginning of the
poem accentuate the mythical quality of this most longed-for character, the beautiful and faithful
woman.

This hyperbole leads us, as usual, to see Donne’s spiritual point. This poem is not just about
misogyny or even a sincere statement about the alleged infidelity of women. Yes, on the surface
the poem could read as a way for a young, scorned lover to cope with a woman who was false to
him. And misogyny in love poems, read with a contemporary lens, might even seem like a
convention in seventeenth-century poetry. Yet, a spiritual reading suggests a gender-neutral
criticism of fallen humanity. As much as people may pledge themselves to be true to the divine,
they fall short and might sin two or three times in the course of an afternoon. People are false the
world over.

"Song: Sweetest love, I do not goe"

The poet tells his beloved that he is not leaving because he is tired of the relationship—instead,
he must go as a duty. After all, the sun departs each night but returns every morning, and he has
a much shorter distance to travel. The third stanza suggests that his duty to leave is unstoppable;
man’s power is so feeble that good fortune cannot lengthen his life, while bad fortune will
shorten it. Indeed, fighting bad fortune only shares one’s strength with it. As the beloved sighs
and cries, the lover complains that if he is really within her, she is the one letting him go because
he is part of her tears and breath. He asks her not to fear any evil that may befall him while he is
gone, and besides, they keep each other alive in their hearts and therefore are never truly parted.

Analysis
“Sweetest love” is a lyric made up of five stanzas each with the same rhyme scheme (ababcddc).
Each stanza develops an aspect of the problem of separation from one’s beloved.

In the first stanza the lover wards off any fear of a weakened love on his part. He does not leave
“for weariness” of the beloved (line 2), nor does he go looking for a “fitter love” for himself (line
4). He instead compares his departure to death, saying that since he “Must die at last” (line 5), it
is better for him to practice dying by “feign’d deaths” (line 8), those short times when he is
separated from his love. Thus, he turns her fears about losing him into an assurance that she is
the very source of his existence; when he is not with her, it is like being dead.

In the second stanza, Donne uses the sun as a metaphor for his fidelity and desire to return. He
compares his leaving to the sun’s setting “Yesternight” (line 9). It left darkness behind, “yet is
here today” (line 10). If the sun can return each day, despite its lengthy journey around the
world, then the beloved can trust that the lover will return since his journey is shorter (line 12).
Besides, he will make “speedier journeys” since he has more reason to go and return than does
the sun (lines 15-16).

In the third stanza, the poet turns to contemplating larger problems beyond merely being
separated from a loved one. He notes how “feeble is man’s power” (line 17) that one is unable to
add more time to his life during periods of “good fortune” (line 18). Ironically, the poet notes, we
instead add “our strength” (line 22) to misfortune and “teach it art and length” (line 23), thereby
giving bad situations power over our lives. We are so powerless that even the power we have
turns against us in bad fortune. Perhaps the suggestion here is that the lover has no choice but to
go, not having enough strength to overcome fate.

This stanza also serves as a turning point in the song. The two prior stanzas are assurances that
the lover will return quickly and faithfully. The final two stanzas focus on the harms his beloved
may cause or fear.

“When thou sigh'st, thou sigh'st not wind,/But sigh'st my soul away” he says in the first line of
the fourth stanza. The beloved’s expressions of despair cause harm to her lover, he argues,
because he is so much a part of her that he is in her breath. He may also mean that her sighs
demonstrate her lack of trust in him. The same argument applies to her tears; she depletes his
“life’s blood” (line 16) when she cries. This is why she said to be “unkindly kind” with her tears
(line 15); this oxymoron emphasizes the lover’s pain in seeing the extent of her need to be with
him. He concludes the stanza complaining that “It cannot be/That thou lov’st me” (lines 21-22),
since she appears willing to “waste” his best parts (perhaps the beloved herself as she pines for
him).

In the final stanza, the lover warning his beloved against future ills she may bring upon him if
she continues to fear a future without him. He urges her “divining heart” (line 25) to avoid
predicting him harm; it is possible that “Destiny may take thy part” and fulfill her fears (lines 27-
28) by leading to true dangers. He prefers that she instead see his absence as a moment in the
night when the two of them are in bed together, merely “turn’d aside to sleep” (line 30). He
leaves her with the encouragement that two people whose love is their very lifeblood can “ne’er
parted be” (line 32); they are always together in spirit.

This poem bears similarities to Donne’s other work about departure from his loved one,
“Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” The tone of the song considered here is lighter, however,
and the imagery not so controlled, poignant, or unexpected as that latter work. Nevertheless, it is
worth attempting to read this poem, like so many others of Donne’s, as a spiritual allegory.
Perhaps one again can see the lover as God and the beloved as the Church, in which case one
might find a resonance with the promised second coming of Jesus in the Christian tradition; in
this tradition he will soon return to the world even though he was crucified.

"A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

The poet begins by comparing the love between his beloved and himself with the passing away
of virtuous men. Such men expire so peacefully that their friends cannot determine when they are
truly dead. Likewise, his beloved should let the two of them depart in peace, not revealing their
love to “the laity.”

Earthquakes bring harm and fear about the meaning of the rupture, but such fears should not
affect his beloved because of the firm nature of their love. Other lovers become fearful when
distance separates them—a much greater distance than the cracks in the earth after a quake—
since for them, love is based on the physical presence or attractiveness of each other. Yet for the
poet and his beloved, such a split is “innocent,” like the movements of the heavenly spheres,
because their love transcends mere physicality.

Indeed, the separation merely adds to the distance covered by their love, like a sheet of gold,
hammered so thin that it covers a huge area and gilds so much more than a love concentrated in
one place ever could.

He finishes the poem with a longer comparison of himself and his wife to the two legs of a
compass. They are joined at the top, and she is perfectly grounded at the center point. As he
travels farther from the center, she leans toward him, and as he travels in his circles, she remains
firm in the center, making his circles perfect.

Analysis

The first two of the nine abab stanzas of “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” make up a
single sentence, developing the simile of the passing of a virtuous man as compared to the love
between the poet and his beloved. It is thought that Donne was in fact leaving for a long journey
and wished to console and encourage his beloved wife by identifying the true strength of their
bond. The point is that they are spiritually bound together regardless of the earthly distance
between them.

He begins by stating that the virtuous man leaves life behind so delicately that even his friends
cannot clearly tell the difference. Likewise, Donne forbids his wife from openly mourning the
separation. For one thing, it is no real separation, like the difference between a breath and the
absence of a breath. For another thing, mourning openly would be a profanation of their love, as
the spiritual mystery of a sacrament can be diminished by revealing the details to “the laity” (line
8). Their love is sacred, so the depth of meaning in his wife’s tears would not be understood by
those outside their marriage bond, who do not love so deeply. When Donne departs, observers
should see no sign from Donne’s wife to suggest whether Donne is near or far because she will
be so steadfast in her love for him and will go about her business all the same.

The third stanza suggests that the separation is like the innocent movement of the heavenly
spheres, many of which revolve around the center. These huge movements, as the planets come
nearer to and go farther from one another, are innocent and do not portend evil. How much less,
then, would Donne’s absence portend. All of this is unlike the worldly fear that people have after
an earthquake, trying to determine what the motions and cleavages mean.

In the fourth and fifth stanzas, Donne also compares their love to that of “sublunary” (earth-
bound) lovers and finds the latter wanting. The love of others originates from physical proximity,
where they can see each other’s attractiveness. When distance intervenes, their love wanes, but
this is not so for Donne and his beloved, whose spiritual love, assured in each one’s “mind,”
cannot be reduced by physical distance like the love of those who focus on “lips, and hands.”

The use of “refined” in the fifth stanza gives Donne a chance to use a metaphor involving gold, a
precious metal that is refined through fire. In the sixth stanza, the separation is portrayed as
actually a bonus because it extends the territory of their love, like gold being hammered into
“aery thinness” without breaking (line 24). It thus can gild that much more territory.

The final three stanzas use an extended metaphor in which Donne compares the two individuals
in the marriage to the two legs of a compass: though they each have their own purpose, they are
inextricably linked at the joint or pivot at the top—that is, in their spiritual unity in God. Down
on the paper—the earthly realm—one leg stays firm, just as Donne’s wife will remain steadfast
in her love at home. Meanwhile the other leg describes a perfect circle around this unmoving
center, so long as the center leg stays firmly grounded and does not stray. She will always lean in
his direction, just like the center leg of the compass. So long as she does not stray, “Thy firmness
makes my circle just, / And makes me end where I begun,” back at home (lines 35-36). They are
a team, and so long as she is true to him, he will be able to return to exactly the point where they
left off before his journey.

"Hymn to God, My God, In My Sickness"

The speaker faces the possibility of his own death by focusing on his preparation for Heaven. He
must tune himself in order to become God’s musical instrument. Or, he is like a map, and as he
struggles through his own life’s map to the west, he realizes that on a map the westernmost and
easternmost points are the same. Death is thus resurrection; original sin by the tree in the Garden
of Eden has its parallel in the Cross where sin was redeemed. The poet’s life can be used as a
sermon to preach that suffering and death are natural on the route to salvation.

Analysis

Donne likely wrote “Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness” sometime between 1623 and
1635. The exact date of its composition, and therefore the date of his life-threatening illness (if
this poem is autobiographical), remain uncertain. This “Hymn” is a six-stanza poem each made
up of five lines of ababb iambic pentameter.

In the first stanza the poet compares himself to music to be used by or for God: “I shall be made
Thy music” (line 3). As he awaits entry into the holy room, he “tunes” himself as an instrument.
In order to prepare himself for his personal translation into sacred song among the “choir of
saints,” he considers what he still ought to do on Earth. This theme follows the traditional
Christian doctrine of becoming purified on Earth so as to be ready for the afterlife.

In the second stanza, Donne shifts the conceit and calls himself a map. If he is the map, his
doctors are the “cosmographers” (line 7) who draw his features and interpret the signs they see
on him in an effort to aid him in recovery, via “their love” (line 6). However, they can see from
his condition that as he journeys across his own map, his path is not likely to include a return
trip. They conclude that he is heading per fretum febris (“through the strait of fever”) in order to
die (line 10).

The poet takes the news with “joy” (line 11) because he sees he will be heading inexorably west,
signifying the end of his life, where he will meet the east and new life. This is because of the
paradox of a flat map in which the western and eastern extremes actually identify the same
longitude, since the world is actually round. Thus, he looks forward to this journey’s conclusion
because it means a transition into a new form of existence, his resurrection: “death doth touch the
resurrection” (line 15). This line marks the halfway point of the 30-line poem.

The fourth stanza uses rhetorical questions to ask whether a geographical location could be his
final destination. The places he lists are of either historical or spiritual significance, but he notes
that for all of them, “All straits, and none but straits, are ways to them” (line 19). That is, as
desirable as these places are, they can be reached only through the straits of suffering or
hardship. Of course, none of these places will be his true place of rest, since he will be translated
to Heaven.

In the fifth stanza, Donne identifies another place in which west (death) meets east (resurrection).
It may well be that Adam’s tree—the forbidden Tree of Knowledge, from which Adam ate and
brought sin and suffering into the world—stood in the exact location as the cross of Calvary—
often poetically called the “tree,” upon which Jesus Christ was killed as a sacrifice for the sins of
the world. In Christianity, Jesus is also the “last Adam,” representing mankind as he dies for
their sins, which originated with the “first Adam” in Eden. Thus the poet finds himself marked
by the first Adams, with the sweat of his sickness suggesting Adam’s curse of hard work, while
he looks ahead to being embraced with the sacrificial blood of Jesus ahead (the language also
suggests the poet’s own blood as he proceeds toward death).

The final stanza focuses on the imagery of Christ’s crucifixion. Just as Jesus’ Crown of Thorns
leads the way to his new crowns as the King of Kings (note the royal purple in line 26), the poet
hopes that his own suffering will prepare him to be embraced by God in Heaven. Donne also
seems to be suggesting that he has a spiritual role on Earth as well, considering his vocation as
dean of St. Paul’s, in which he was responsible for preaching sermons to the congregation.
Accordingly, he wants his own situation, sickness and all, to be usable as a sermon about
suffering. The topic of sermon would be, “Therefore that He may raise, the Lord throws down”
(line 30). In this paradox, he who is to be raised to eternal life by God in almost all cases will
first suffer and die. Thus, Donne sums up the reason for his joy in the second stanza, seeing how
the end of life will teach others (compare Meditation 17) and lead to resurrection.

Holy Sonnet 14, "Batter my heart"

The speaker asks God to intensify the effort to restore the speaker’s soul. Knocking at the door is
not enough; God should overthrow him like a besieged town. His own reason has not been
enough either, and he has engaged himself to God’s enemy. He asks God to break the knots
holding him back, imprisoning him in order to free him, and taking him by force in order to
purify him.
Analysis

In his holy sonnets, Donne blends elements of the Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet with the English
(Shakespearean) sonnet. Here he begins in the Italian form abba abba, but his concluding idea in
the third quatrain bleeds over into the rhyming couplet (cdcd cc) that completes the poem.

The poet begins by asking God to increase the strength of divine force to win over the poet’s
soul. He requests, “Batter my heart” (line 1), metaphorically indicating that he wants God to use
force to assault his heart, like battering down a door. Thus far, God has only knocked, following
the scriptural idea that God knocks and each person must let him in, yet this has not worked
sufficiently for the poet. Simply to “mend” or “shine” him up is not drastic enough; instead God
should take him by “force, to break, blow, burn” in order to help him “stand” and be made “new”
(lines 3-4). This request indicates that the speaker considers his soul or heart too badly damaged
or too sinful to be reparable; instead, God must re-create him to make him what he needs to be.
The paradox is that he must be overthrown like a town in order to rise stronger.

Indeed, the second quatrain begins with that metaphor, with the speaker now an “usurp’d town”
that owes its allegiance or “due” to someone else (line 5). He is frustrated that his reason, God’s
“viceroy” in the town of his soul, is captive to other forces (such as worldly desire) and is failing
to persuade him to leave his sins behind.

The poet then moves from the political to the personal in the last six lines. He loves God, but he
is “betroth’d unto [God’s] enemy” (line 9), the Satanic desires of the selfish heart (if not the devil
himself). He seeks God’s help to achieve the “divorce” from his sinful nature and break the
marriage “knot” (lines 10-11). In the final couplet, he gives voice to the paradox of faith: the
speaker can only be free if he is enthralled by God (line 13), and he can only be chaste and pure
if God ravishes him (line 14).

The poet uses this dissonance of ideas to point out just how holy—in this case, otherworldly and
spiritual in a carnal world—God truly is. In other words, a relationship with God requires being
reborn and rebuilt from the ground up, in but not of the world.

Finally, since the speaker here suggests being in the female role of betrothal and ravishment (a
city too tends to be coded as female), we once again see that the speaker is putting himself in the
position of the Christian church generally. In the New Testament, the church is metaphorically
said to be married to God. Can it be that, in Donne’s eyes, the church still needs to be utterly
reformed, even after the Reformation?