Christian Art | John Donne | Holy Sonnets | Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God
John Donne | Holy Sonnets | Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God
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,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d 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.
John Donne | Holy Sonnets | Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God
John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 14, beginning, ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God,’ enacts a struggle between divine grace and human resistance, expressed through forceful imagery and paradox. The speaker does not ask for gentle persuasion but for a radical upheaval of the self. The poem presents a mind at war with itself, aware of divine sovereignty yet bound by sin, seeking liberation through subjugation.
The opening line calls on the ‘three-person’d God’—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—to ‘batter’ rather than merely shape the speaker’s heart. This violent verb contrasts with the more measured ‘knock, breathe, shine’, suggesting that God’s usual methods of persuasion have failed. The speaker’s heart must be forcefully taken, not won. Donne employs a sequence of destructive actions—’break, blow, burn’—that suggest refinement through suffering, recalling biblical images of fire and hammering as means of purification. The poet’s request is not for comfort but for obliteration and recreation, aligning with Christian notions of spiritual rebirth.
The metaphor of the self as a ‘usurp’d town’ deepens this conflict. The soul belongs to God but has been overtaken by an enemy—sin, Satan, or the corrupt will. The speaker ‘labors to admit’ God but finds himself powerless, reinforcing the doctrine of fallen humanity’s incapacity for self-restoration. ‘Reason, your viceroy in me’ should defend the city but is ‘captiv’d’ and ineffective. This theological position aligns with Augustinian and Calvinist views on human depravity, where the will, corrupted by sin, cannot effect its own salvation.
The sestet shifts from the language of war to that of marriage and desire. The poet confesses love for God but is ‘betroth’d unto your enemy’, echoing biblical depictions of idolatry as spiritual adultery. The plea—’Divorce me, untie or break that knot’—suggests that redemption requires dissolution, a violent severing of sinful bonds. The language intensifies: ‘Take me to you, imprison me, for I / Except you enthrall me, never shall be free.’ The paradox of captivity as freedom reflects Christian teachings on obedience to God as the highest form of liberty. In Donne’s vision, salvation is not gentle persuasion but an overpowering seizure.
The final paradox—’Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me’—is among the most arresting in the poem. The verb ‘ravish’ carries dual connotations of divine rapture and forced possession. The speaker calls for an invasion of the soul, where consent alone is insufficient; God must act. The erotic imagery, common in Christian mysticism, suggests that union with the divine is all-consuming, beyond reason’s control.
Structurally, the poem follows the Petrarchan sonnet form, with an octave presenting the dilemma and a sestet offering resolution. Yet Donne subverts traditional sonnet logic. Instead of resolving the tension, the turn heightens it, moving from external conquest to internal surrender. The poem’s form mirrors its subject: an ordered structure grappling with chaotic emotion.
Donne’s theological position here resists easy categorization. The rejection of reason and the demand for divine force align with Calvinist notions of irresistible grace. Yet the poem’s urgency suggests the personal anguish of one who longs for transformation but fears what it demands. The poem does not merely depict conversion; it enacts it, forcing the reader into the speaker’s turmoil.
At its core, Holy Sonnet 14 presents salvation as violent disruption. The poet, bound by sin, cannot free himself and must be taken by force. Love and destruction, captivity and freedom, desire and fear collapse into one. The God he calls upon is not distant but imminent, ready to act. The poem does not end in peace but in paradox, capturing the intensity of a soul in crisis, demanding divine intervention at any cost.
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We process. Glass exhibition cases, old reliquaries. A forearm here; here a nun’s fingertip. In chapel, at a glance, there are the usual faces. But they all stand to attention. Jonathan breaks from the procession to – fire the organ with oomph and dignity: Ride on! ride on in majesty! The angel-squadrons of the sky look down with sad and wondering eyes to see the approaching sacrifice. When we’ve done the readings, the Arch holds that tree in his hands to deliver the homily. He rocks quietly on his feet, some few seconds, as if balance defeated it. A way you might affect as the Spirit moves… Copying. Then he says: ‘Our palm fronds may seem to us today rather dry. I mean this not in a literal sense, but by the standards of those who originally lined the roadways in order to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem, as they proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah, who would be clambering up and ripping their palm branches fresh from off the trees. I think perhaps also our faith is somewhat distant from that of the people there on that highroad into Jerusalem, and something of our sense of the meaning has shifted in vividness from what it was then. And of course the expectation of all those many people is markedly different, but in many important respects the same. There are the same essential qualities to all our faith in God, which springs complete from our humanity, and that is one and the same in value for all of us, and time is consistent on this point. So then, let us renew the fullness of Catholic faith, and let us ask the Lord’s blessing as we embark upon our Holy Week. ‘Our Lord enters into Jerusalem in order to refresh us. He is to die in order that we may have life. There is a living reality here, both spiritual and as entangled in the joy of our daily living. We have Ladies’ Day where I grew up. They still have it, and they close the roads off, and little children parade, dressed-up like spring brides. When I was a boy, there was a May Day festival, and there was a May pole on the field, with the people dancing, like Morris dancers might be one way of visualizing this if you’ve never seen it, with their ribbons tied onto the top of the May pole, and they would weave around each other, dressing the pole, which is what we called it. It was like a dance with red and white and blue ribbons all hung off of the top of the May pole, which stood there all year, only like a telegraph pole, but it was concreted in, and then there was a slide, and swings – one baby-swing and two you could have a go at – terrible health and safety but that’s what it was in those days. ‘There was a round-a-bout – we used to run it round and round to try to get it off its central axis. It were rusty as anything and creaked like mad – on concrete. And climb up where it was all greased up at the top. Ruth, who was big as the next four of us, used to sit there sucking on the lollipops we nicked for her from Raddies, and she’d direct matters. We were trying to destroy it, and get it to dislodge from its central axis, and fly away – roll off into that farmer’s field, which he only ever kept for silage, but we never succeeded. There was a car someone had left there so we spent forever smashing that up, until someone who lived in one of the houses there took exception to our doing that, so he put thick grease under the door handles and gave us a right talking to. ‘It would only be a few stands, hot-dogs and things like that. The man selling the hot dogs would have his records on full blast. There’d be a couple of set-up stalls. Air-rifles – that sort of thing. But we all had them, and we all went shooting, of course, if not with twelve bores then with smaller gauge. Or pay a pound – I have no idea how much it was in actual fact then – it might have only been a few pennies – and we’d get all that time smashing up the crockery the man would put up for us to smash on the dressers. That was my particular favourite thing to do at these festivals, by the way, in case you were wondering. You got a little bucket of so many cricket balls. ‘I dread to think what went into those hot dogs. Probably EE rules would forbid it now. But it was a fair mix in those days. A lot of young people then were C of E. We’ve done a lot to hang onto our young people, which is a tremendous encouragement when you consider how things are, while in recent decades the Church of England hasn’t been so successful. People still want it on feast days and what are essentially now civic celebrations. It’s strange to see, though, how all the little stands there people have are run by the police and people like that along those lines. There’s no May pole. That was a sort of faith that ran and ran beneath all the theoreticals of it in the 1960s and the 1970s and into the 1980s. The May pole isn’t there now in the particular place I’m thinking of. Considering May poles were officially suppressed hundreds of years ago – as a part of the protestant reformation. One or two of you are probably thinking I’m remembering things from that time! ‘I should have liked to say that those processionals were so hardwired into us, that even after the last thirty years, when I became a bishop, they are still with us. They were […]