Holy Sonnet 14
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The analogous language of romantic passion and intellectual paradox has always seemed natural to those seeking to understand and speak of spiritual mysteries. Even so, John Donnes image of the Divine Rape in “Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God, For You” (Holy Sonnet XIV), by which the victim becomes, or remains, chaste is at first startling; we are not accustomed to such spiritual intensity. In spite of the shocking character of the poems imagery, the sonnet seems coherent: its language is apt; it is metrically jagged, yet traditional; its imagery is anthropomorphic, yet pious. Many seem to focus on the intensity of religious ardor expressed by Donnes expansion of the boundaries of metaphorical usage within the poem. I will address more directly this metaphorical usage as it relates to Donnes experimentation with metrical freedom within the strictures of traditional sonnet form, as a further inroad to the poems theme.
Both of these characteristics–the sinewy elasticity of meter and the intellectual contortion of metaphorical conceit–are attributes of the “metaphysical” style of poetry of which Donne is the preeminent representative. These attributes caused the critics of metaphysical poetry to label it the “strong-lined” style. It is, however, difficult to imagine Donnes passionate outpouring being expressed in any other way, since the poet uses the irregularities imposed on the iambic pentameter model to reinforce his unusual, striking imagery.
The poem follows the standard sonnet model of three quatrains, each with separate but related image, and a concluding couplet. The first quatrain presents the poet in prayerful pleading to God to “oerthrow” and “break” him, like some sort of tinkers creation. The second presents the poet as a town “usurped” from God- its rightful lord. The third presents the poet as a woman who loves God, her suitor, but is engaged to his enemy.
In these quatrains, Donne takes the position that reason, though the highest faculty and Gods “viceroy” in humanity, is incomplete and flawed; and requires the enlightenment brought about by the intimate revelation of the divine being. The poet, as a fallen human, is “betrothed” unto Gods “enemy,” and therefore pleads for God to progressively “break that knot” of attachment to the enemy, “imprison” the poet, “enthrall” him (or her, since the soul is typically feminine in Elizabethan poetry) into freedom, and finally, in the most daring of the paradoxical juxtapositions, “ravish” the poet into the condition of spiritual chastity. The tinkers object is broken and remade, the town is taken, and the love affair is irresistibly consummated, even as the paradox of virtue and passion is glowingly resolved.
So the strategy of the poem appears to be that of approaching a dangerous, blasphemous anthropomorphism in the heat of devotion; but deflecting that danger, just in time, by the equation of sensual passion to spiritual virtue. For the concluding couplet declares that true freedom comes when one is imprisoned by God, and that purity of heart comes with Gods ravishment (sexual assault, with the double meaning of “ravish” as “to win the heart of” someone). By the poems conclusion, the conceit of the rape which ensures chastity no longer skirts blasphemy.
This resolution of discordant imagery, this stillness after the storm, is reflected most in the poems metrical pattern. Nominally iambic pentameter, as befits a sonnet, does not hold true. The first twelve lines (with the exceptions of lines 3 and 11) are full of irregularities. For instance, the first line opens with a trochee on the violent “Batter my heart,” the trochee reinforcing the idea of the crashing blow and response for which the poet prays. This verb also foreshadows the daring imagery to come: the hardened heart is battered (“heart” also being Elizabethan slang for the vagina); even as the tinkers artifact is battered; even as an entry is forced through the closed city gates (through which the poet labors to admit the attacker; even as, finally, a sexual entry is forced.
As the poet grapples with these daring but compressed and contorted images, the poems meter contorts in response. Several lines have repeated strokes of accent, with two lines having as many as three accents in a row (a far remove from the