John Donne
As a young poet, John Donne often utilized
metaphors of spiritual bond in many
of his Songs and Sonnets in order to
explain fleshly love. Once he renounced
Catholicism and converted to the
Anglican faith (circa 1597), Donne donned a
more devotional style of verse,
such as in his Holy Sonnets (circa 1609-1610),
finding parallels to divine
love in the carnal union. In many ways, however, his
love poems and his
religious poems are quite similar, for they both address his
personae’s
deep-seated fear of isolation by women and God, respectively. For
example, in
"Song," Donne’s speaker tells an unknown person (presumably
male) that if he
would "Ride ten thousand days and nights" he would return
"And swear/
Nowhere/ Lives a woman true, and fair" (ll. 12; 16-18).
Similarly, in
Holy Sonnet 2, the speaker voices fear that God will not be with
him on his
day of reckoning: "Oh I shall soon despair when I do see/ That Thou
lov’st
mankind well, yet wilt not choose me" (ll. 12-13). Whereas many
of
Donne’s love poems display a speaker’s anxiety and anger about his
inability
to sustain affection from a woman, Donne transferred that theme of
resentment
towards women to frustration with God because he personally
doubted his
salvation. Why would Donne have felt unfulfilled spiritually
during the time in
which he wrote theHoly Sonnets? Witherspoon and Warnke
posit that "Donne’s
religious doubts seem to have been...settled" because
after his conversion to
Anglicanism, he led attacks against Roman
Catholicism and published a treatise
which encouraged English Catholics to
take the oath of allegiance (58). While
Donne abandoned Catholicism for
Anglicanism willingly, records indicate that he
did so primarily for reasons
of self-preservation and self-advancement (Carey
60). I propose that
despite his genuine attempts to embrace the Anglican faith,
he encountered
seemingly insurmountable liturgical roadblocks that caused a
long-lasting
religious disorientation. To leave one religion in order to embrace
another
with some fundamental differences with respect to eternal salvation must
have
troubled Donne greatly. As a Catholic, Donne probably believed that
salvation
was achieved by true contrition for sins, personal endeavor and
virtuous
behavior. As an Anglican, however, he was forced to adopt the
Calvinistic
approach that personal effort was futile and irrelevant; he must be
chosen as
one of the elect. Donne, then, reasonably must have felt that he was
not one
the elect when he converted, for he had sinned merely by being
a
Catholic. No longer cushioned by the assurances of Catholicism and
its
sacraments, he possessed a fear of eternal damnation. This was also a
sin, for
in order to be saved by God, one had to believe he was already
saved. In
essence, fear of condemnation caused condemnation. Donne’s Holy
Sonnets reveal
his consternation over his unworthiness as a Christian through
speakers’
repeated attempts to beg God for redemption. In Sonnet 14 the
speaker plays the
martyr by asking God to brutally force redemption upon him,
for the speaker
cannot achieve it by the Catholic mode of prayer or the
humanistic mode of
reason. Simultaneously, Donne is able to be the martyr he
could never be once he
turned traitor to his original faith. Famous for his
metaphysical conceits, and
his relentless pursuit of a faithful woman, Donne
uses the most farfetched
paradoxical juxtaposition of all: his speaker begs
God to rape him or her in
order to become chaste. Donne employs numerous
poetic devices in order to
suggest a symbolic rape that would win salvation
for his speaker. The hard
consonant "B" in the first quatrain alliterates the
words "batter," (l.
1) "breathe," (l. 2) "bend" (l. 3), and "break, blow,
burn" (l. 4)
in order to conjure violent images. Notice, however that these
violent images
are welcomed, for in an extremely perverse way, "Batter my
heart" (l. 1) is
an example of the invitation "sub-genre." The word "heart"
was possibly
Elizabethan slang for the vagina, and therein lies a very
blatant sexual
metaphor. Donne uses subtler sexual imagery in the first
quatrain when the
speaker continues to ask God for physical favors:
"o’erthrow me, and bend/
Your force" (ll. 3-4). From a sexual standpoint,
the speaker asks God not to
tease and tantalize, but rather to exert force
upon him or her. This relates to
Donne’s religious dilemma in that in the
first two lines, the speaker states
that he or she does not want to be
"mend[ed]" by God, but rather spiritually
reborn. The speaker’s old self is
insufficient, and no amount of prayer will
qualify him as worthy of
redemption. God must act first and "make [the
speaker] new" (ll. 4). In the
second quatrain of Holy Sonnet 14, Donne uses
the simile of a usurped town to
further portray the speaker as spiritually
impotent.