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.