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Exploring Faith's Complexity: A Poetic Journey into John Donne's 'Batter my heart', Summaries of Voice

An analysis of john donne's poem 'batter my heart, three-person'd god' by malcolm guite, chaplain of girton college, cambridge. The poem is a profound exploration of faith, desire, and the human condition, as donne calls on god to take an active role in his life and transform him. The document also discusses donne's use of metaphors from metalwork and siege warfare to illustrate the need for god's intervention in our lives.

What you will learn

  • How does Donne describe his relationship with God in the poem?
  • What is the significance of the metaphor of siege warfare in the poem?

Typology: Summaries

2021/2022

Uploaded on 09/12/2022

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The Commemoration of George Herbert, Priest & Poet - 2016.02.27
Please not that yesterday's poem and commentary are attached as a pdf file.
Batter my heart, three-person'd God John Donne (1572-1631)
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.
… for Donne, faith and prayer needed to involve the whole person and not just a pious set
of behaviours and responses that form only one aspect of life. And therein lay the
problem. Donne was aware that he was a highly complex, deeply conflicted person
whose desires and interests, opinions and beliefs, pulled him in many different directions.
Moreover he was immensely independent and strong-willed, while knowing and
believing that at its heart his Christian vocation involved a renunciation of ego and a
humility of which he felt scarcely capable. All this comes out in his poem in which he
calls on God to take the active role, to step in and take over, in a dazzling series of vivid
metaphors and paradoxes. He opens the sonnet abruptly and dramatically:
Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
Here the image is drawn from metalwork, and specifically the trade of the tinker - a bold
metaphor for the work of God Almighty! It is as though he is a broken vessel that needs
to be completely remade, beaten again into shape. It is not enough just to knock out the
old dent, to breathe on the copper and shine it up; Donne needs to be completely
reworked. The effect of these short, sharp, kinetic verbs each pummelling in in the
imperative voice is breathtaking: knock, breathe, shine … bend … break, blow, burn …
make! But the end and purpose of it all is not to destroy but to ‘make me new’. Though
these words were written 400 years ago many contemporary Christians will recognize
Donne’s dilemma and the necessity of this prayer, the need to be thrown down, to be
knocked off one’s perch, to be taken back to a beginning in order to start again with God.
In the next six lines Donne switches metaphors and draws his image from siege warfare,
something he knew about first-hand as he had sailed with Raleigh and Sidney and taken
part in the siege of Cadiz. But here he gives his metaphor a particular nuance: it is not a
pf2

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The Commemoration of George Herbert, Priest & Poet - 2016.02. Please not that yesterday's poem and commentary are attached as a pdf file.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God John Donne (1572-1631)

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. … for Donne, faith and prayer needed to involve the whole person and not just a pious set of behaviours and responses that form only one aspect of life. And therein lay the problem. Donne was aware that he was a highly complex, deeply conflicted person whose desires and interests, opinions and beliefs, pulled him in many different directions. Moreover he was immensely independent and strong-willed, while knowing and believing that at its heart his Christian vocation involved a renunciation of ego and a humility of which he felt scarcely capable. All this comes out in his poem in which he calls on God to take the active role, to step in and take over, in a dazzling series of vivid metaphors and paradoxes. He opens the sonnet abruptly and dramatically: Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; Here the image is drawn from metalwork, and specifically the trade of the tinker - a bold metaphor for the work of God Almighty! It is as though he is a broken vessel that needs to be completely remade, beaten again into shape. It is not enough just to knock out the old dent, to breathe on the copper and shine it up; Donne needs to be completely reworked. The effect of these short, sharp, kinetic verbs each pummelling in in the imperative voice is breathtaking: knock, breathe, shine … bend … break, blow, burn … make! But the end and purpose of it all is not to destroy but to ‘make me new’. Though these words were written 400 years ago many contemporary Christians will recognize Donne’s dilemma and the necessity of this prayer, the need to be thrown down, to be knocked off one’s perch, to be taken back to a beginning in order to start again with God. In the next six lines Donne switches metaphors and draws his image from siege warfare, something he knew about first-hand as he had sailed with Raleigh and Sidney and taken part in the siege of Cadiz. But here he gives his metaphor a particular nuance: it is not a

case of one person besieging another, as had happened between the English and Spanish. Donne compares himself to ‘an usurp’d town to another due’. Here the besiegers are on the side of the true citizens! The town is being besieged not to be invaded by enemies but, on the contrary, to return it to its true sovereignty and oust the usurpers. Donne knows that God is his true sovereign; he knows that his own reason is, in a beautiful image, God’s ‘viceroy’ in him. But somehow reason has been incapacitated, or has perhaps even rebelled and denied his sovereign. Donne typically allows an openness to both or either possibility; ‘Reason … is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue’. But whatever the case, somehow the city of Man-soul, as Bunyan was later to call it, has been menaced by an internal coup d’état! Donne sees that in our state of unreason, incoherence and the bondage of the will we need God himself to come in and re-establish his place and his throne in our hearts. And at this point Donne makes a beautiful elision to a third metaphor: the struggle of human love and passion: 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, Now it’s personal. If the call to God to stop tinkering seemed too mechanistic, and the siege warfare too grandiose and impersonal, now we come to the heart of things and true intimacy. The quest to be reunited and ‘right’ with God becomes, paradoxically, the yearning away from the mere institution to the call of true love. In an age of arranged marriages, Donne himself had incurred the wrath of his patron and a term in prison for marrying for love; he knew what it was to have a true love frustrated and constrained by external forces. It is both daring and helpful to think of God as the secret lover for whom we learn in spite of all the current institutional commercial and consumer forces - our arranged marriage to secularism - that try to keep us from him! But there is one last turn to this sonnet. Donne was a famously passionate man and he knew that in fact this deepest of all passions, his love of God, would involve his learning to subdue, redeem and redirect the profound erotic energies of his being. For Donne this is not to be an icy renunciation, however, but rather the encounter with an even more overmastering passion, of which Eros himself might be only a shadow, and the poem comes to its celebrated and dramatic conclusion: Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

  • Malcolm Guite, Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge The Lenten Poetry is available on the website for the Parishes of Sackville and Dorchester at sackville-dorchester-anglican.org. Click on 'Worship' and then 'Lent'. Towards the bottom of the page you'll find 'Poetry'.