God. Real. Right.

This poem became my favorite when I first read it in college. It has remained so since. Ignore the numbers, of course. They are only provided to relate line-for-line with the paraphrase which follows. The paraphrase is an interpreted, applied, reading which may help clarify the sonnet for those who struggle a bit with Donne’s still-Elizabethan English. But no paraphrase can even approach catching the many subtleties Donne writes into the fourteenth of his Holy Sonnets. Click “read the rest of this entry” to see the paraphrase. Readers should know that in his youth and early poetry, before his personal commitment to Christ, Donne was indiscreet to say the least. So his pleadings come from an earnest humility and a desire to be transformed.

Holy Sonnet XIV

1. Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
2. As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
3. That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
4. Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
5. I, like an usurp’d town to’another due,
6. Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
7. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
8. But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
9. Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
10. But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
11. Divorce me,’untie or break that knot again,
12. Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
13. Except you’enthrall me, never shall be free,
14. Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

c. 1609

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