Analysis

In his holy sonnets, Donne blends elements of the Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet with the
English (Shakespearean) sonnet. Here he begins in the Italian form abba abba, but his
concluding idea in the third quatrain bleeds over into the rhyming couplet (cdcd cc) that
completes the poem.

The poet begins by asking God to increase the strength of divine force to win over the
poet’s soul. He requests, “Batter my heart” (line 1), metaphorically indicating that he
wants God to use force to assault his heart, like battering down a door. Thus far, God
has only knocked, following the scriptural idea that God knocks and each person must
let him in, yet this has not worked sufficiently for the poet. Simply to “mend” or “shine”
him up is not drastic enough; instead God should take him by “force, to break, blow,
burn” in order to help him “stand” and be made “new” (lines 3-4). This request indicates
that the speaker considers his soul or heart too badly damaged or too sinful to be
reparable; instead, God must re-create him to make him what he needs to be. The
paradox is that he must be overthrown like a town in order to rise stronger.

Indeed, the second quatrain begins with that metaphor, with the speaker now an
“usurp’d town” that owes its allegiance or “due” to someone else (line 5). He is
frustrated that his reason, God’s “viceroy” in the town of his soul, is captive to other
forces (such as worldly desire) and is failing to persuade him to leave his sins behind.

The poet then moves from the political to the personal in the last six lines. He loves
God, but he is “betroth’d unto [God’s] enemy” (line 9), the Satanic desires of the selfish
heart (if not the devil himself). He seeks God’s help to achieve the “divorce” from his
sinful nature and break the marriage “knot” (lines 10-11). In the final couplet, he gives
voice to the paradox of faith: the speaker can only be free if he is enthralled by God
(line 13), and he can only be chaste and pure if God ravishes him (line 14).

The poet uses this dissonance of ideas to point out just how holy—in this case,
otherworldly and spiritual in a carnal world—God truly is. In other words, a relationship
with God requires being reborn and rebuilt from the ground up, in but not of the world.

Finally, since the speaker here suggests being in the female role of betrothal and
ravishment (a city too tends to be coded as female), we once again see that the speaker
is putting himself in the position of the Christian church generally. In the New
Testament, the church is metaphorically said to be married to God. Can it be that, in
Donne’s eyes, the church still needs to be utterly reformed, even after the Reformation?

A Short Analysis of John Donne’s ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d

God’
March 23, 2017 3:00 pm

A reading of a classic Donne poem by Dr Oliver Tearle

‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God’: a typically blunt and direct opening for a John
Donne poem, from a poet who is renowned for his bluff, attention-grabbing opening
lines. This poem, written using the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet form, sees Donne calling
upon God to take hold of him and consume him, in a collection of images that are at
once deeply spiritual and physically arresting.

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,
Labour 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.

This is a remarkable sonnet because, although it was written after Donne’s confirmation
as a priest in the Church of England, it is teeming with the same erotic language we find
in his earlier ‘love poems’. This is the aspect of Donne which prefigures (and possibly
influenced) a poet of 250 years later, the Victorian religious poet Gerard Manley
Hopkins, who often addresses God in the same breathless, excited way that we see in
this sonnet. (Hopkins also favoured the sonnet form, as demonstrated by his most
famous poem, ‘The Windhover’, as well as by many of his other best-loved poems.)
Donne’s sonnet ends with a very daring declaration of desire that God ‘ravish’ him –
much as he had longed for the women in his life to ravish him in his altogether more
libertine youth.

Perhaps the best way to summarise and understand is to paraphrase. ‘Beat me into
submission, God [who is ‘three-person’d’ because he is the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit]; at the moment you merely try to persuade me, gently, to accept you into
my heart. But in order to make me rise up and stand before you a new, devout man, use
your power to break me and remould me into someone new. I am like a town that has
been captured and long to let you, my saviour, in to reclaim me. But it’s no good, for
my reason – which should act as your second-in-command within me and make me see
sense, has been captured by the other side [i.e. the Devil], and is ineffectual or else has
proved a turncoat. Yet I do dearly love you, and would gladly accept your love, but I
have been promised to the Devil; sever the ties between me and him, take me to you and
lock me up, for [paradoxically] I will never be free unless you take me as your slave – I
will never be pure unless you ravish me.’

Strong stuff, this – which, when paraphrased and put into modern-day language (with
‘thee’ replaced by ‘you’), only becomes all the more shocking as a holy poem. God is
not only depicted as an almighty force, but is called upon to use his might and force to
beat Donne into submission. Here is a man wanting to be treated mean to be kept keen:
‘Batter my heart’, with that opening trochee (in a poem that is largely written in iambic
pentameter), sets the trend.
Donne piles on the verbs, especially in that first quatrain:

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.

This lexical volley – in the plainest possible sense, a verbal attack – conveys both
Donne’s sense of urgency to be saved and embraced by God, and the force he
acknowledges God to possess. The array of hard plosive sounds too, present in the b-
words (batter, breathe, bend, break, blow, burn), as well as the internal rhymes
(break/make, o’erthrow/force), half-rhymes (seek/break/make), and assonance
(shine/rise) add to the feeling of inundation, of verbal assault, mimicking the hoped-for
battering Donne hopes to receive from God.

‘Batter my heart’ is close to ‘break my heart’, but the paradox here – as in that final
couplet – is that only through such ‘tough love’ will Donne’s heart be opened to the
glory of God in a visceral and tangible way. He may be asking for heartbreak (and,
even, to be ravished – suggesting sexual force and also, perhaps, sexual assault), but the
irony is that only through such actions will God’s goodness reach Donne. In order for
him to be remade, he must first be broken.

The best edition of Donne’s work is, in our opinion, the indispensable John Donne –
The Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics) . Discover more about Donne’s poetry
with our thoughts on his poem ‘The Canonization’, his classic poem ‘The Ecstasy’,
and our discussion of his ‘A Hymn to God the Father’.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in
English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret
Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great
War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.