" Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?

John Donne was the main practitioner of Metaphysical poetry. He made his name as a
love poet, his imagery often being passionate and sensuous, but later turned his talents to
religious poems, hymns and sermons. The main idea of his religious poems is the
essence of guilt and sins, and the request to God for His Mercy. In Donne's Holy
Sonnets, he is speaking directly to God, asking God to hurry up and fix him before the devil
takes hold of his soul. In this poem, John Donne, describes a speaker’s battle against
returning to his sinful previous life.

This poem consists of three quatrains and a couplet. In this poem, the speaker
asking God if he’s going to allow his creation, the speaker, to fall into “decay.” He has lived
a bad life and now all his sins are catching up with him. The speaker can feel his body falling
apart around him and he needs God to fix him as soon as possible. If he cannot get back
some control over himself he knows that he will walk straight to death, and perhaps enter
into Hell. At the end of the poem, the speaker comparing his own “iron heart” to God’s
strong, metal-like presence in his life. God acts as a magnet, drawing the speaker in closer
and closer and winging him away from his sins and the Devil. The speaker is suffering from
an aging and crippling physical body. He is engaging with his Beloved Creator, as he
prayerfully contemplates his mortality and immortality.

It is clear from the first line of this poem that Donne’s speaker is addressing God.
He asks his creator if it is his will that his creation “shall…decay.” Donne’s speaker, who is
generally considered to be the poet himself, is worried about his own life. Something is
happening to him that makes him feel like his life is falling apart. The next line depicts a bit of
the frustration this speaker feels. He tells God that now he must “Repaire” him and return
him to the state he was in before things started to go bad. He knows God must have this
ability. His impatience comes from the fact that his “end doth haste.” The speaker does not
want to spend any more time on the earth in this incarnation of himself. In fact, he wills death
to come for him.

Donne’s speaker states that he is running towards death, and it is coming “fast” to
“meet” him. It is a very simple thing for the speaker to toss his life away at this point. All the
pleasures he used to have “yesterday” have shown themselves to be sins. Their return is
something he greatly fears. Instead, he is looking for something new to live for.

In the second quatrain of the poem the speaker expresses his everyday fear. He
does not want to “move” his eyes from where they rest because there are only reminders of
the past around him. He knows he’s going to see “Such terrour”. It will remind him of all the
mistakes he’s made. These lines also clear up a bit about the speaker’s own situation. He
has lived a life that he is ashamed of. Now his choices are taking their toll on his “feebled
flesh.” The speaker is wasting away, all because of how he chose to live. He sinned, and
now those sins are sending him down to hell.

The next four lines are somewhat more hopeful. It turns out the speaker does have
one source of happiness in his life, God. When he looks towards “thee” in the sky, he
feels as if he is rising again. The hope that is intrinsic to his understanding of God improves
him. While God’s light might shine on, and sustain him for a time, he is soon tempted back
down to earth. He has an “old subtle foe” which is always there, luring him back to sin.
This “foe” is the embodiment of his sin, which is likely the taking of too much pleasure.
This would relate directly to Donne’s own life. He turned from his own patterns of pleasure to
one in the church, dedicated to God.

In the couplet, the speaker makes his most positive comment. The speaker re-
emphasizes the fact that only God is able to keep him away from the devil. Satan is always

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 calling to him, through his own desire to please himself once more. The speaker tells God
that he is his only hope. He believes in God’s ability to “wing” him away from his current life
and keep his attention on goodness and faith.

God is the “adamant,” or metal, to the speaker’s “iron heart.” He is drawn, like a
magnet up to God’s grace. This final line is a great example of the metaphysical conceits
for which Donne is so well-known. This kind of clever comparison seeks to be original and
relates two strangely opposite things in an interesting way.

This divine poem is a fourteen line sonnet that is contained within one block of text.
The lines follow a consistent pattern of rhyme that conforms to the traditional Petrarchan, or
Italian, sonnet form. In this divine poem of Donne the sonnet follows a rhyme scheme of
ABBA ABBA CDCDEE. The lines follow a scheme of iambic pentameter. This kind of
sonnet often presents a problem and a solution. The problem is contained within the first
eight lines, and the solution in the concluding sestet. This is most certainly the case in ‘Thou
hast made me, and shall thy work decay?’ The octave presents the speaker’s problem of
constant temptation by the sins of his earlier years, and the sestet provides God’s
attraction as the solution.

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