Rereading John Donne's Holy Sonnet 14

Batter my heart, three-personed 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 usurped town, to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed 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.¹

I cannot recall when I first read John Donne's Holy Sonnet 14; I seem to have always known it. For years I thought this sonnet was the closest thing I knew to a perfect poem, not to mention a perfect prayer—the impassioned yet flawlessly elegant cri de coeur of a yearning soul. Long ago, when I still taught my university's version of English 101, I used to delight in pointing out the power of Strong Verbs—fourteen of them in the first quatrain alone. Those mighty monosyllables, each like a hammer blow from heaven! Those heart-shattering spondees! Then I'd wait for my students to discover the parallels, verb by inexorable verb, that build the contrast between mere patchwork and a new creation. Next we would examine the classic images of the second quatrain and the sestet: the intertwined figures of the City and the Bride. In the Apocalypse, both symbolize fulfillment at the end of time: the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. But in this text, both have fallen into enemy hands. The city is "usurped," its rightful lord reduced to siege warfare, its defenders turned traitors, while the bride is engaged against her will to her lover's mortal foe—a damsel in distress indeed. What then could be more natural, or more poignant, than her final, desperate bid to be rescued?

My sympathy with Donne's speaker was sharply challenged two years ago, however, when I came across a collection of sermons by my friend A. K. M. Adam, one of the finest preachers in the Episcopal Church today. Reverend Adam, like Reverend Donne, is not one to pass up an opportunity for fiery, in-your-face rhetoric, and in this particular sermon he goes head to head with the Dean of St. Paul's, preaching against the perilous error of Sonnet 14.² That mistake, in his view, is to imagine God as "Superman in theological white robes," "a spiritual jailer, a conquering general," who will come to release us once and for all from our frailties so that we no longer have to exercise those tedious virtues of patience, perseverance, and constancy. To extend Father Adam's thought, would such a superhero God have endured the Cross? Would he not have asked his Father instead to send twelve legions of angels—or leapt down by miracle and raptured St. John and Mary Magdalene with him to heaven? But if the incarnate Christ truly reveals to us the nature of God, should we not expect him to remain "gentle and humble in heart," patiently bearing with us until we learn at last to bear with ourselves and our neighbors? Closer to this spirit is the poem "Discipline," by Donne's less flamboyant contemporary, George Herbert:

Throw away thy rod,
Throw away thy wrath:
    O my God,
Take the gentle path.

For my heart's desire
Unto thine is bent:
    I aspire
To a full consent.

Not a word or look
I affect to own,
    But by book,
And thy book alone.

Though I fail, I weep:
Though I halt in pace,
    Yet I creep
To the...