Holy Sonnet 14

 

John Donne

 

Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you

As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend

Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.

I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,

Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,

Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.

Yet dearly’I love you,’and would be loved faine,

But am betroth’d unto your enemie:

Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe,

Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I

Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,

Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

* * *

I've read a lot of John Donne's work during the past six months, and a lot of it I haven't enjoyed. For me, he is a difficult poet to love: spleeny and cerebral, often petty in his angers . . . but when he's on, he's on, and this sonnet is most certainly on. I mean, good lord, that first line. Yesterday I copied it out, mostly because I wanted to feel what he was doing with the punctuation--not least those crowded apostrophes. But what about the simile "I, like an usurpt town"? What about that skin-crawling rape me, God ending? It's a poem that makes me shake.

At the moment I am not writing particularly well or easily, but at least I am reading hard. I'm immersed in Byatt's The Children's Book, which is complicated and painful and full of specific history, and Donne is racketing around in my brain. I suspect I'm on the cusp of a new project, but I don't know what it will entail, what it will demand of me. All I can do is keep paddling. This is not my favorite state of mind, but it's familiar, and it will end.

Today will be mostly housework: taking down the tree, putting away decorations, dusting, cleaning up the needle mess, plus my usual Friday schedule: washing sheets and towels, cleaning bathrooms and floors. It's possible that a day of plain chores will open some creative door; my brain does seem to be linked to my hands. In any case, I've got this sonnet to haunt me.

The year is rolling toward its end, and I worry that I've wasted my few precious open days. I had such plans for them, yet I've made hardly anything at all. Still, I did read. I did walk. I did think.