A Shaking

15 January 2016

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for youAs yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bendYour force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.I, like an usurp'd town to another due,Labor 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, perhaps, the best known of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and I think the best. Where the other sonnets have a tendency to wallow in confessions of abject sinfulness, to obsess especially over the stain of lust on the soul (suspicious, or at least ironic, in one who also wrote such memorable erotic poetry), this one does not. Oh, it maintains the general theme in that it confesses guilt and begs for God’s deliverance, but it manages to do so without focusing just on what they used to call “unclean thoughts,” with the happy result that this sonnet, at least, doesn’t sound like a conventionally devout adolescent boy wracked with guilt for thinking so much about sex.
But this one is just great poetry, both in the marriage of its pounding rhythms and its sense, and in the wealth of evocative images, smashed chaotically together. The conceit of being an occupied city held against the rightful king by a rebellious force is thrown together with that of being a lover separated from her true love and now unwillingly betrothed to another. But the poet is unable to escape. Even his reason has been overpowered (or seduced) by the occupying enemy, and he is helpless to do anything but cry for help – and to submit to whatever force is necessary.
But this time through was a little different, because after reading it once it suddenly occurred to me go back and read it again – but this time to read it as if I were a woman. Suddenly “Batter” had a different feel. “Bend your force to break, blow, burn” did not come across as deliverance but simply as an exchange of one abuser for another. As for the last line, calling for God’s cleansing rape – that was surely intended to be jarring, and it is, but reading it as a woman, it is not just a stark image. It is a threat. The sonnet is still a great poem. But this time I realized that its truth is not equally true for everyone.
This is not an earthshaking discovery. I would imagine that somewhat more than half the people who read this poem for the first time every year have these same thoughts. No, what’s shaking is that as many times as I have read this sonnet over the past thirty-five years, this is the first time they have occurred to me.