Emotion flows freely from the lines of John Donne’s poetry. From witty flirtation to near-overwhelming sorrow to awestruck love, he covers the whole gamut of human feeling. One cannot read his poems with something within them moving. One laughs at Donne’s mockery of woman’s constancy in saying that their constancy is inconstancy. In poems for those who have died, one suffers with the poet in his loss and can easily imagine the one deceased in all their virtue and grace. Finally, in some of his most beautiful poems, one learns to see God in a, possibly, new light, one cast in love and the greatest adoration. Wherever one looks in Donne’s poetry, there is no end to the ways to exercise the heart.
In his Holy Sonnet XIV (Batter my heart, three-person’d God), Donne speaks to God as one would speak to a lover, passionate and intimate.
Yet dearely ‘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. (9-14)
Normally, I would not have imagined such vehement language to be directed towards God. And yet, by looking at the book of Song of Songs, this kind of speaking is not uncommon in its direction towards God. Likewise, God is the lover of our souls. Why should we not speak to Him in this fashion? Ultimately, we are to be totally in love with God alone so it seems only appropriate to speak to him in language like John Donne.
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