Summary
The speaker asks the “three-personed God” to “batter”
his heart, for as yet God only knocks politely, breathes, shines,
and seeks to mend. The speaker says that to rise and stand, he needs
God to overthrow him and bend his force to break, blow, and burn
him, and to make him new. Like a town that has been captured by the
enemy, which seeks unsuccessfully to admit the army of its allies
and friends, the speaker works to admit God into his heart, but
Reason, like God’s viceroy, has been captured by the enemy and proves
“weak or untrue.” Yet the speaker says that he loves God dearly
and wants to be loved in return, but he is like a maiden who is
betrothed to God’s enemy. The speaker asks God to “divorce, untie,
or break that knot again,” to take him prisoner; for until he is
God’s prisoner, he says, he will never be free, and he will never
be chaste until God ravishes him.
Form
This simple sonnet follows an ABBAABBACDDCEE rhyme scheme
and is written in a loose iambic pentameter. In its structural division,
it is a Petrarchan sonnet rather than a Shakespearean one, with
an octet followed by a sestet.
Commentary
This poem is an appeal to God, pleading with Him not for
mercy or clemency or benevolent aid but for a violent, almost brutal
overmastering; thus, it implores God to perform actions that would
usually be considered extremely sinful—from battering the speaker
to actually raping him, which, he says in the final line, is the only
way he will ever be chaste. The poem’s metaphors (the speaker’s
heart as a captured town, the speaker as a maiden betrothed to God’s
enemy) work with its extraordinary series of violent and powerful
verbs (batter, o’erthrow, bend, break, blow, burn, divorce, untie,
break, take, imprison, enthrall, ravish) to create the image of
God as an overwhelming, violent conqueror. The bizarre nature of
the speaker’s plea finds its apotheosis in the paradoxical final
couplet, in which the speaker claims that only if God takes him
prisoner can he be free, and only if God ravishes him can he be
chaste.
As is amply illustrated by the contrast between Donne’s
religious lyrics and his metaphysical love poems, Donne is a poet
deeply divided between religious spirituality and a kind of carnal
lust for life. Many of his best poems, including “Batter my heart,
three-personed God,” mix the discourse of the spiritual and the
physical or of the holy and the secular. In this case, the speaker
achieves that mix by claiming that he can only overcome sin and
achieve spiritual purity if he is forced by God in the most physical,
violent, and carnal terms imaginable.
