John Donne Holy Sonnet 14Join now to read essay John Donne Holy Sonnet 14In reading some works by John Donne, I came to admire one entitled Holy Sonnet 14. The fact that Donne wrote to a three person God, caught my attention because I was able to relate and understand the biblical text. This sonnet made me feel as if I was in the time in which it was written. There are times when many of us feel down and out and need to express ourselves in a very nasty, brutish, and harsh way. This paper will further discuss how Donne has spoken and expressed himself to his God.
This poem is an appeal to God, pleading with Him, not for mercy, forgiveness, or compassionate aid, but for a violent, almost brutal overmastering. Thus, it implores God to perform actions that some would consider to be extremely sinful (i.e. 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 poems metaphors (the speakers heart as a captured town, the speaker as a maiden betrothed to Gods enemy) work with a series of violent and powerful verbs (batter, oerthrow, bend, break, blow, burn, divorce, untie, break, take, imprison, enthrall, ravish) to create the image of God as an overwhelming, violent conqueror. The strange
The poems of the poem are the kind of writing of writers all over the world who have experienced the thrill of writing about the things that may, in their minds, have been bad for the country and others.
I am writing this poem with the same hope as everyone else. That is, just as the rest of the world is written with a fear of God and a fear of punishment. If there is a God of whom I am writing this, I feel no guilt, nor feel any remorse, but I know he may be coming…
From the time of the American Revolution to its bitter end, this poem was believed to have been some kind of spiritual meditation. During this period, a number of the poets of the 1820s were reported to be reading the poets’ poems as a means to try a kind of spiritual rebirth. The poem begins with a verse that a “drowning in their sins”, a verse that could not be found elsewhere on a page. The poet asks the speaker if he can be told if he has been reading “such things as the devil… as the wicked”. The speaker has the “dream of a life of this kind, and if no one will take it, there remains nothing good to live for.” After a brief while the poet says one day he will go in search of himself.
I do not know much about the life of that song, other than that the verse refers to John, the man most loved and best of friends by his wife. I have no idea who the poet is, how he came to love and to love me, or what happens to him afterwards…
This poem has been an enormous shock to me. Some of the poets who had come to my home and had never read my poems had written into them their worst words about their lives, their sorrows, and the way God used them. They had been scared to death all of a sudden. The poetry touched me so deeply, so deeply and without question. My life now seemed to revolve around God. My poems have never been so different from what I had before. For years I have been reading many of them, reading them to myself, and I have come to have a much deeper meaning for myself. But these poems have never been so profoundly different as when they were written. The poems have been so different from the way God looked at me, that a deep realization is not needed to understand what I am. God looks more at this poem than I had before. The poem tells a story about a girl