Batter My Heart (holy Sonnet 14): Overview
Critic: William Zunder
Source: Reference Guide to English Literature, 2nd ed., edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James
Press, 1991
Criticism about: John Donne (1572-1631)
Nationality: British; English
John Donne wrote 19 Holy Sonnets, most of them probably between 1609 and 1611. These years
seem to have been a time of spiritual crisis for Donne, as well as part of a larger cultural crisis
for England. In 1602 he had been dismissed from his post as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton,
Elizabeth's lord keeper, on account of his unauthorised marriage the previous year. And between
then and his ordination in 1615, his life was one of unemployment, isolation, and alienation from
the court, which, in the early years of the 17th century, was the centre of English life. At the
same time, the characteristic changes of the period were gathering head: the shift from a feudal
to a capitalist economy, the growth of puritanism, the rise of science, the increasing rift between
Parliament and crown. It was a critical development registered in Donne's two Anniversaries,
published in 1611 and 1612.
The Holy Sonnets, then, represent a turning to God at a moment of personal and cultural crisis.
Holy Sonnet 14 begins with a forceful, even aggressive, assertiveness, of a kind found in the love
poems: in ``The Canonisation,'' for instance. Here, however, the person addressed is not the
reader, or a woman, but God. ``Batter my heart, three-personed God,'' says Donne. ``For,'' he
adds, using an unusually homely metaphor of a tinker mending pots, ``you/As yet but knock,
breathe, shine, and seek to mend.'' Something more violent is demanded. ``That I may rise, and
stand,'' he goes on, immediately and characteristically alert to paradox, ``o'erthrow me''; and,
moving on to another unusually commonplace image, ``bend/Your force, to break, blow, burn,
and make me new,'' like a blacksmith, the lines gaining a sense of enormous force from their
enjambment and from the alliteration and emphasis on the packed, brief verbs in line 4.
Although the emotion is violent, it is also carefully contained within the sonnet form, in a way
typical of the Holy Sonnet, where Donne can be seen using the form to control the experience
being expressed: in this poem, the desperate need for some sort of inner renewal. The initial plea,
therefore, presented in the guise of a succession of commands, is contained within the first
quatrain. And the move to the second quatrain marks both a shift in tone and a transition of
thought. ``I,'' explains Donne, changing to political imagery, ``like an usurped town, to another
due,/Labour to admit you'' to admit God, his rightful ruler ``but oh, to no end.'' The attempt is
fruitless, because ``Reason your viceroy in me'' God's deputy in him ``me should defend,/But
is captived, and proves weak or untrue.'' In the face of the rapidly and radically altering world of
1609, in which he plays no part, Donne is helpless.
Source: William Zunder, "Batter My Heart (holy Sonnet 14): Overview" in Reference Guide to
English Literature, 2nd ed., edited by D. L. Kirkpatrick, St. James Press, 1991.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center
