(poems, 1633)
Written during a time of intense spiritual struggle and crowded with startling and unexpected images, The Holy Sonnets is one of the most consistently surprising cycles of poems in the English language. They show a man in the midst of a spiritual crisis who is honest about his doubts, his hesitations, and his inability to always practice what he preached. John Donne, an Anglican priest, had once been known as a witty and passionate ladies’ man, but in this series of poems he reveals himself to be God’s man, with no less passion for God than he had once shown for the women in his life.
The Holy Sonnets contains nineteen short poems dealing with Donne’s interior musings about God’s love and his own inability to be worthy of that love. The first sonnet starts with a question, “Thou has made me, and shall Thy work decay?” which sets the tone for what follows: an inquiry into the struggles of the spiritual life. That these struggles are all-too-familiar to most believers is likely why the poems have stood the test of time. These are not tidy and pious expressions of praise as much as honest outpourings of his wrestling with God. Sometimes he addresses God directly in these poems, but often he is in conversation with his own soul, posing questions to himself and trying to come to terms with his own failure to love as fully as he is loved.
Throughout the poems, Donne is concerned with the close connection between the physical and the spiritual, for he sees humans as frail and sinful beings who long for the release we will only find in eternity. One of the recurrent themes of these poems is confession and repentance, and in the third sonnet he speaks of “this holy discontent,” and chides himself for his sins and pride. He also asks God to wash and cleanse him through his tears, and burn away the sins of lust and envy.
Another important theme in the poems is the imminent specter of death and Donne’s embrace of a hope beyond it: “Death be not proud. . . . One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.”1 With this hope in sight, and in the face of his own unfaithfulness, in “Sonnet XIV” Donne invites God to overwhelm and overcome him:
Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, ’and bend
Your force, to break, blowe, burn, and make me new. . . .
I like a usurpt 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 loved fain,
But am betrothed unto your enemy:
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’ enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.2
God is never a spiritual abstraction in Donne’s poetry but One with whom he has a sometimes troubled personal relationship; spiritual victory requires being, in a sense, defeated by God. His desperate desire for God and his hope that one day he will shrug off this body of flesh and all its inconstancies are what make these poems such unforgettable depictions of the reality of the life of faith.
John Donne was born in 1572 in London to a prominent Catholic family at a time of religious discord between Catholics and Anglicans. Thomas More and other persecuted or martyred Catholics were part of his mother’s family tree. In 1592 Donne entered into the study of law, and at the same time he began reassessing his own religious leanings. For a time he was skeptical of both his Catholic upbringing and the Anglican alternative, and more interested in frequenting the taverns and pursuing the affections of young women. The young Donne also began writing poetry—poems that were witty, clever, and risqué celebrations of both love and lust. Some, like “The Flea,” were frankly erotic. In “The Bracelet” he even dismissed “that silly old morality” and its demands upon his life. There were few clues that he would blossom into one of the greatest Christian poets.
From the very beginning, Donne’s poems were not written for the public at large but for a few select friends who passed them around in manuscript form, and they were not published until after his death. Since his early goals were more concerned with career advancement and receiving the attention of the court and the king, he had little interest in being thought of as a poet. In November 1597 he took a significant step toward recognition by the throne by becoming secretary to a prominent favorite of the court, Sir Thomas Egerton. It appeared that from there Donne would advance quickly to a place of prominence himself; that is, until love intervened.
When Donne met Anne More, he knew he had found the woman he had been looking for. She was not yet of marriageable age and was the daughter of a wealthy and important aristocrat, but she had the qualities he desired. The two fell in love and, because of her father’s disapproval, had to marry secretly. When the secret came out, Donne was stripped of his position and had to fall back upon his own meager means for survival. As he quipped about the financial fallout of his romance, “John Donne; Anne Donne; Un-done.”
Donne spent the next thirteen years living in near poverty, always hoping to find a way to make a place for himself in the world. He also continued to ponder his religious convictions and wrote books that showed his movement away from Roman Catholicism toward an embrace of the Anglican faith. When the king read these works, he pressured Donne to give up his ambitions of serving at court and instead serve the church by becoming a priest.
Donne could not initially imagine himself taking the Holy Orders. He still yearned for worldly glory and was keenly cognizant of his past sins. But in 1615 he was finally ordained in the Anglican church. Two years later Anne died while giving birth, and Donne was shaken to the core. He would never remarry, and instead found a deepening sense of spiritual vocation. In 1621 he was installed as dean in the prestigious St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. From this pulpit he preached some of the sermons whose words still challenge and inspire readers today.
During the last decade of his life, Donne’s health began to fail, and he experienced numerous bouts of serious illness. The meditations he wrote on his sickbed, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, contain some of his most beautiful writing, including the famous line “Ask not for whom the bell tolls . . . it tolls for thee.” His last sermon, which he delivered despite the concerns of his friends over the weak state of his health, was entitled “Death’s Duel,” a celebration of the ultimate triumph of God over the power of death and the hope offered for a world to come. In a sense, as Izaak Walton later suggested, Donne had preached his own funeral. He died in March 1631.
Much is sometimes made of Donne’s struggles with doubt in his poetry, but these poems do not reflect the kind of intellectual struggles that question the reality and existence of God. Instead, as Michael Schmidt reminds us, “His religious struggle was due to an uncertainty about the terms, not the fundamentals, of faith. His problem was not in believing, but in believing rightly, and having accepted right belief, to behave accordingly.”3 His poems don’t so much make an argument for faith as they show it acted out in a real and honest way, with all the interior wrestling that involves. There is little polite piety to be found in his poems but instead honest human spiritual experience. He wavers sometimes between disgust at himself and spiritual ecstasy but he settles into a reluctant yet hopeful trust in God’s love and mercy.
Donne’s spiritual journey was a quest to overcome his sin and worldliness and replace it with “holy worldliness.” His is not an “other-world” centered spirituality but one that sees the physical life on earth as the arena in which the spiritual life is lived out. “To be spiritual [for Donne] does not require the negation of the earthly, but the cleansing and restoring of it to that condition in which God first created it.”4 This involved honest self-examination, the embrace of God’s forgiveness, and the acceptance of his love as the balm that heals all our inner wounds.
The abundance of God’s mercy is absolutely central to Donne’s theology, as that is the reality upon which all our hope can rest. Our lives will be a constant and unending struggle against the power of the flesh, but the end of all that struggle has already been determined—we will be embraced by the God who loves us passionately. Through his poems and his other writings Donne is a companion for the trenches of life, the endless battle to live out the grace we have been offered. His impatience with his own failings and his willingness to tear off the veil of piety to express his deepest interior battles and spiritual longings make him the contemporary of every man and woman.