Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but O, 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 lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
I first encountered this strange, strenuous seventeenth-century poem in a college classroom, as many do—not a particularly fitting context in which to receive and reflect on its spiritual challenge. But I had the good fortune to be guided through it by an inspiring professor whose great literary passion was the seventeenth-century “metaphysical” poets, John Donne chief among them. The professor himself was a bit outlandish and wild-eyed, given to extravagant claims and edgy anecdotes. So he was a fitting guide: he taught us to love Donne’s paradoxes, the tensions and stresses in the poem, the brash improprieties and disturbing metaphors, not simply because they were outrageous, but because they were theologically appropriate. Donne, a notorious rake and womanizer in his younger years, came to his belated vocation as Anglican priest with a spirit of repentance and an exuberant gratitude that matched his other passions in urgency and magnitude of feeling.
Roughly paraphrased, the poem confesses something like this. I am a slave to sin; my heart is fickle and deceitful. There’s no way I’m going to come back to you, God, if you don’t wrench me by force from the devil’s stronghold and invade my deepest inner places. It is, we can assume, a real confession of a real man: Donne was pretty candid about his personal knowledge of sin and temptation. And the argument of the poem rests on good Reformation theology: only God can redeem and repair us; we can’t do it for ourselves. It gets at the desperate nature of addiction, uncontrolled appetite, and ego possession.
But it gets at those things in unnerving ways. It was a shock at the time to learn that “ravish” actually meant rape. “Ravish” is a rather appealing word if you don’t know what it means—it sounds domestic and cheerful like “radish,” or inviting like “relish,” or a bit ironic, like “rubbish,” the British term of dismissal. . . . But when you recognize that it means to abduct by force and generally implies rape, this poem turns very dark. My own first encounter with the final lines of Holy Sonnet XIV was every bit as shocking as Donne apparently intended. At the time I first studied it, I was also beginning to read the mystics and was struck by how often they, too, borrowed erotic words to speak of encounter with God. Their language unsettled me. So, for that matter, did The Song of Songs.
That “ravish” also means “to overwhelm with emotion; enrapture,” though, serves Donne’s purposes perfectly. His purposes are a lot like those of Flannery O’Connor, who frequently resorted to shocking images to get at the magnitude of sin and the extraordinary nature of radical grace.
“Sin” is an unpopular word, and a sense of its horror is hard to sustain when we so commonly domesticate our bad habits, excuse our errant ways, and regard our foibles with affectionate irony. We have (rightly, I think) reclassified some “sins” as psychopathologies. What some of us were taught to regard as personal sins may in fact be systemic: people may be driven to push drugs by poverty created by other people’s greed. Conviction of personal sin in our complicated, secularized culture can become so highly modified that we no longer feel much urgency about escaping it. We may be among the “good people” that Flannery O’Connor acerbically recognized as inured to grace and in need of a rude awakening.
Donne tries one metaphor after another in an effort to get at what sin is. We are like dented and damaged vessels that can’t be made usable by patching or polish, but have to be melted and recast—reduced and reformed in the most literal sense. Or we are like towns taken over by enemy forces. Our defenses against grace have become militant and violent. We are like slaves who have lost even the will to seek freedom. We are like brides given in unholy marriage to abusive husbands. We are bound by a Gordian knot that God alone can untie. The forms of damage, abjection, and addiction suggested here are dire, but, interestingly, they are not willful. We’ve been cracked and broken and need to be fixed, caught and need to be freed, hurt and need to be healed.
It can be tempting, in light of its violent images, to write off the poem as evidence of Donne’s bad taste. Fortunately, though, my teacher knew enough theology and cultural history, and had developed enough informed sympathy for the profundity of Donne’s penitence to enable us to appreciate why he would choose such extreme metaphors to make his point. They actually offer compassionate rather than punitive ways of thinking about what sin is. I think as I read the poem of the wisdom so many have found in twelve-step programs. There, along with being required to acknowledge the damage done to others, addicts understand themselves as captives of compulsions that can’t be overcome by will alone but only by prayer, shared accountability, and love.
That message of compassion deepens even as the last couplet complicates it. But the final paradox, the one I found so difficult at first, challenges us to imagine God’s grace in even starker terms: “nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” How shall I be purified except by giving myself completely, allowing myself to be taken over, occupied, enraptured by the One whom another poet called “this tremendous Lover”?
I have come increasingly to love and rely on this poem. I have come back to it, grateful, in my own moments of sorrow, for precisely that unsparing reminder of ways my own heart has been hardened and has needed to be “battered” like a closed door. It can’t be reduced to a display of clever poetic devices. The opening imperative is every bit as urgent as the Psalmist’s “O LORD, make haste to help me!” Followed by “Three-person’d God,” it enlists the entire Trinity to do the job. Every dimension of divine power is invoked to save what is almost utterly lost. Behind the words I hear the echo of Luther’s insistence that an adequate understanding of what Christ undertook requires an effort to fathom the depth and horror of sin.
Over the years those lines have lost, perhaps from much teaching, some of their shock value. But they still awaken longing: I want to desire God this urgently—God who gives us the very desires of our hearts, not just the objects of those desires. I have longed to be as fully possessed as St. Catherine in ecstasy, or St. Teresa in prayer. To be caught up, taken up, held, possessed, and inhabited by Love itself is a good thing to want—the best thing.
It is possible to find in this poem, and in the prayer it prays so fervently, an invitation to imagine divine love, and to discover a desire that is the beginning of its own fulfillment. It opens, like any prayer prayed from the heart, a way to what it asks.