![]() In Revelation 3:20 Christ states, in part, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him.” Donne will extend this conceit throughout the sonnet. That line contains a caesura due to the semicolon that follows the apostrophe to God then continues with enjambment into the second line: “for, you / As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.” This series of verbs reflects on various biblical characteristics of Christ, with knock representing a polite request to open a door. The three persons referenced constitute the holy trinity composed of Christ the Son, the Holy Spirit, and God the Father, and the speaker commands that all three attack his heart, the term Batter suggesting repeated blows. ![]() While critics including the Donne expert Helen Gardner insist that a true assessment of Donne’s “spiritual and moral achievement” may be gained only through his sermons, the sonnets best reveal his extreme capacity for passion and ecstasy.įrom the opening line, “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” the reader understands the speaker does not seek a Christian God who is gentle or compassionate. Typical of Donne, he heavily emphasizes the first-person pronouns I and me, enabling readers to visualize the speaker’s involvement and the importance of the experience to him, while the strong but simple language does not distract the reader from the poem’s theme of the importance in the Christian life of total surrender to God. The sonnet’s hysterical tone grows from the tradition of meditation, which may be used as an emotional stimulus. ![]() ![]() Victorian readers found Donne’s comparison of God’s effect on his life to the violent act of ravishment, or rape, so disturbing that the poem basically disappeared from publishing until resurrected in the 20th century through the efforts of the poet T. Critics feel fairly certain that one group of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets was published in 1633, a collection that included “Batter My Heart,” sometimes listed as “Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God.” It gained fame as a prime example of the style of Metaphysical Poets and Poetry with markedly unusual figurative language (figure of speech) or comparisons. ![]()
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