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,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved 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.
(Holy Sonnets XIV)
I've always been able to relate to this sonnet. I feel just this way sometimes. The trouble I have with Donne, though, is that I cannot seem to separate these poems from his other less "holy" work. How can the same man who wrote "The Flea" write this?
Even as I type, my brain is protesting. It says, "People change" and "People act" and "People have layers." Perhaps John Donne was the same man who wrote "The Flea," after all-- or perhaps, as I imagine, the authors were very different people. Perhaps there is not such a disparity between the two works-- or perhaps the disparity was intentional.
In any case, I must admit that John Donne is one of my favorite poets, and whether or not he truly believed what he wrote, I take comfort in it. After all, God uses imperfect people. Perhaps discounting a message just because the messenger doesn't act on it is wrong.
As usual, I'm reading far too much into this. Enjoy the sonnet.
I like John Donne's poetry a lot, too. If I remember correctly from a lit. class, John Donne had a conversion experience and wrote only religious poetry afterwards. All of the more "worldly" poetry has been attributed to his earlier, unconverted self, known as Jack Donne. For clarification, you may wish to pull out your anthology and explore his biography. :)
ReplyDeleteYeah, I read that it was a sort of "before and after" thing. Then someone I trust told me that he wrote some secular poetry after his conversion. This bears further research.
ReplyDeleteThe question I have, though, is still: can you trust the message when the messenger doesn't? I wasn't very clear on it, but that's what I ask every time I read Donne.
If his conversion experience was not a true conversion experience (which isn't the argument I care about), can we still find value in his poetry?
I ask this not because I don't think Donne's experience was genuine but because other poets are not so... cut and dried.