This is the text from our free study guide for our free booklet, Poetry and Meditation: The Worshipful Art of John Donne.
John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, a series of nineteen religious poems, were published two years after his death in 1631. The poems combine two styles of composition—the fourteenth-century Italian style of Petrarch, and the contemporaneous English style of William Shakespeare—to explore questions involving the interrelationships between God, humanity and the world, intensely probing issues of life and death, love and estrangement, and sin and salvation.
Death is a pressing concern in the sonnets—not only was plague a recurring problem, but three of Donne’s twelve children died before turning ten, two were stillborn, and his wife died in 1617 mere days after the second stillbirth. This concern is clearly seen in Sonnet 10, “Death be not proud,” where Donne rejects the seemingly overwhelming and conclusive power of death. Even though death has been called “Mighty and dreadful,” and even though “our best men with thee do go,” mortality itself is ultimately undone by the eternality of the uncorrupted soul.
Death is also front-and-center in Meditation XVII, a prose work in which death comes for each of us, and we are all diminished by the suffering and death of others. But this is not the end of the story: God ensures the value of our lives, and through our lives and mortal suffering binds us together and carries us “nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.”
Sonnet 14, “Batter my heart, three-person’d God,” is a powerful demonstration of a Christian’s simultaneous desire for union with God opposed by an innate resistance to this union. We “labor to admit” God into our lives, but we are like a town whose walls keep God out or, even more, like someone engaged to God’s deepest enemy. Our only hope for full union with the divine is for God to “break, blow, burn, and make me new,” “enthrall(ing)” and remaking us.
Image: Cover from the booklet, using a portrait of John Donne (Source).
