Doing Donne Donnes Use of Conceit in Holy Sonnet 14
Doing Donne: Donne's Use of the Divine Rape Conceit in Holy Sonnet 14As a young poet, John Donne often utilized metaphors of spiritual bond in many of his Songs and Sonnets in order to explain fleshly love. Once he renounced Catholicism and converted to the Anglican faith (circa 1597), Donne donned a more devotional style of verse, such as in his Holy Sonnets (circa 1609-1610), finding parallels to divine love in the carnal union. In many ways, however, his love poems and his religious poems are quite similar, for they both address his personae's deep-seated fear of isolation by women and God, respectively. For example, in "Song," Donne's speaker tells an unknown person (presumably male) that if he would "Ride ten thousand days and nights" he would return "And swear/ Nowhere/ Lives a woman true, and fair" (ll. 12; 16-18). Similarly, in Holy Sonnet 2, the speaker voices fear that God will not be with him on his day of reckoning: "Oh I shall soon despair when I do see/ That Thou lov'st mankind well, yet wilt not choose me" (ll. 12-13). Whereas many of Donne's love poems display a speaker's anxiety and anger about his inability to sustain affection from a woman, Donne transferred that theme of resentment towards wo
4) in order to conjure violent images. From a sexual standpoint, the speaker asks God not to tease and tantalize, but rather to exert force upon him or her. Why would Donne have felt unfulfilled spiritually during the time in which he wrote theHoly Sonnets? Witherspoon and Warnke posit that "Donne's religious doubts seem to have been. In Sonnet 14 the speaker plays the martyr by asking God to brutally force redemption upon him, for the speaker cannot achieve it by the Catholic mode of prayer or the humanistic mode of reason. As an Anglican, however, he was forced to adopt the Calvinistic approach that personal effort was futile and irrelevant; he must be chosen as one of the elect. No longer cushioned by the assurances of Catholicism and its sacraments, he possessed a fear of eternal damnation. 1) is an example of the invitation "sub-genre. " The word "heart" was possibly Elizabethan slang for the vagina, and therein lies a very blatant sexual metaphor. Simultaneously, Donne is able to be the martyr he could never be once he turned traitor to his original faith. Famous for his metaphysical conceits, and his relentless pursuit of a faithful woman, Donne uses the most farfetched paradoxical juxtaposition of all: his speaker begs God to rape him or her in order to become chaste. Donne, then, reasonably must have felt that he was not one the elect when he converted, for he had sinned merely by being a Catholic. The hard consonant "B" in the first quatrain alliterates the words "batter," (l. To leave one religion in order to embrace another with some fundamental differences with respect to eternal salvation must have troubled Donne greatly.
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Acceptance Essays
