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 oh, 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.
John
Donne, Holy Sonnet
Reflection –
One more day of poetry,
then on to other stuff! I’m not a huge Donne fan, to be honest, but have always
found this one to be rather moving. It captures so very well the reality of our
resistance to God, the desire we carry within us that God should overcome that
resistance and that we be His entirely at last, and the fact that we of
ourselves do not have to power to overcome that resistance.
The images
used—a city under siege, a woman betrothed to a loathed enemy—are telling. The
violent imagery of the first stanza suggests Jacob’s wrestling with the angel;
the last couplet is downright disturbing in its violent wording, yet there it
is.
This poem
raises questions about the nature of freedom and grace and discusses them in a
way that some would consider Calvinist—the soul of the pre-destined one being
overpowered by the action of God, freedom essentially becoming an illusion in
this presentation.
Well, you
could read the poem that way, and if you wish push it to the extremes of
Calvinist theology—absolute corruption of human nature into sin, absolute
necessity of God to act, therefore the action of God is only given to his
favored pre-destined souls, and so forth.
I read the
poem as a Catholic, and so see in it strong echoes of John of the Cross, the
mystical tradition of the Carmelites, and that strong Augustinian stress on the
utter necessity of God’s grace to save and restore the human person. In that,
there is much to be meditated upon regarding the nature of human freedom and
the intersection of God’s action and our response.
‘Except you
enthrall me, never shall be free’ is a most profound statement. We do tend to
think that freedom means unencumbrance, means that nothing and no one has any
absolute claim on us. This is a profound spiritual mistake, one which in fact
delivers us over to the most base slavery, which is slavery to the winds and
whims of desire, fancy, and fashion. We are not strong enough, in an essential
metaphysical way, to stand in the kind of freedom we imagine to be the human
ideal. When we cast off the yoke of God in the name of human freedom, we end up
the worst and most degraded of thralls, trafficked to the highest bidder for
our passions without any capacity to resist or any means of escape.
It is the
great paradox, only learned by experience, that the servitude of God is the
doorway into absolute and utter human liberty, the surrender of one’s own
self-will the road into freedom and full joyous human life. The slave traders
of the human person are the passions, the unfettered desires; it is only in
their fettering and harnessing that the person is emancipated and walks free.
Donne’s poem
reflects on all this, with great poetic beauty. I must say, too, without
lapsing into inappropriately public self-revelation, that this sonnet captures
my own spiritual experience and journey pretty accurately. And this is one of
the great gifts of poetry, why I am a proud poetry geek and will occasionally
lapse into a sonnet on this blog. Poetry gives words to the deepest level of
human experience and apprehension of reality, that which cannot be expressed in
simple prose but has to be voiced in meter and rhyme, image and allusion. That
is the function of poetry, that its abiding value for us.
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