ENGLISH LITERATURE 20th October 2013

Apollnia Isabel Barcel Ballester 2nd Humanities. Group 2

LEARNING TO LOVE GOD IS A ROUGH PATH Although I love poetry, I had never heard of John Donne before I applied for English Literature at university. However, last school year one of my best friends was always speaking about him and some other English poets who were very literary and complex, and I must confess that I liked the few works that she showed me. Then, one Wednesday we analysed one of this authors poems, called Batter my heart, three-personed God, in which John Donne (1572-1631) expresses his remorse when it comes to his religious faith. The title is already interesting: theres an imperative, batter, that means smash. It is directed to God, which is three-personed, referring to the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. There is a big paradox within the whole poem: he prays to God to punish him to rise and stand, but he asks to overthrow him, God has to destroy him to regenerate him. He really wants to be renewed because he has a condition of guilt, he has sinned: reason makes him wonder if God exists. We can divide the poems structure in three main parts, which correspond to three different related metaphors. Firstly, the author uses words from a typical ironsmiths vocabulary, also representing the different parts of the trinity. For example, the Father is who knocks and breaks because he symbolises authority, the Son breathes and blows and the Holy Spirit burns and shines like in the Christian artistic representations, where it is represented like tongues of fire. Secondly, the poet is presented as a town in the middle of a siege, where Gods enemy, the governor or viceroy of the town, is the reason, which is also seen as the Devil. Therefore, God must save him. As well as in this case he is like a prisoner who is subdued to the Evil, the next allegory shows the poet as a lover woman who is engaged (betrothed) to the Devil and asks God to divorce or even kidnap (imprison) her. We

ENGLISH LITERATURE 20th October 2013

Apollnia Isabel Barcel Ballester 2nd Humanities. Group 2

can find a similarity within both metaphors, a common expression in war and also in marriage: in both cases God has to untie a knot. Moreover, the word again in the eleventh line indicates that the relation between him and the Devil has taken place several times. Finally, the conclusion shows a beautifully constructed contradiction. In it, John Donne explains that, to be free, he needs to be captivated or enslaved by God. In addition, to be chaste again, he needs Him to rape him. To sum up, I think that I learned a lot of things that Wednesday at the seminar. In fact, the poem was splendid and cleverly formed, but its contents were also very deep and metaphysical. Not for nothing, it is about a problem that a lot of us can have at some point in our lives. How can we know that God exists, and if He does, how do we know that He is by our side? Whether there is a Divinity or not, I am sure that John Donne has showed to us that God will always be so abstract, spiritual and untouchable that He will always have to be represented with similes and metaphors to become a little more real for us.