John Donne’s fourteenth Holy Sonnet includes a cunning extended metaphor that sheds light on the human conflict between physical love and spiritual love. I gathered from the sonnet that Donne must have struggled with prioritizing his spirituality and his personal affairs, which is why he wrote of his effort to reconcile them. This well-known sonnet is full of biblical imagery which exemplifies Donne’s dedication to the church and his own relationship with God. For example, the second line of the sonnet says, “for you as yet but knock” which I believe is an allusion to Revelation 3:20 which says, “I stand at the door and knock. If you hear my voice, open the door, I will come in.” The speaker wants God to break down the door instead of knock, for that is the only way to save him from his figurative marriage to the enemy. Revelation also speaks of the relationship between Christ and his followers as ‘a marriage,’ but Donne perverts this term by using it to speak of a Christian’s relationship with Satan. The speaker compares himself with “an usurped town” that is in need of defense, which could be an allusion to the biblical occasions when the Israelites were forced to defend their nation and their holy temple against attackers such as the Assyrians or the Romans. Donne suggests that he has been taken over by the enemy, but he longs for God to enter even though his inner struggles with his soul are too great to overcome. He asks God to give him the strength to defend himself like he provided for the Israelites, but all he has is reason, which proves to be insufficient.
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