John Donne, Divine Poems

[VirginiaHuguenot]

One of my favorites by Donne:

Holy Sonnet XIV

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you
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 a usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue,
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed 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.

[Edited on 7-18-2006 by VirginiaHuguenot]

 

[PuritanCovenanter]

Originally posted by VirginiaHuguenot
.....
Take me to you, imprison me, for I
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Amen.

 

[DTK]

One of my favorites from John Donne is the following stanza from his Divine Poems, Hymn to God, My God, in My Sickness...

We think that Paradise and Calvary,
Christ's cross, and Adam's tree, stood in one place;
Look, Lord, and find both Adams met in me;
As the first Adam's sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adam's blood my soul embrace.

Blessings,
DTK

 

[biblelighthouse]

Originally posted by VirginiaHuguenot
One of my favorites by Donne:

Divine Meditations, 14

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you
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 a usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue,
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed 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.

Andrew, thank you for sharing that! That has been one of my favorites for years. I remember studying that and it seems like I even memorized it back in college . . . but I couldn't quote it now.

I need to print that excellent sonnet out and hang it here in my office cube.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Originally posted by biblelighthouse

Originally posted by VirginiaHuguenot
One of my favorites by Donne:

Divine Meditations, 14

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you
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 a usurped town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue,
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betrothed 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.

Andrew, thank you for sharing that! That has been one of my favorites for years. I remember studying that and it seems like I even memorized it back in college . . . but I couldn't quote it now.

I need to print that excellent sonnet out and hang it here in my office cube.

Joseph, You're welcome. This poem has been an inspiration to me as well. God bless!

 

[Ex Nihilo]

That last line is shocking and wonderful. This is definitely one of my favorites, also.

 

[RamistThomist]

Originally posted by Ex Nihilo
That last line is shocking and wonderful. This is definitely one of my favorites, also.

Ditto to this and Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven."

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Originally posted by Draught Horse

Originally posted by Ex Nihilo
That last line is shocking and wonderful. This is definitely one of my favorites, also.

Ditto to this and Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven."

Yes. I am partial to The Hound of Heaven too, though the author was a Roman Catholic. It is powerful.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

John Donne

 

[weinhold]

Andrew, thanks for posting on Donne. He's one of my favorites! I'm wondering, thought, what you make of his use of clearly sensual and erotic language in his religious poems. Maybe we should keep Samuel Johnson's critique in mind as we read Donne. He wrote of Donne's metaphysical conceits that they are "two unlike ideas yoked together by violence." Your thoughts?

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Originally posted by weinhold
Andrew, thanks for posting on Donne. He's one of my favorites! I'm wondering, thought, what you make of his use of clearly sensual and erotic language in his religious poems. Maybe we should keep Samuel Johnson's critique in mind as we read Donne. He wrote of Donne's metaphysical conceits that they are "two unlike ideas yoked together by violence." Your thoughts?

Good question. I can't help though but look back to the Bible, especially the Song of Solomon, or the example of Isaac sporting with Rebekah (Gen. 26.8), and appreciate the Biblical and Puritan (as opposed to Victorian, not saying that Donne was a Puritan) perspective of sensuality in the context of holy and chaste love, not only between a man and his wife, but between the Church, the Bride of Christ, and the Bridegroom.

Edward Taylor is a Puritan who wrote in similar vein based on the Song of Solomon, as illustrated here.

[Edited on 7-15-2006 by VirginiaHuguenot]

 

[weinhold]

Some really great points, Andrew. I find this perspective on worship and sexuality fascinating. I thought your comments about the biblical witness to be particularly fine. Thanks!

P.S. Let's talk more about Donne!

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Originally posted by weinhold
Some really great points, Andrew. I find this perspective on worship and sexuality fascinating. I thought your comments about the biblical witness to be particularly fine. Thanks!

P.S. Let's talk more about Donne!

Do you have a favorite work by Donne?

 

[turmeric]

We sing (sorry EP's!) "Hymn to God the Father" at church to a really beautiful tune our liturgist composed.

 

[weinhold]

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
"”Whose soul is sense"”cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Brilliant.

My favorite poem by Donne is the OP. My favorite of his prose writings is Meditation XVII:

XVII. MEDITATION.


PERCHANCE he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbours. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

I wonder if anyone else has ever preached their own funeral sermon like Donne did.