A Collection of Sonnets

Detail of EL GRECO's  (1541-1614) Agony in  the Garden (1595) Toledo  Museum  of Art,  Ohio

     There are other sonnets on the KISS site, but this page was set up as a collection point for sonnets that do not have other homes on the site.

      Although this is one of my favorite sonnets, its vocabulary, imagery, and syntax make it extremely difficult for students to understand on their own.
     Asked what "Batter" means, for example, many students respond with "mix up," as in cake or cookie batter. That image does not make much sense, but for students to understand what Donne's speaker means requires that they bring together "Batter" from the first line, "usurped town" from the fourth line, and some knowledge of towns in the early 1600's. And "usurped" (taken, often by force and without legal right) is not a common word in most students' vocabulary. Once students realize that 17th century towns were walled and gated, it doesn't take long for one or more students to realize that "Batter" refers to a battering-ram. The speaker is not asking God to "mix up' the speaker's heart, but rather he wants God to batter His way into his heart in a very forceful way. 
     If "Batter," by chance, does not throw the students, they meet, still in the first line, an uncommon use of "for" as a conjunction. This is followed in line two by an uncommon use of "but" to mean "only," and the "but" introduces an image that is almost totally unknown to students under thirty. Even for people over thirty, "knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend" is unlikely to evoke Donne's intended image of a tinker, a mender, usually itinerant, of pots and pans. Over thirty myself, I can still remember dents in my mother's pots and pans. Today's students have never seen such a thing. Donne's "knock" thus refers to gently knocking the dented parts back into place, and then the tinker would breathe on the pans as he proceeded to shine them up. (Students who wear glasses are usually the first to catch the meaning of "breathe" and "shine.") Students with some military background sometimes make the connection to "spit shine," but I note that it would not have been nice, even back then, to spit on the customer's pots and pans. (Some students catch the idea of what is going on in this line if I give them the image of knocking out dents in older cars.)
     Students would probably have less of a problem with the third line if a "So" preceded "That," but that would have ruined the meter. At the other end of the third line, many students get snagged by "bend," which simply means "use" here, but "use" would not rhyme with "mend." Confused and lost by images and syntax beyond their control, most students miss the beautiful, contrasting parallels between what the speaker perceives of God as doing, and what he wants Him to do: "knock" rather than "break," "breathe"  rather than "blow," "shine" rather than "burn," and "seek to mend" rather than "make me new."
     Even the students who have looked up the meaning of "usurped" usually have trouble understanding what it means here, since the adjective modifies town in a prepositional phrase that functions as a simile -- the comparison of the speaker to a town is a long stretch for most students, especially since they have to try to figure out usurped by whom? And "to another due"? Even if we straighten out the syntax, the sentence requires a religious context that not all students have -- I am due to another (God). Even those students who believe it often have a difficult time determining that the phrase means "I belong to God (but was usurped by the Devil)." In line six, the speaker labors, but the students, comparatively speaking, get a break from the complex syntax and vocabulary.
     For most students, however, line seven defies comprehension. ("Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend.")  For one, it requires religious, literary, and historical background.  As the years pass, it seems that fewer and fewer of my students are aware of the Christian concept that God gave people the ability to reason in order to help them choose right over wrong. But even those students who are aware of the religious concept have problems because "Reason" is a personification and because the direct object of "should defend" appears before the verb does. Students, in other words, are well accustomed to things such as "My head hurts" or "My heart bleeds," but, if they do manage to get the sentence order straightened out, what are they to make of "Reason should defend me"? It is not a usurped town, it is confusion city. Words, words, ungoverned words!
     Then, of course, there is the problem of "viceroy." Some students will recognize it as the name of a cigarette; few know that it means assistant to the king, or governor. Unlike Britain, of course, this country has never had viceroys, so we can't really blame the students. And it seems that fewer and fewer students are studying French -- in the past, an occasional student of French would note that "roi" means king and that "vice" probably has the same meaning as it does in "Vice President." Thus, the student would basically figure out the meaning. But figuring out the meaning (or looking it up) is only half the battle. How in heck does the word fit in the sentence?
     When I am sure from the long pause that no one can tell me, I ask if anyone knows what an appositive is. Silence. I'm usually sitting down during this class discussion. (I can't take it standing up.) So I get up, trot to the board, and write an example -- "We are in Williamsport, a city in Pennsylvania." "Ah," come a few (very few) signs of recognition. And then I sometimes hear, "I remember those. We studied them in eighth grade." Readers will, I hope, now see why I subtitled this "In Defense of Students." It is not the students' fault that they were taught isolated grammatical concepts that were subsequently ignored, and rarely, if ever applied.  The syntactic connection of "viceroy" to "Reason" having been explained, most students see that the line means that God gave people the ability to reason as his assistant (governor) to defend them from the devil. ^*
     Perhaps because too much explanation is coming too fast, perhaps because they do not have the religious background, it still takes many students a while to understand the implications of "untrue." I usually remind students of "Young Goodman Brown," which we read earlier in the course. Brown, of course, goes on his walk with the devil, "reasoning as we go." I'll do it just one time. Well, everybody else is doing it. Reason not only proves weak; sometimes it turns traitor, and reasoning becomes rationalizing.

      Some of the vocabulary in the rest of the poem causes difficulty, but the syntax is fairly easy. Once teachers can get students beyond the problems with vocabulary, imagery, and syntax, the sonnet becomes a great example of the masterly use of paradoxes and of sonnet form to support the speaker's theme. Pleading to God for help, the speaker feels desperately caught in the struggle between God and the devil. His frustration is, of course, suggested by his literal statements and the basic imagery of the poem. But the intensity of that frustration reverberates through the paradoxes and even the sonnet form.
      One person's paradox is another's contradiction, the primary difference being that it is a paradox if one believes it to be true. Donne's speaker skillfully makes his plea and shows the difficulty of his situation by both accepting and pointing to numerous religious paradoxes. The tension between the apparently contradictory ideas in each paradox echoes and expands the tension felt by the speaker.
     In the first line, the speaker immediately points to and accepts the most famous of these by addressing God as "three-personed." The paradox of the Trinity has a long-debated history, with some Christians totally accepting it, others denying or downplaying it, and still others attempting to explain it as some sort of oxymoron. The speaker's immediate acceptance of it is, in effect, a statement of faith, especially since he later notes that "Reason," which is the only way, other than faith, to resolve a paradox "proves weak or untrue."
     For the speaker, however, faith itself is not enough, since faith is unable to save him from temptations. Helpless before the devil, the speaker evokes three other paradoxes, each of which suggests the supra human, divine power that is needed to "free" him. Thus, in line three, he begs God to throw him down ("o'erthrow me") so that he can "rise and stand." The paradoxical situation of the speaker is then emphasized in the climax of the poem, the last two lines of which each present a paradox -- I won't be free unless you enslave me, and I won't be chaste unless you ravish me. The pull between the opposing poles of the paradoxes represent the pull between God and the devil. The speaker is caught, helpless, between them and can be saved only by God's grace.
     Like the paradoxes, the sonnet's very form resonates with the speaker's frustrating situation. He wants to be God's, but he is possessed by the devil. The sonnet "wants to be" Italian, but it is also English. An Italian sonnet consists of an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines), with a "turn" in meaning from the octave to the sestet. An English sonnet, on the other hand, is composed of three quatrains and a couplet. Often the quatrains are distinguishable in meaning or imagery, and the final couplet present a thematic, unifying idea.
    The two types of sonnet are also basically distinguishable by the pattern  of their rhyme schemes. The Italian maintains a consistent pattern in the octave, and a different pattern in the sestet. The rhyming words are conventionally identified by letters, such that, for example, an Italian pattern for the octave might be abba cddc. The pattern for the sestet might then be efg efg (or ee ff gg). An English sonnet might have the pattern abba cddc effe gg. Note that the distinguishing lines are lines nine through twelve -- do they follow the pattern established by the preceding eight, or do the create a separate pattern with lines thirteen and fourteen? 
     When we examine the pattern of "Holy Sonnet XIV," we find that it is neither Italian or English, but somewhere in between:

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you a
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; b
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend b
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new. a
I, like an usurped town, to another due, c
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end. d
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, d
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. c
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, e
But am betrothed unto your enemy: f
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, e
Take me to you, imprison me, for I f ^**
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free, g
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. g

     Students often feel that there is a major gap between the real, and serious problems in their personal lives and the, to them, meaningless literature that we ask them to explore. More often than we might expect, students' problems are problems of belief. Students to whom we present this sonnet, after all, are usually in their mid teens to early twenties, a time in our lives when most of us questioned our belief systems. If we can get students beyond the syntactic and vocabulary problems in this sonnet, if we can give them the necessary historical and religious background, they may well find the sonnet not only artistic and extremely well done, but also very meaningful.

     In a short e-mail correspondence, I was informed that my interpretation of the structure of this poem is incorrect. The implication seemed to be that I am misleading students. The correspondent, identified (if I remember correctly) only as Jane, informed me that this is simply an English sonnet. Oddly like many grammarians, Jane did not offer any explanations or justification -- she simply said that Italian sonnets can have any rhyme scheme, but that this one is English. At the time of the correspondence I was busy and had forgotten that this page was on the web. (I have hundreds of them.) So in my last message I suggested that her interpretation was too rigid and asked which of my pages she was referring to. I never heard from her again. I mention this correspondence not only because it interested me, but also because it reflects the rigid, either/or mind-set of too many people (including teachers).
     In the process of selecting some Shakespearean sonnets for inclusion on this site, I ran across the following comment by Stephen Spender that is relevant to this question. Discussing Shakespeare's Sonnet # 94, Spender states that

...the poem takes the form of a general statement about the virtues of the great and powerful, in the octave and then, in the sestet, applies this to the young man." ["The Alike and the Other," in The Riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets. ed. Edward Hubler. NY: Basic Books, 1962. 118.]