Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God
The speaker asks God to stop knocking, breathing and shining and to break, blow and burn instead, on the grounds that mending will not do the work and only violence will make him new. He is an usurped town holding out for a rightful ruler it cannot let in, and the viceroy inside — his own reason — has either been captured or proved useless. Fourteenth of the Holy Sonnets, and the sharpest instance of Donne turning the erotic vocabulary of his early verse on his God.
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