The Violence of Redemption in John Donne’s “Batter My Heart” (Holy Sonnet 14)

In “Holy Sonnet 14,” John Donne would like his “three person’d God” to break instead of knock, blow instead of breathe, and burn instead of shine. This vision of redemption is about remaking rather than reform. And it seems to be motivated by a sense that neither reason nor the typical rhetoric of faith are not enough to bridge the mortal and the divine—what’s needed is God’s violent intervention. Wes & Erin discuss Donne’s surprising and paradoxical use of war and rape as metaphors for salvation. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:08 Wes: In Holy Sonnet 14, John Donne would like his three person God to break instead of knock, blow instead of breathe, and burn instead of shine. This vision of redemption is about remaking rather than reform. And it seems to be motivated by a sense that reason and the typical rhetoric of faith are not enough to bridge the mortal and the divine. What's needed is God's violent intervention. In this episode, we discuss Donne's surprising and paradoxical use of war and rape as metaphors for this intervention. This is Wes Alwan. 0:41 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to subtext. 0:49 Wes: So Erin, when he says batter my heart, is he talking about battery or is he talking about deep frying? 0:55 Erin: I think. I think it's deep frying. That seems to be the conceit that's running through this whole poem, is that he's just gotten a job at McDonald's and he wants God to save him. 1:07 Wes: Batter my heart and season it with 13 spices. I'll deliver it to you on a platter, my love. What we're getting at, I think we're reacting to the violence of the poem. The way I summarize this poem to someone who's telling about it, I just said, you know, it's kind of like he's asking God to rape him, basically. 1:30 Erin: Yeah, I think that's totally right. 1:32 Wes: So that's one way to overcome one's doubts, I guess, is to have God. 1:37 Erin: That's interesting what you say about doubt, because I'm wondering if doubt even comes into the poem. So you see this as a poem that has doubt in it. I never even considered that it's my 1:48 Wes: interpolation or the only thing really to go on. Right, is that he's betrothed to the enemy, which I take to be Satan. That's one of the questions of the poem. What is it that separates him from God? Or however you want to put it in such a way that God's being Mr. Nice Guy, right? He doesn't want the Mr. Rogers version of God breathing, shining, mending. He needs something more forceful still. The question is why? 2:13 Erin: That's interesting. I can see that reading now, being betrothed to the enemy and the enemy being Satan. I usually think that belief in Satan is the first thing to go. It's the first step on the way to unbelief if you're raised within that tradition. So the fact that he believes himself betrothed to Satan tells me that he's in thrall of sin. But it could also be doubt, too. I'M also seeing that reason is captive proves weak or untrue. So that could mean doubt as well. I didn't see that reading the fact that reason is weak or untrue, I saw as being to stand up against the sin that he feels is overwhelming him, that you wouldn't be smart enough to combat these instances of sin when they arrive, or that reason would even betray you, and that you would be using your reason to sort of justify your sinfulness. So it's betrayed you to say, even though it's supposed to be this gift from God, it's actively working against you. 3:03 Wes: I think the talk of doubt, it runs against the being betrothed to the enemy. Suggests that he believes. Right. It's just that he believes that he's caught up in the other forces. And then the rest of it's about chastity and freedom. So this has something to do with impulsiveness, his own sinfulness and impulsiveness and perhaps sexual impulsiveness and maybe aggression goes in there as well as sex and aggression. So God's metaphorical sex and aggression is the only thing that can save him from his worldly sex and aggression and impulsivity. He's asking God to become the carrier of the impulsivity that he wants to get rid of from himself. Do you want to read it before we go further? 3:42 Erin: Sure. Holy Sonnet 14. Batter My Heart 3 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 an usurped town to another due, labor 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, shall never be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me. 4:28 Wes: Very nice. So a three persons God. 4:31 Erin: Yeah, I was wondering about that to 4:34 Wes: begin with, you know, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the three spices that go in the batter. 4:39 Erin: Yep. 4:40 Wes: Just kidding. The use of the word person there, right. Makes it more corporeal maybe than where you used to or maybe not. But it's almost like there's a hydra like effect. I think the very, you know, from the very beginning, it's kind of a surprising image. I don't know. What do you think about that? 4:56 Erin: I was thinking through this a really long time because I was just wondering why three? Why three? I mean, why emphasize the triune God here? And I noticed that the first six lines or so have that spondaic foot in the middle, so that we get three stresses in a row in the middle of the line. So it's as if there's like three, you know, three knocks that happen in the middle of each of those first lines, which gives it that really explosive kind of power. And the more I thought about that and that battering or knocking, the more I thought that, you know, if his heart is a door and they're battering it, you would need more than one person to break down a door, wouldn't you? Or you'd need more than one person to batter it down with a battering ram, I think. So he needs three people, it seems, to stand up to his sin or to stand up to Satan. Like there's a kind of strength in numbers here, maybe that's being implied. 5:43 Wes: Yeah, I mean, he is thinking the Trinity, right? It makes me wonder. So he's come up with this nice, you know, as you were saying, these three stresses in the middle. Knock, breathe, shine, and later on, break, blow, burn. And then of course there's in each case a fourth thing, which is the effect, you know, maybe the effect of the fusion of those things. So God does these different things. Knocks, breathes, shines, and then men's. And I suppose that the knock, breathe, shine, right, has to do with each different person in the three persons, God. So it makes me think about the genesis of the poem which came first. Did he come up with that nice idea of knock, breathe, shine, right? And then think, okay, let me backward engineer the first line. But anyway, whatever the case, it's rhythmically interesting. And then also. So what are knocking, breathing and shining? Knocking is politely knocking at the door to announce his presence, his existence. So that's like the first awareness of God being a child and being told there's God showing up to church early on. One's first memories of church or something like that. And then there's the other two, by 6:51 Erin: the way, for the stresses too. I'm reading that three stress from the very first line. So heart, three personed God. So I'm reading those three stresses there. And then also the triple stress on stand, o'erthrow me to batter my heart. 7:04 Wes: I mean, I'm three personed God. I'm still reading that as iambic. 7:07 Erin: So batter is reverse foot. It is Iambic pentameter. But of course, there could be variation. In fact, there should be some variation if you don't want it to be right. So batter my heart three personed God. So I'm reading my heart as an iambic foot and three personed. So three per would be a spondaic foot. So you'd have heart, three personed God. 7:29 Wes: Yeah. Okay. 7:30 Erin: And then the same in that I may rise and stand because of that caesura, o'erthrow gets a kind of. Both halves of that word get equal weight. So we have stand, o'erthrow me. That's another line that has that three in a row. 7:46 Wes: So we get three per. So that's the spondaic, unstressed soned. And then God again. And then the second line, knock, breathe, shine. Yep, all stressed. 7:57 Erin: Then rise and stand, o'erthrow me. So stand, o'erthrow. And then in the fourth line, break, blow, burn, of course. And then I think that's where we. And I, like an usurped town, to. That's where we get the change in rhythm there. So the first quatrain, I should say, I think maybe at the beginning, I thought it was the first, or said generously, was the first six lines, but it's really the first four. But I think that there are a lot of changes in rhythm that then happen or continue to happen throughout the poem. It keeps kind of shifting. And of course, the biggest tonal shift comes with the octave turning into the sestet. It's worth mentioning again that this is another combination of the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean, or the Italian and the English sonnet. So just as death be not proud, so we have A, B, B, A, A, B, B, A, C, D, C, D, E, E. So we have the traditional Petrarchan octave, and then we have the break with the sestet. But then it ends on that Shakespearean couplet to tie it all together. So back to knocking. The other thing I really see there, of course, I'm reading this really biblically. I spent a lot of time with my Bible over the past couple days reminding myself of some of these references. And of course, knocking is Christ the bridegroom knocking on the door of the bedchamber. So from the very beginning, we have a little bit of that sexual implication, right, with the church or the soul, even, like I think was traditionally conceived of as being feminine because of the fact that there was a lot of this kind of like, male female imagery in a sort of. Not in a literal sense, but in, like, a supernatural kind of sense. Just as A metaphor. And so Christ was always the bridegroom and his church, the bride in this metaphor. And so the soul was conceived of as being like, feminine for that reason that Christ is the masculine bridegroom that woos the soul is the feminine bride. So the knocking on the bedchamber is a reference to several things. There's connections to revelation there, but also to the Song of Songs, famously erotic poem in the Old Testament, which the early church fathers and most Christian traditions interpret either both as a love poem, which it is, but also as a metaphor for Christ seducing the soul, the sinner. And so that kind of gentleness. Or the bridegroom knocking on the door already has this decidedly not rapey but romantic implication from the very beginning. And a gentle knocking as you're saying 10:14 Wes: Jesus is a nice guy. 10:16 Erin: Yeah. So Jesus has a lot of different roles. 10:19 Wes: Right. 10:19 Erin: So he can also be. Mean is the wrong word. Right. Because that implies that, like, he's doing something wrong, but justly, he could be the just punisher as well, like mighty king. All these things are images of God that are baked into the Old Testament as well. So here he's being gentle, which is part of it too. 10:34 Wes: Yeah. This makes me think this is out of order, but maybe I'm just trying to read this too rigidly with lining things up with the Trinity, but knocking with Jesus and breathing with the Holy Spirit and maybe inspiration shining with the glory of God. 10:48 Erin: Yeah. I was wondering that myself, because I was like, okay, knock seems like a reference to Christ, but then shine, we have this idea that it's connected with the sun, S U N, which would then be a homophone for S O N. So maybe knock is supposed to be God the Father, but not sure. 11:04 Wes: I was thinking. Yeah. That probably each of these, you could make an argument for each of them lining up with the different parts of the Trinity. Maybe it's informative to compare them to what they're going to turn into. Breaking, blowing and burning. Knocking will become breaking down the door. Breathing, which again, to me, but you can correct me if I'm wrong, but connotes inspiration, breathing into. Probably there are other ways to read that too. Whereas blowing is no longer. Well, let's compare breathing and blowing. Breathing gets inside you. And blowing is external. It's like something internal versus external force in a way. And then shining versus burning. So shining puts light and warmth over things and there's glory in it and articulates and clarifies the world. And burning, of course, is destructive. So you get these verbs which are Associated with establishing some sort of relationship, some sort of connection between two beings, the divine and the. The mortal. And it's non destructive. And the second one is just entirely. Seems to be entirely destructive, but also external. If you're inspired, if. Right. In the first case, you can become a believer, you have a sort of internal or have faith, there would be some internal spiritual or psychological change in one's attitude. In the second case, it turns that into something seemingly, at least metaphorically external. 12:29 Erin: Mm. 12:30 Wes: You are forced. And it's no longer a matter of faith, Although it could be. Maybe that's what faith looks like under this model. Right. Something. Maybe force is the. Is the way that's the argument on the face of it. Right. Is that this nice guy stuff is not good enough. If you're really gonna get to me, I need this force. So Very, very interesting. 12:52 Erin: Yeah. I was thinking, like, blowing into somehow. But you're right, it is external. I'm thinking of Lear. The more I sat with this, being knocked around on the heath, the idea that this is external. I really like knowing Donne's upbringing in Catholicism and his relatively late conversion. So he was educated in Catholic teaching and all of that. And then even when he became an Anglican. Right. It was what we would recognize today as being like, extremely high Anglican, you know, Catholic. Catholic light. So the Catholic understanding of God's influence in our soul, of grace's influence in our soul, is something that really does. To the extent that we can say sort of metaphorically speaking or even, you know, sort of creatively speaking, that the soul has some form of physicality or some form of reality which is. You know, I'm using physicality loosely here. Right. But the extent to which it's maybe visible to God, the extent to which it's somehow present within us. You know, Catholics believe that through the sacraments, through sanctifying grace, our souls are literally changed. They're in some way evidently changed in the sight of God. So this idea of remaking one's inner self or this idea of like, a physical change being enacted on the body is actually a pretty good metaphor for what is happening internally. Right. The kind of internal change that is conceived of in Catholic teaching. And I could talk about sanctifying versus actual grace, I suppose, because I feel like that's like a good reference point to talk about if people don't know. 14:20 Wes: But you should do that. But I would just want to emphasize the point you've just made, because I think it's very important. This breaking, blowing, burning. They seem like externalities and more radical remaking. Right? So the effect of knock, breathe, shine is to mend. Right. But the effect of break, blow, burn is to make new. And it's almost. Maybe hints of transubstantiation there. Right? So something seemingly destructive happens, but that's what's necessary for something truly transformative. Right? Don't just patch me up and make this feeble, broken thing a little bit better. Give me a crutch or something like that. Just, yeah, completely transform me. So I think that's very good. Because, you know, as you put it, the question is, what kind of influence. How did you put it? What kind of influence does God have on us? 15:02 Erin: This episode, by the way, is brought to you by the Baltimore Catechism. So grace is. I'm thanking my mother for, you know, making me memorize some of that. So grace's favor. It's this free help that God gives us to respond to his call, right? To partake of his, like, divine nature. So grace is participating in the life of God. It's sanctifying us. It raises us up. It's a gratuitous gift that God gives us out of himself. And it surpasses human intellect, and to a certain extent, it surpasses human will. So there are two types of this that at least the Catholic Church recognizes that Donne would have been familiar with. The first is sanctifying grace. This is like the being in the state of grace thing that people might have heard of, right? This is like when you have supernatural life. So if you die in a state of sanctifying grace, you may have to go through a process of purgation first. But Catholics believe that you will go to heaven. The lines are open to God. You're free of mortal sin. You've, like, received sacraments. God is working within you. So this is kind of like the state that has to be continually cultivated through, you know, if you do commit a mortal sin through, like, confession. Right. And receiving absolution. So this is like your operating system. Ideally, actual grace is more of what Donne is talking about here. Now, sanctifying grace, like to be in that state of sanctifying grace through the intervention of the sacraments through, like, baptism, confirmation, all those things. Right? That does, like, physically to get there. That does physically change your soul in this way that I'm talking about. Actual grace is also what Donne is really, I think, talking about here, which. This is the second type. This is God's intervention in our process of sanctification. So this is when God offers us an Opportunity to convert back to him. Right. He's collaborating with us, though. It's God's free initiative to offer this to us. And we have to have, you know, Catholics believe in free will. Right. So it demands a free response. We have to, like, enter freely into God's love. Otherwise, you know, it's not really love. Right. So God is basically standing at the door and knocking with actual grace. Like, he's saying, can I come in? Right. He's inspiring us maybe to convert, to return to him through this kind of supernatural help, and also helps us, like, resist temptation. Actual grace. So he's standing at the door and saying, like, can I come in? And we have to let him in freely. But that can be really hard to do. Right? Because sometimes we don't want to accept the call. Right. We're free to reject grace. So, for instance, for me, it's the way that I conceive of this, if I was teaching a catechism class or something to kids would be to say, okay, that might be something like the working of your conscience when you've done something wrong and you get this nagging feeling like, I really have to make that right. That would be actual grace. But of course, you can ignore that and push it away and just be like, no, I'm fine. There's a famous line from Augustine, I think, in his Confessions where he's like. He reaches this point where he knows that he wants to convert to Christianity and to live a holy life, but he's like, okay, not yet. Like, I'm not done sinning. Like, I want to. I want to stay doing this other stuff that I'm really enjoying. So we can reject that. And the problem is, when we're habituated to reject it or when we're habituated into certain sins, it becomes really easy for us to just reject that. So Donne is here advocating for, I think, an actual grace that takes away his free will so that he can't say no. He can't reject it in favor of, like, continuing to live a sinful life. So it's this sort of paradox of using his free will in this poem or using this creative effort to ask God to basically remove his free will, make it so I can't reject this grace. I know I went on for a bit, but I don't know if it's worthwhile to make that distinction between the 18:40 Wes: two forms of grace. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's very helpful. Your talk of free will is very apt here in light of the fact that he's going to complain later on. Right. That reason, you, Viceroy in me, me should defend the way free will is thought of in this period as being the product of reasoning in our capacities to reason and to make choices based on reasons rather than simply on impulses. So this is in line with what you've been saying about, in a way, being asked to be relieved of the choice and free will and just basically having one's door knocked down. And no, you don't have a choice. Whether or not you're going to accept this, it's going to be by force. This reminds me, because I'm rereading the Brothers Karamazov right now for the live show that partially Examined life is doing in New York soon. Ivan's famous speech about the Grand Inquisitor argues that Jesus messed up because when he rejected Satan's temptations, because Satan basically offers him the chance to have absolute power over the world. And that power would mean the ability to create a utopia and to make sure that no one ever suffers. Right. But the cost would be to freedom and to free will. There's some commonalities between that vision and this vision, the vision of being. They're different in important ways. But the commonality here is the idea that wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have a choice at all and faith were simply imposed on us? 20:06 Erin: Yeah. You know, the other thing that most orthodox, small, Orthodox Christianity argues, is that reason alone is just not enough to withstand evil. Right. Like we need God's grace. So we do need some sort of divine intervention. But often what we get is so accommodating of our free will that it's easy to reject it or to just walk away from it. 20:25 Wes: When we say reason is not enough. Yeah. The question is, what else do we need? Right. The more general question, just putting aside religion for a moment, is a failure of reason might be a failure to persuade. It might be a failure to solve a diplomatic problem in an international level, meaning violence or war is necessary. Or maybe even at a personal level, reason doesn't always work. Or reason might fail in the sense that we need our feelings. We need our feelings to navigate the world, and we need our feelings to relate to people. There are lots of ways in which we can point to the failure of reason. And then we look for what are the contrasting faculties or domains that are available to us that are alternatives to reason. So there's instinct and emotion, and there's love and sex and violence and impulse. And then there's also faith. Right. And religion, oddly, Enough. Maybe the religious and the divine and faith kind of straddle the line between those two. Right. So if we're thinking of the classical division of the soul, maybe the Platonic division, reason, eros, and then the spirited thumos. Thumotic part of the soul, maybe faith in some sense has a foot in each of those things. I don't know, but I think what you just said made me think of the sense in which faith must transcend reason. Right. You're not going to reason your way into believing in God by proving God or something like that. Something. It has to be outside of reason. But on the other hand, once you start talking about free will or once you start talking about resisting one's impulsivity or one's temptation to sinfulness, there seems to be a place for reason. 22:02 Erin: Sure. 22:03 Wes: So I think you could say that about any faculty here. Right. So it seems like the erotic might be opposed to faith into the religious in important ways, but here they're important. And as with Donne's poetry in general, I mean, there are important parallels between the religious and the erotic. 22:19 Erin: Yeah. In Catholicism, at least, obviously. It's hard for me to even say that reason isn't enough as someone who loves Aquinas. Right. So there's like that whole, you know, intellectual tradition within Catholicism, but there's also the erotic there as well. Like, there's a really strong link, I think, more so than in most religions, between the erotic and the sacred. 22:37 Wes: What part does the erotic have to 22:39 Erin: play in faith, besides the obvious joke about Catholics loving sex and having a lot of kids? You know, I think that the idea of God, or Christ in particular, as a bridegroom wooing the bride is something that really comes into a lot of Catholic and orthodox Christian stories of mysticism, of different saint stories, have, like, famous periods of ecstasy, Right. In which the saint experiences something like sexual ecstasy to see when being visited by God. The really famous version of this, or a good visual image of what I'm talking about is Bernini's famous sculpture, which is in the Vatican, the Ecstasy of St. Teresa, which shows Teresa being visited by an angel. Actually, this is a great image for this poem. She's being visited by an angel. She has this beautiful gold behind her coming down like the Holy Spirit, and almost like, you know, the shower of Danae, you know, the coins coming down, the Holy Spirit coming down upon her. And this angel is holding an arrow, I think an arrow or a spear of some kind, and is going to, like, plunge it into her. And she looks like she's wrapped in a kind of erotic ecstasy. And so, you know, this idea of, I think, like, communion of joining with God, in a way, it kind of like mirrors sexuality in the fact that this is supposed to be this. Ideally, you know, it was supposed to be kind of like a joining together of two souls in like, a really beautiful and intimate way. Right. So that's all part of it. So stories like. Of ecstasy, which, you know, can look a lot of different ways. And it's not like God is literally coming down like Zeus would and having sex with. With women or something like that. I don't mean to suggest that at all. 24:18 Wes: That was the old style. 24:20 Erin: Right, right. But just more like that is the closest metaphorically we can get to understanding that kind of communion with God. And that's why it's a, you know, like the bride and bridegroom metaphor. That's why it's a trope that is useful for people thinking about this kind of thing. To return to. 24:34 Wes: Yeah, you're making me think that monotheism solved the problem of being literally raped by the gods. The closest you could get to Zeus was if he was sexually assaulting you. 24:46 Erin: God, what a terrifying religion that was. 24:48 Wes: Fucking with your fate in other ways. 24:50 Erin: But. Right. 24:51 Wes: I was also reminded of. There's the whole soulmate thing. And I was reminded of Aristophanes and Plato's Symposium telling a story about how because they pissed off the gods, because they tried to be like the gods. I think after Prometheus brought the fire. Right. Human beings are punished for their advanced reasoning capacity. Speaking of reason again. And the way they're punished is to be cut in half. All of us used to be kind of joined at the back. Each of us have four arms and four legs, and so they get cut in half. And then everyone. Love is about searching for one's soulmate and re. Merging with that person. And this is a conception of love that Socrates actually rejects. Socrates sort of entertains the speeches of a bunch of people, including Aristophanes. And maybe he preserves parts of those accounts, but overall he's going to say that all of them come up short because it turns out that what love is, according to Socrates, has something to do with our reproductive capacities. In particular, reproduction in the presence of beauty. And that reproduction, that's broadly conceived. Right. It could be actual reproduction of children. It could be the sense in which thinking is reproductive, in the sense of it involves representation. And the same thing with the arts, so the same thing with anything sublimating. So in other Words, Socrates argument is that actually love is a kind of relatedness that actually preserves the distinction between the two lovers, but produces a reproductive third. But the maintaining of the distinction is important and the prevention of merger. And you see the same sort of idea later on in psychoanalysis, where the conception of love as merger is kind of a pathological element to that. Right? Because it's reminiscent of the merger with the mother and being in the womb, or in this symbiotic relationship where the distinction, separation and individuation hasn't occurred and the distinction between mother and child is not yet clear. This is not unrelated to the incest taboo, Right. The sense in which the idea is that there are types of relationships which obliterate the person. There are types of love relations, you know, like if there were a sexual relationship between parent and child, the psychological significance of that is psychological obliteration and trauma and so on and so forth. So what am I trying to say here? So I'm trying to think about that in light of. That doesn't necessarily transfer to faith in a way. That might be what makes faith unique. I think whatever model of faith and its relation to the erotic you're working with, obviously the individual is preserved. It may be ecstatic, it may be that one is inspired or filled up or feels merged at particular moments, but one is not simply destroyed by the divine. And in Donne's account, right, it's overthrow me so that I may stand, destroy me in order to make me new. The destructive part of the merger is actually a moment in something new, something standing. And so you get that reproductive third that Socrates was talking about. In a way, you give birth to a new self through the divine. 28:02 Erin: Yeah, that's great. I'm thinking about this too, in terms of. Like, you're suggesting this parallel to the creative. The submission, whether it be to the muse or to the divine, has to be a submission, right? Like, you have to metaphorically willing to be penetrated in order to allow, like, a creative force to work within you, in order to allow a supernatural power to come into your life, right. You have to. You have to admit that you need something larger than yourself, that you alone are not enough. Right? And you have to be willing to be humble enough to open yourself up to that kind of, again, submission penetration, 28:40 Wes: which isn't supposed to be inspiration, the muse, right? 28:43 Erin: Which ultimately results in something that's supposed to be not demeaning to you in any way. By humbling yourself, you actually are then able to produce the creative thing that you're trying to Produce, because you have to be open to that kind of transmission. And if you're overly determined in terms of your reason or in terms of trying to control all elements of the creative act, for instance, and not allowing inspiration to come into you and to strike where it may, then that means that you're going to produce something that's rather closed off and as a result is going to be pretty much an artistic failure. Right. I think the same thing with the divine here. Like, I think that the poem, even as I think it's not super humble in a lot of ways, I think is humble in the way that it's thinking about submission and about using this, frankly, like using this rape metaphor to describe the way in which Donne wants to be penetrated by the divine, wants to open himself up to another's influence. I don't know if that's too gross. Yeah. And I'm not. I feel like by the end of this, I'm, like, advocating for something really, really terrible here, which I'm not meaning to do. Obviously, rape is. 29:50 Wes: Rape is bad, even if it's. All right. I hope you're not going to ask me to take that joke out after we're done. So there's an interesting transition here now in the second quatrain to. It's not a different metaphor. I think everything works. Well, it is and it isn't. We talked a little bit about rapes, but now we have a. I guess it's a political version of that where we have a town under siege and maybe the possibility of a pillaging. So I like a usurped town to another due, labor to admit you. All right, let's unpack this. What's going on here with this? It's a usurped town, so it's already been taken over by the devil, I suppose, or by some equivalent of that to another due. Right. Due to God, I think. 30:34 Erin: Oh, I see. 30:35 Wes: He's trying to give God his due, but he can't. Right. God is besieging the town to take back what's his. But Donne can't open the gates. Reason, his viceroy. Okay, so if he's the town, there's a viceroy in that town, which is reason. The viceroy should be able to defend the town, but it is captived and proves weak or untrue. So those are different ideas. Either the viceroy has been put in the tower, put in prison, or he's a collaborator. I'm not sure which, or if there's some combination of that. But yeah. So we get the unfolding of A very elaborate and different sort of metaphor, but go ahead. 31:15 Erin: Yeah. Well, I like the fact that he's not sure if it's weak or untrue. Right. That's indicative of someone whose reason is in fact captive. 31:22 Wes: Right. 31:22 Erin: Because he just not sure. So Viceroy is. I had to look this up to know exactly what it is because outside of the Star wars universe, I realized. I realized I don't have a strong understanding of that. So this is a representative of the Monarch or someone who acts in the name of the Monarch. Right. So reason is acting in the name of God here. So reason is supposed to be. It's a gift from God. It's supposed to be there to. I guess short of having God in like a tiny form sort of working the controls in some sort of Cartesian like image, we have reason at the helm. This part always makes me think of Lord of the Rings too. But anyway, so we have the steward, in light of the fact that Aragorn is off being a ranger, whatever, so should be defending us, but instead is captive. So this is where I get this idea, which I mentioned earlier, that reason is either too weak to withstand sin, which would be literally true. Right. Like it would be true in Donne's understanding. We need something more than reason. As I already said, to withstand evil, we need God's grace. 32:25 Wes: Yeah. 32:26 Erin: Or it's become warped. It's like the Viceroy has been paid off by Satan and has actually been actively betraying what it's supposed to be used for. So it's been warped by sin to believe that it's doing the right thing. So it's using reason to justify one's sinfulness or to remain in one's sinfulness. 32:43 Wes: Yeah. There's a bunch of different ways to make sense of reason. Being captured. Right. And being weak or untrue. I mean, normally we would think of reason as something very strong and the vehicle to truth. And strong in the sense of just the transformative effect for human beings of reason and education and culture. And then that includes the existence of a city and it includes technology. And it's of course intimately related to self consciousness and language and everything that we take to be human. Right. So it's Aristotle's writing. It's what is distinctive in our humanity and separates us from the brutes. So it's a unfortunate circumstance, turns out to be weak and untrue. And the capture. I think the most straightforward reading is that it's just not strong enough to deal with our impulses. Plato has this image of a. I think it's reason. This is not the exact metaphor, but reason trying to rein in horses, basically, but being drawn this way and that by our impulses. The other way to think of this is that. And I think you were getting at this a little bit. You know, reason can be used to rationalize. So it's a dangerous. And a psychoanalyst would think of it even as a defense. It can be a dangerous way to justify things, even things that are positively evil. One other way to look at this is that reason is on Freud's account, and it's a really interesting account because there's a paradox involved, and we know that Donne loves these paradoxes. But on Freud's account, what we call the ego, which is associated with reason, is kind of constructed out of the clay of the ID of the passions. And so is our conscience, which is part of the ego as the superego. But that account is quite complicated. But the idea is that anything that's motivated has something to do with our passions. And reasoning actually is a motivated activity. There has to be. What's the best way to put this? So, for instance, if we are wrestling with some sort of moral conundrum and we're saying, well, I want to do that because I just want it, that would be very pleasurable. And some other part of us is saying, no, that's wrong, or that would, in the long term, not be in my best interest. Or it may just be wrong, morally wrong. If the reason side is going to win out, it has to win out because there's some amount of pleasure, right, in being good, being a good person, ultimately obeying our conscience. There has to be something that satisfies, at least, is a compromise, right? With the passions, it's a form of sublimation. It's not just sex, for instance, that feels good. But refraining from sex can feel good in a different sense, maybe a higher sense. So anyway, that's the complexity in which reason can be captured by the passions. And in some sense, maybe built out of. It may be a structure that's built out of. Of the clay of the passions. So, but anyway, I like this idea of the people being cities in God's domain in his country. And when they rule themselves through reason, to some extent, they are really doing that as representatives of God. But on Donne's account, it's not a very workable form of government because, in fact, the town is occupied. What is the town occupied by? By the passions. So, God, you know, is this really the way things are supposed to work? Right. You've installed the governor, but you've also installed a usurper. 36:14 Erin: Right. I was thinking about that. First of all, this is another connection which I didn't see, to Teresa of Avila, whose book the Interior Castle kind of works with this idea of us as being a city. In fact, I'm thinking of the cover image used on a lot of editions of Interior Castle, which has. I think it's a Remedios Varo painting, this fabulous woman's surrealist painter, which shows something like a city, the extent to which Like a castle is kind of like a city also, because the inside usually has several buildings within it. But I was thinking about that idea of the town or the city and the maiden that then comes into this, the betrothed maiden. And I'm wondering, I don't want to skip over this hinge line so we can return to it this yet dearly, I love you. But what connects the two, I wonder? The collapse of town and maiden or betrothed woman. 37:03 Wes: Yeah, he's given us two different metaphors here. And now they are coming together, I guess. Right. 37:08 Erin: I guess it's related to this bridegroom knocking at the door thing. Right. So we have this connection that goes all the way back to Song of Songs, where we have the door of the citadel or the door of the bride's chamber kind of being collapsed into. I guess I was looking for something, like, inherently similar, which is a little bit ridiculous. Right. Between a city, a woman, somehow. There's the rape of the Sabine women, which, of course, is. Anything that talks about an abduction with this kind of wording is probably inviting that reference in, you know, the city being founded on those abducted women. So maybe there's something there. 37:48 Wes: You're trying to save this mixed metaphor. 37:50 Erin: No, but I think it's the door. I think it's the door. Right. The battering of the door, ultimately. Is it the door to the chamber? Right. Is it the door to the city? This door contains all doors, all things that separate us between our sort of hardened hearts and the God who wants to enter there. 38:06 Wes: Yeah. In the beginning, we get something that sounds like rape, and then we get the pillaging being asked, you know, okay, come into this town. Take it back. And then the third thing, we're now talking about marriage and divorce. So we get a more legalistic turn, in a sense. Right. 38:24 Erin: Yeah. 38:24 Wes: Less violent, a little bit more civilized. Although, again. And he does say, imprison me, I guess, for the crime of marrying. Marrying your enemy. 38:34 Erin: Well, before we get there, I just wanted to say, you Know yet dearly I love you that turn, I'm wondering, is this a little bit performative? Is this. I mean, this is quite a shift. Suddenly it's like, oh, but actually, I. You know, it's like he's trying to woo God in this moment. I guess I'm just. I'm wondering if that's meant to be taken as a rhetorical, sort of self consciously performative move. No, but really, I really love you. I really do. You know, that kind of thing. 39:05 Wes: Yeah, he's been usurped by another. So in other words, you know, to the extent that. That's, again, about one's passions, right? So being usurped by sinfulness or by passion, by emotion, sex, violence, whatever. And despite eating, to be so radically transformed, there's love. There's a seed of that impulse here in love. So there's more than just the sinful impulses. And, you know, this goes back to the erotic stuff here too. Right. There has to be love for all of this to work. Right. Not just love of earthly things, but love of God. 39:36 Erin: That's right. I think this is also doing a really good job of sort of dramatizing the waffling that happens when you're trying to work your way back. Like you're doing something that you know is wrong, but you can't quit it. You know, this moving back and forth, like, no, no, I really want to do this thing. I don't want to be doing that. Like, I know what I need to do. And that sort of like, you know, which Donne is doing here. Like ransoming for yourself. You know, like self negotiation. What do I really want? What do I really care about here? No, but really, I love God, you know. No, but he's abandoned me. That kind of thing is, like, really well dramatized here. And this also relates to. Maybe here is a good place to say it, but the performativity of this, too. I mentioned earlier that I think that in some ways this is really not a humble poem. Those ways are the ways in which Donne really evades kind of taking responsibility for his own sin. And so I'm wondering if the performativity here of no, but I really love you is complicated by the fact that he wants God. He's acknowledging God's superiority. He's wanting God to come in, take back the city, take him back. But the extent to which this whole usurpation has occurred, you know, it's like, oh, well, gee, things are really bad here. Don't know how that happened. So there's not a huge acknowledgment of the part that he's played. Like, all of that is kind of sublimated in favor of this idea of God coming in and just rescuing him from himself. But what exactly he needs to be rescued for? Of course, it's hinted at in the last line. Right. And based on the other poems we 41:01 Wes: kind of know and his history. 41:02 Erin: Yes. 41:03 Wes: So he's been having a lot of fun, Poor John Donne 41:07 Erin: Donne. Rhymes with fun. 41:09 Wes: And then after he had all his fun, then he decided to become religious. 41:13 Erin: That's what most people do is the convenience way to go, basically. I'm just saying that this is not someone doing a mea culpa, doing a confession, per se. 41:21 Wes: Right. 41:22 Erin: Yeah. 41:22 Wes: That's really interesting. Yeah. 41:23 Erin: This is someone who's like, hey, come in here and deal with this. And oh, by the way, I really love you. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. 41:29 Wes: You know, so I'm a philanderer, so philander me. So I can stop. You do to me what I've been, and that's the only way I can stop. Yeah. Never chaste except you ravish me. So just to emphasize what you're saying, I think it's really interesting that it's not an expression of guilt over being sinful. It's an expression of. It's a complaint in a way to God that he's not doing enough to overcome that by force. 41:57 Erin: Right. 41:57 Wes: And in a way, it's an abdication of reason, or it's a suggestion that reason is not good enough and possibly an abdication of the power of free will. So it has that element that you're pointing to of passivity and helplessness, which is not precisely where one wants to be, even if one is acknowledging the parts of faith that are not rational. 42:16 Erin: Right, right. On the one hand, arguing with God is a classic tradition in Judaism and Catholicism. Right. Actually, this is another connection to Teresa of Avila, who argues with God. 42:27 Wes: Yeah. There's a job like element to this, I think. 42:29 Erin: Yeah, for sure, for sure. But on the other hand, this is not really the way to approach. Right. This is not the way to do 42:38 Wes: it, but yeah, to be imprisoned and to be ravished, one appreciates the sentiment and the kind of desperation of it. But ultimately it's not a model for. 42:47 Erin: I think that's fine. Ultimately, it's the demand. It's like, you're not doing enough. I know better than you. Also, my reason is crap. I don't know anything. Put it this way, it's not the traditional Prayer, it's not the way that one is traditionally taught to pray. And the lack of acknowledgement and responsibility for his own sin is probably the biggest part of that. But the other big part of it is this, this demand of God, which isn't to say that God can't handle this, it's fine, but it's just not the way that one would normally approach the divine with a request. Not just because of the metaphors or whatever, which actually I think the metaphors are one of the more standard elements of this. Not standard in a, oh, I was expecting that kind of way, but it is trafficking in biblical themes. 43:33 Wes: So there's the demandingness of it. And then the thing that I was pointing to is the tension between the aspect of faith, which maybe depends on it's about grace or it's about ecstasy and the irrational. There's that, but there's a tension between that and free will, which implicates rationality to some extent. So to ask God simply to overwhelm one's free will, to make one's choices and to do all, it takes the concept of the relationship to God too far. Maybe theologically I don't think it can be. Or at least there's that tension. Right. It makes sense in a way, but there's almost like a hysterical, the hysteria to the poem. 44:14 Erin: You're reminding me of something that, you know, especially with this, like divorce me untie or break, like asking God to do something that is, I suppose divorce is permitted in Judaic law. 44:24 Wes: But yeah, no big source of contention. You know, a lot of things happen because of Henry VIII wanting to not so long ago get a divorce. 44:32 Erin: Yeah, but you're reminding me of Rasputin of all people. 44:35 Wes: Right. 44:36 Erin: Have you heard this idea that Rasputin's heretical idea is that he might have borrowed some things from this religious sect which it's actually been proven that he was not a part of. But he, either through that sect or through his own heretical one man system, you know, that he was trying to get people to join. He actually had this belief that he should sin greatly. Like it's a fascinating idea, but that it was a good thing to sin. And the bigger the sin the better because the more infused with grace and forgiveness you get as a result of that sin. So, and this is actually refuted by Paul in Romans 6 because he talks about the fact that like when you sin, but then you come to God for forgiveness, you get this infusion of grace and you get, if you have some big sins, right Then God gives you this big infusion to like counteract that. Maybe I'm misremembering or sort of like overemphasiz. But then he says, but does that mean that you should sin a lot? Like, no, of course not. Right. But Rasputin ignores that cult leader type of. Exactly. He is a cult leader. That is exactly what he is. Yeah, that's the word I was looking for, his cult. But there's something kind of fascinating about. I mean, there's something insane about that because Rasputin is insane. But there's this idea that maybe that's too tangential. I don't know why that crossed the windscreen of my. Or the windscreen. The windshield of my mind. 45:56 Wes: No, I, I think it makes sense because this is, you know, this is what happens in a cult. People want to, you know, and often religion gets accused of this in general. But it's in a cult, people want to abdicate their freedom and give up their minds. You end up, or at least the women end up being taken advantage of by the cult leader. Right. And are ravished. And are. So I think it's spot on to worry about that connection. And that's the tension I was pointing to at the point where this is a request to God to be deprived of one's mind. It becomes a problem. 46:30 Erin: Yeah. And I think that Donne is saying, like, I need the big guns come in with the full troops. 46:34 Wes: I'm just a little too good looking. 46:38 Erin: Yeah, that's right. That's a really good point. 46:41 Wes: He'd been not as good looking. I think it would have gone easier for him. 46:44 Erin: But yeah, I think there's something about that. Like, especially because he's kind of proposing that God do things to him, metaphorically speaking, which are like, literally speaking, sort of ungodly. And also the fact that he's sinned a lot, so he feels like he needs this like, big infusion of grace. Like there's something that maybe is also. Is this connection to this cult y idea that I'm thinking about, which is that the greater the sin, the greater the grace and forgiveness. And he really wants to be like overwhelmed with that. So go out and sin people. 47:11 Wes: Look, everyone's. Everyone needs their own particular connection to God. And in the case of a Don Juan, you know, you need the Don Juan God. You need the ravishing. The ravishing God for the ravishing man. 47:24 Erin: That's right. Well, I was going to say that he has two choices. Like he can either be beaten up by God or he could join A fight club. And that would be like. 47:32 Wes: Right. 47:32 Erin: Two ways to drum it out of him. 47:34 Wes: I said Don Juan. I should have said Dun Juan. 47:36 Erin: Dun Juan. Yeah. 47:39 Wes: Terrible. Although he was known to make. Or was it him who made some puns on his name and poems and letters. I think he did. But then others did, too. 47:46 Erin: It's that time honored tradition. 47:48 Wes: What's done is done. In reference to the marriage. 47:51 Erin: That's great. 47:52 Wes: Of his employers. 47:54 Erin: Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. That's good. 47:57 Wes: All right, so what are we going to discuss in Postscript? 48:01 Erin: Well, the final couplet. I don't think we quite got all the way there. Or did we? 48:04 Wes: Okay, we'll finish up any loose ends with this sonnet and then maybe we'll discuss another random. 48:12 Erin: I have some connections to make to the flea, actually. 48:15 Wes: Oh, were you thinking of the fleas? 48:16 Erin: That's the obvious. Oh, yeah. Well, I think, you know, the flea is not unlike a rapist. 48:23 Wes: Yeah, well, I love the. I love the argument in the flea. And we're not going to tell you anymore. We're going to. 48:29 Erin: Yeah, let that be enough of a teaser. 48:30 Wes: We're going to make you listen to Postscript if you want to know what that's all about. All right. Thank you. You. 48:36 Erin: Thank you. 48:38 Wes: Thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.