RSS

Batter My Heart

by John Donne

Batter my heart, three-person’d 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 usurp’d town to’another due,
Labor to’admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly’I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d 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.

 

4 Responses to Batter My Heart

  1. lucricausa

    April 7, 2008 at 9:00 pm

    I enjoy the imagery here of being captured, ravished and imprisoned by His goodness. The Bible speaks of us as “prisoners of hope”… You’re right, without that sort of captivating love, what chance would we have to be true?

     
  2. beingmade

    April 7, 2008 at 10:26 pm

    I think that shall be my prayer right now.

     
  3. Brian

    April 8, 2008 at 8:10 am

    lucricausa: “Prisoners of hope” — whoa! I’ve never heard that before. That’s it!

    beingmade: Mine too. Amen.

     
  4. lucricausa

    April 8, 2008 at 7:30 pm

    “Turn you to the strong hold, prisoners of hope…” Zechariah 9:12 Really beautiful passage. In the verse prior He speaks of our redemption by the blood covenant as “prisoners out of a pit wherein is no water.” The interesting part is that we’re “sent out” from it. In the bondage of one we’re deep within a dry pit… held captive by the other, we’re essentially commissioned to run about under the reign of His goodness and grace. In that light, it proves true that His yoke is easy. Rambling now– but it’s incredibly compelling to consider.

     

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.