by CCW | 18 February 2026 13:00
John Donne’s sonnet serves as a commentary on this verse from Psalm 51. “Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you/ As yet but knock, breath, shine, and seeke to mend;/ That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend/ Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.”
The sonnet’s extravagant imagery, unlikely as it might seem, helps us to take Ash Wednesday seriously in the sense of our extreme separation from God, on the one hand, and the desire for restoration and renewal, on the other hand. Both belong to the project of Lent and to the dynamic of love, “love divine, all loves excelling,” as finishing, perfecting, and renewing our human loves and lives. In another poem, The Good Night, part of an epithalamion, a poem celebrating marriage, Donne notes that “fire ever doth aspire,/ And makes all like it self, turns all to fire,/ But ends in ashes,” only to note about the newly-weds that this is that “which these cannot do”. Ashes are not the end of love. Dust and ashes on this day mark the beginning of Lent as the pilgrimage of love renewing and restoring or setting in order our disordered selves.
That love is the divine love which, as Donne suggests, we seek in order to be made new. Nothing else will do. Our returning to the Lord, our God, with all our heart, as the prophet Joel exhorts us, is only possible through God turning us back to himself from whom we have turned away. Donne’s sonnet meditates on the radical meaning of what that turning means for us. It means being made new.
He asks God as Trinity to “batter” him, an image of violence and force. He suggests that something more extreme is necessary for our good beyond the milder, more gentle biblical images of piety about God “knocking” on the door of our hearts, “breathing” his spirit upon us, “shining” down benevolently upon us, and “seeking to mend” us. Donne says this is not enough. “That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.” The alliteration of the ‘b’ sound in batter, bend, break, blow, burn reinforce these images of force. Overall, the poem makes the necessary but forceful point that God has to break us to make us. Yet the imagery of violence which is maintained throughout the sonnet really reflects the violence of sin and evil in all that opposes God, in the devil and us, that results in the violence that God suffers on the Cross for us.
Here the violence we seek from God is the counter and conquest of the radical meaning of all sin and evil made visible on the Cross. As the poetic preacher Lancelot Andrewes notes and, in a way, that complements Donne’s insight, Christ crucified is the liber charitatis, the book of love opened for us to read.
The sonnet adopts a personal voice – “my heart”, “make me new”, and several times, “I”- but these are all images about our souls in captivity to what separates us from God. Donne gives a rather precise account of the reasons for our turning away from God and the impossibility of ourselves turning back. That insight belongs to the profound Christian understanding that redemption is a greater act of God than creation itself. Thus redemption is not simply about a return to Paradise. There is no going back. The renewal of our love and our humanity cannot mean a forgetting of our sin and evil, as if the Fall, and its on-going presence in us as sinners, can simply be ignored. Forgiveness is something greater, a new and greater creation, and as something sought for and recognised by us. It requires repentance, our being turned back to God from whom we have turned away; the sensibility about that separation is what the poem highlights.
God’s forgiveness is absolute and extends to all; it can’t depend on us in any way, shape, or form. But forgiveness for us is nothing in us without repentance, without a deep awareness of human sin and evil and our desiring to be restored. This is true for both Protestant Reformers and for Counter-reformation Roman Catholics and colours a whole body of literature about the seriousness of sin. In a way, Donne’s sonnet anticipates William Law’s observation that the wrath of God is simply the love of his own righteousness and truth which sin in its folly seeks to deny. As if we can unmake reality. It is really ourselves whom we unmake.
Donne likens himself or the soul to a town that has been taken over by an aggressive power: “I, like an usurpt towne, to another due”, bound and taken captive, as it were, unfree, and thus not truly ourselves. He says “I …labour to admit you,” meaning God, but can’t. Our desire to be returned to God cannot accomplish that return itself. As he says, “But Oh, to no end,” and explains why. This is important in terms of what it means to understand ourselves as persons made in the image of God, an image which we have defaced or besmirched by sin. “Reason,” he says, “your viceroy in me, me should defend.” Here reason is named as the principle form of the image of God in the soul but that reason is impaired; it “is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.”
The shift from the octet to the sestet, in the Petrarchan form of the sonnet that Donne uses, happens here by way of the little word, “yet”. It marks the change in direction from description of alienation or separation to the prescription for restoration and renewal. It does so by invoking our will or desire that is equally an essential faculty of the human soul. “Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,” loved in return, “but am betroth’d unto your enemy.” Paradoxically, Donne turns to marriage imagery but in reverse, essentially seeking to be united to God by way of divorce from captivity to the enemy of God, in short, the devil. “Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again.” Redemption seeks the radical remaking of our disordered humanity through the breaking of the bonds of sin.
At this point, the imagery in the sonnet attains its highest and most extravagant expression. The soul cries out to God. “Take me to you, imprison me, for I/ Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,/ Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.” We seek to be freed from sin and imprisoned by God, imaged both as slavery and as love; enthrall here in its double sense of being taken captive and being captivated by something wonderful. Our freedom is found in our service to God, “whose service is perfect freedom”, as the Collect for Peace prays. And our restoration to purity – imaged as chastity – can only happen through the soul being ravished by God himself, playing with the word ravish in its sexual sense of rape, on the one hand, and the idea of delight, the delight of the soul in God and God in the soul, on the other hand.
Our treasure, what we most seek and truly desire, is in heaven with God and our being with God. The means of its realization for us and in us is through the pageant of Lent in the passion of Christ. The violence of God towards the soul for our redemption expresses the sense of the violence of sin and evil which Christ bears on the Cross. “It cost the heart-blood of the Son of God to redeem us “(Jeremy Taylor). The extravagance of the sonnet is nothing less than the extravagance of the divine love which recreates and makes us new. Yet this is exactly what we seek and desire. The disciplines of Lent belong to the awakening of that desire in us. Such is God’s love remaking our loves. It happens “by self-examination and repentance, by prayer, fasting, and self-denial, and by reading and meditation upon God’s holy Word.” These things belong to our being broken in order to be remade and made new. “A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou shalt not despise.”
Fr. David Curry
Ash Wednesday, 2026
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