John Donne’s Holy Sonnets

Reading John Donne for the first time, especially after exploring Dante, Petrarch, and Sidney I was amazed at the personal intimacy that Donne has with God. While the poets before him philosophically explore divine love as an unattainable ideal through beauty manifested in inaccessible liaisons, Donne does not subscribe to such pretensions. He consumes it, ravages it, and wallows in it, bringing an excruciating physical sensuality to his faith that tears him in two. The blasphemous notion of consummated love with the ideal is so embraced by Donne as he pursues this intimacy with God, that his work inevitably speaks to us from the bowels of his pain and aftermath: from the depths of the conflicted sinner instead of the moral righteousness of the devout.

In Sonnet II, Donne explicates what is perhaps the culmination of his torment. While he accepts himself as a creation of the Almighty, he also feels abandoned by Him and is consumed with confusion and grief before his struggle. H...