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Letter from the Editors
Dear Readers,
Our thanks to Marcus Wicker for today's Poet's Pick!
We are bringing you a special poem and commentary each weekday in April as part of our annual fund-raising campaign and in celebration of National Poetry Month. Please help us to continue our service to you and to poetry by making a tax-deductible contribution to Poetry Daily! Click here to find out how you can contribute online or by mailing a check or money order.
Thank you so much for your support! Enjoy today's special poem and commentary!
Warmest regards,
Don Selby & Diane Boller
Editors
Holy Sonnets: "Batter my heart, three-person'd God"
by John Donne (1572–1631)
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.
Marcus Wicker Comments:
I love that Donne’s speaker is both in love with God, and betrothed to God’s enemy: sin. The poem’s active descriptors—“batter,” “blow,” “burn,” “ravish”—are equal parts violent and sexy; a combination that, in concert with the sonnet’s meter, creates an ecstatic and unabashed tone. To my mind, “Batter my heart, three person’d God” is a perfect prayer. Perfect in the sense that I believe in its urgency.
About Marcus Wicker:
Marcus Wicker is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, The Missouri Review's Miller Audio Prize, as well as fellowships from Cave Canem and the Fine Arts Work Center. His first collection Maybe the Saddest Thing (Harper Perennial) was a National Poetry Series winner. His second book, Silencer was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2017. Both collections were finalists for an NAACP Image Award. Marcus teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis, and he is the poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review. Wicker's poems have appeared in The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, and Boston Review.
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