Why do we humans make and listen to poetry? “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” — everything in it is worthy of our attention. A poet fixes our gaze on some God-created being or experience by “translating” it for us, by rendering it delightfully and powerfully through words.

If the poet successfully makes use of the imaginative and emotional power of words, we the audience are drawn into the miniature world of the poem. The poet’s “make-believe” works, and we believe! Once drawn into that world, we see some thing or some experience afresh, from the inside (as it were), through being moved by it to joy, or sympathy, or longing, or sorrow, or some other emotion. We experience something new, and we are moved by it.

Too often in our lives, along the well-worn and well-known tracks, sometimes ruts, along which we move, the God-charged world passes by unnoticed. We take for granted what is of dreadful importance, being satisfied with and settling for our puny assessment of it; or we overlook the still, small voice of God speaking through the mundane or the trivial. The poet arrests our attention on these.

Since we carry our moral weakness with us always, and since we are by now so accustomed to hearing of our absolute need for God’s saving grace that it has become a tagline, these two realities — our weakness and the necessity of his grace — tend to become trite. We generally fail to regard and experience them as they ought to be regarded and experienced. It is these realities that are called out of this shadowland, this vague and gray existence, by the conjuration of one of the masters of English poetry, 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,
Labour 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.

Donne has expressed, through one central, striking image, the cri de coeur of repentant sinners, not just of King David or St. Augustine but of all of us. Our hearts are usurped towns made into fortresses against their rightful ruler, God. We implore the Lord to employ his battering ram against our hearts. We try to open our town gates to God, but God’s viceroy (our mind) is tied up, impotent. So we cry out to God to break off our engagement to our enemy, to imprison us for himself, and to enrapture us.

This poem — which is indeed a prayer — brings home to us the reality of our moral weakness and the necessity of God’s saving grace.

It is no mere statement of these realities. In describing the abject misery and thoroughgoingness of our slavery to sin and the intensity but impotence of our desire for God through the central image of a treacherous town turned into a fortress against God, and in imploring the Lord to lay siege to the town, defeat it, and enthrall us to himself, Donne’s poem paints a clearer, richer picture of our moral state. It provides us with an emotional intensity that matches this picture, an intensity that would be permanent, were we constantly and thoroughly cognizant of our weakness and of our need and desire for God.

The poem captures the reality of our state — the impotence, desperation, and yearning — and, at least for many of us, does so better than our generic statements about our sinfulness and the need for grace. To put it another way: the poem, through concretizing these realities and making them personal and powerful, allows us to feel their import, blunted by repetition and superficial familiarity. We are brought to see and appreciate them afresh.