Why does Donne defy conventional sonnet structure in “Holy Sonnet 10”?

February 26^th, 2017

John Donne’s meter was—in a word—controversial. His contemporary, Ben Johnson, claimed that he “deserved hanging” for “not keeping of accent” (Hunter 124), while literary historian Henry Hallam called him (in completely unpretentious fashion) “the most inharmonious of our versifiers” with “lines too rugged to seem meter” (Patrides 89). Their concerns are not without merit; the sonnet form is defined by its constraints and a poet’s ability to work within them, yet Donne knowingly invokes the form only to run roughshod over its iambic rhythms. In scanning “Holy Sonnet 10,” I found myself stumbling over extra syllables and abrupt stops; while they obviously complemented the poem’s violent subject matter, I still had trouble making out the precise method in Donne’s madness. Ultimately, I found that each time Donne subverts sonnet conventions, evoking the rough cadences of everyday speech, he does so to enhance the poem’s impact as a rhetorical plea. Sonnets often take the form of an ‘essay’ or argument, and Donne takes this idea to its ultimate end by undermining the form’s traditional sing-song sensibilities; a sonnet is, after all, ‘a little song,’ but you would have difficulty applying that label to most poems in Donne’s catalogue. This essay will demonstrate how his violation of iambic pentameter and use of irregular sentence structure both act as strategic devices to aid the speaker’s impassioned demands.

While Hallam’s more harmonious ‘versifiers’ often stray from iambic pentameter, they usually do so in a liberal, strategic fashion; Donne’s departures are also strategic, but instead of a nudge to lead you into a certain way of reading, his verse is more like a running tackle. The poem immediately violates sonnet convention with its first word: “Batter my heart,” he says (Donne 1). The speaker’s goal is to force God’s attention, so by opening with an abrupt, stressed syllable, Donne reflects the aggressive action he demands of God within the demand itself. By opening subsequent lines with trochees—bemoaning how he “labor[s]” to admit God, how his “Reason” proves useless—Donne exercises rhetorical power in that he propels us into the speaker’s demands with a sense of forward momentum (6-7). This aggressive momentum continues through the strategic use of spondees to create groupings of stressed syllables: “knock, breath, shine,” he says, “break, blow, burn” (2-4). Donne forgoes a rising, falling, iambic rhythm in order to enact his battering-ram metaphor within the text itself; the consecutive, imperative, monosyllabic verbs hammer the speaker’s argument into the listener’s mind. The parallel construction of the two spondees also serves a rhetorical function in that it draws a formal connection between God’s current inadequate treatment of the speaker against the violence of how he would like to be treated. Donne further subverts iambic pentameter not just through the manipulation of syllables, but by including additional ones—in lines three, five, seven, nine, eleven and thirteen. By doing so, Donne guides the reader into reciting the sonnet not as song but as a powerful rhetorical speech. Take line three, for example: “That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend” (11). If you try to recite the line along conventional iambic rhythms, you reach the end with a syllable to spare. Donne therefore gives you two options: read the line as an impassioned speech in accordance with the punctuation breaks he lays out; or elide “me” into “and” at the end of the line as a single unstressed syllable, and in doing so, produce an awkward sound that bleeds into the next line—an aural enactment of the “bend” the speaker so longs for in his argument. In either case, Donne successfully subverts the musical sensibilities of the sonnet form, strengthening the speaker’s argument with the rhetorical force it requires. He creates a similar effect in his approach to line nine, which reads: “Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain” (9). This line, as printed in the Longman Anthology, absolutely defies easy scansion. The only way to make it fit iambic pentameter is to pronounce “loved” with two syllables and to structure the second and third feet as anapests (i.e. “ly I love | you, and would”). If you do the latter and not the former, you end up one stress short; if you do the opposite, the line becomes hexameter. In my mind, Donne constructs it this way specifically to call attention to it, as it is the only line where the speaker is not blaming God, making demands of Him, or admitting his own guilt. If Donne’s goal is to manipulate proper sonnet conventions to advance the speakers argument to God—which I suggest it is, obviously—it makes perfect sense that his most subversive line would be a statement on the purity of his love, and his desire to be loved. While Donne employs both a Petrarchan rhyme scheme and an English couplet (further reinforcing his position as ‘purposefully but also ridiculously’ subversive), his statement here, in the ninth line—the Petrarchan Volta—stands out as the more meaningful turn of the two.

While writers often employ line breaks or caesura strategically, to call attention to specific words, nearly every line in “Holy Sonnet 10” includes a possible interruption to flow—encouraging the reader to catch every clause as it passes. Donne writes, “That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend / Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new” (3-4). He places commas after “rise” and “force” despite the fact that it is not grammatically necessary, introducing a possible caesura where one did not exist before—forcing each word to resonate in the mind of the listener. The speaker appeals to God by pausing, expressing reverence for His “force” as a power in itself, separate from the verb it enacts. Even if one smooths past Donne’s commas, their mere placement separates the preceding phrase as an independent unit worthy of note. Writer Edmund Gosse suggests that this “violent mode of breaking up the lines into quick and slow beats,” achieved in concert with the poem’s iambic violations, is Donne’s “rebellion against the smooth … nerveless iambic flow” of the Elizabethan poets—and not without good reason (Goose 244). For example, Shakespeare seldom uses punctuation (commas, semi-colons, periods) to break up his verse mid-line; of the sonnets listed in the Longman Anthology, the majority hover between two to seven breaks, with the highest (Sonnet 129) employing eighteen (Damrosch, et al.). By contrast, “Holy Sonnet 10” features at least twenty-six (Donne 1-14). While I can read through the romantic Bard’s smooth verse without stopping, Donne forces me to stop, slow down, and start again. Shakespeare and the courtly poets that preceded him deliver their arguments through long, drawn-out ironies, but Donne—by cutting up his verse—creates a speaker capable of spitting out successive, disjointed phrases: “Divorce me, untie … Take me to you, imprison me,” he says (11-12). Donne sacrifices the smooth lines so valued by critics like Johnson and Hallam, and in doing so crafts a sonnet that fully operates in the imperative, argumentative mode. This serves another rhetorical purpose within the context of the sonnet, as the irregular sentence structure evokes the stuttering of everyday speech. The poem’s very form reinforces the narrator’s appeal to God, as it positions him as lowly, common man, desperate for His love—and as we all know, God has a soft spot for the meek and poor in spirit.

By now I have hopefully made it clear that Donne only manipulates sonnet form to reinforce the rhetorical force of his content. However, the opposite is also true; when he conforms to conventional structure, it serves a rhetorical function by drawing attention away from the narrator’s words. The poem’s only line without any punctuation break, caesura, or divergence from iambic pentameter reads: “But am betrothed unto your enemy” (10). Before this point, the narrator’s bombastic pleas focus on God’s failings: that He has been too easy on the him, that Reason—God’s viceroy—has failed him (6-7). When it comes time to reveal his own culpability, that in God’s absence he has been unfaithful, adulterous, aligning himself with Satan—the passionate violations of sonnet convention fall away. This is clear conformation of my thesis; Donne’s style is derived from the assumption that proper verse is not rhetorically impactful, and thus the narrator exercises that style when commanding or coercing God, only reverting to convention in the hope that both He and the reader might gloss over his infidelity. As further proof, the only other line of perfect iambic pentameter just happens to be the only other mention of this infidelity. The narrator claims that unless God enthralls him, he will never be free, “Nor ever chaste” (14). Donne employs a smooth iambic flow only to draw attention from his status as a failed Protestant—from the fact that if God fails to act, the speaker will surrender himself (sexually) to Satan, because of course he will.

Ultimately, Donne employed frustrating meter that irritated his contemporaries to no end and haunted literary critics two hundred years into the future – but not just for the sake of being contrary (though that was probably part of it); every extra syllable and line break in “Holy Sonnet 10” was a measured choice made to elevate the sonnet form into a powerful rhetorical device, the only way Donne could – by tearing it down. His use of trochees, spondees, and anapests allowed him to build a violent, triumphant voice propelling the listener through the poem’s argument; his ragged use of commas and caesuras allowed him to eschew the saccharine sensibilities of earlier sonnets; and the few times he held to convention, he did so in a sly bid to conceal the speaker’s innocent associations with Satan. Doctor Donne the eloquent preacher proves himself a rhetorician even in this earlier work, reflecting the idea of ‘poem as argument’ within the text itself.

Works Cited

Donne, John. “Sonnet 10.” The Longman Anthology of British literature, edited by Damrosch,

David, and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. 4^th ed., vol. 1B, Longman, 2010, pp. 1607.

Damrosch, David, and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. The Longman Anthology of British literature. 4^th

ed., vol. 1B, Longman, 2010.

Gosse, Edmund. "The Poetry of John Donne." The New Review, edited by William Ernest

Henley, Longmans, Green, 1893, pp. 236-247.

Hunter, William B. A Milton Encyclopedia. Vol. 8, Bucknell University Press, 1978.

Patrides, C. A., et al. Figures in a Renaissance Context. University of Michigan Press, 1989.