Holy Sonnets

John Donne's Holy Sonnets are a group of Christian devotional poems in which spiritual inquiry takes the form of direct, often urgent address. A speaker may challenge death, question the condition of the soul, or ask God to overcome the resistance of a divided will. Argument and prayer repeatedly interrupt and strengthen one another. The sonnet's compact structure gives these movements particular pressure, allowing an image or reversal to change the direction of the whole poem. Their power lies in the difficulty of the encounters they stage between human frailty and the hope of grace.