How can a ravished person be chaste

To His Mistress Going to Bed. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts. The original text plus a side-by-side modern translation of every Shakespeare play.

Sign Up. Already have an account? Sign in. From the creators of SparkNotes, something better. WikiPaintings Visual Art Encyclopedia. Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. New York and London: W. I, like an usurped town to another due, Labor to admit you, but O, to no end; Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captivated, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain, But am betrothed 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.

Summary John Donne wrote most of his Holy Sonnets between and The harsher possibilities are brought up in line 4. I, like an usurp'd town, to another due, Labour to admit you, but O, to no end. Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captived, and proves weak or untrue. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved 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.

This poem, written using the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet form , sees Donne calling upon God to take hold of him and consume him, in a collection of images that are at once deeply spiritual and physically arresting. This is the aspect of Donne which prefigures and possibly influenced a poet of years later, the Victorian religious poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who often addresses God in the same breathless, excited way that we see in this sonnet.

Perhaps the best way to summarise and understand is to paraphrase. But in order to make me rise up and stand before you a new, devout man, use your power to break me and remould me into someone new.

I am like a town that has been captured and long to let you, my saviour, in to reclaim me.