Holy Sonnets

However, several rhythmic and structural patterns as well as the inclusion of couplets are elements influenced by the sonnet form developed by English poet and playwright William Shakespeare (1564–1616).

Many of the poems are believed to have been written in 1609 and 1610, during a period of great personal distress and strife for Donne who suffered a combination of physical, emotional and financial hardships during this time.

This was also a time of personal religious turmoil as Donne was in the process of conversion from Roman Catholicism to Anglicanism, and would take holy orders in 1615 despite profound reluctance and significant self-doubt about becoming a priest.

[3]: p.385  "Since she whom I loved, hath paid her last debt," though, is an elegy to Donne's wife, Anne, who died in 1617,[4]: p.63  and two other poems, "Show me, dear Christ, thy spouse so bright and clear" and "Oh, to vex me, contraries meet as one" are first found in 1620.

For instance, the sonnet "Oh my black soul" survives in no fewer than fifteen manuscript copies, including a miscellany compiled for William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

[5]: pp.lx, lxxvi According to scholar A. J. Smith, the Holy Sonnets "make a universal drama of religious life, in which every moment may confront us with the final annulment of time.

"[1] The personal nature of the poems "reflect their author's struggles to come to terms with his own history of sinfulness, his inconstant and unreliable faith, his anxiety about his salvation.

[10] Donne is concerned about the future state of his soul, fearing not the quick sting of death but the need to achieve salvation before damnation and a desire to get one's spiritual affairs in order.

The poems are "suffused with the language of bodily decay" expressing a fear of death that recognizes the impermanence of life by descriptions of his physical condition and inevitability of "mortal flesh" compared with an eternal afterlife.

[13] The pieces were first performed at a concert at the Royal College of Music on 22 May 1916, and a review in The Times stated that the setting of Donne's sonnet was "one of the most impressive short choral works written in recent years".

[8][16] However, Britten was inspired to compose the work after visiting concentration camps in Germany after World War II ended as part of a concert tour for Holocaust survivors organised by violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Handwritten draft of Donne's Sonnet XIV, "Batter my heart, three-person'd God", likely in the hand of Donne's friend, Rowland Woodward, from the Westmoreland manuscript (circa 1620)
John Donne (1572–1631)
A few months before his death, Donne commissioned this portrait of himself as he expected to appear when he rose from the grave at the Apocalypse . [ 7 ] He hung the portrait on his wall as a reminder of the transience of life .
The British composer Benjamin Britten set nine of Donne's sonnets in a song cycle in 1945
The first nuclear weapons test on 16 July 1945, code named "Trinity" was likely named as a reference to Holy Sonnet XIV's "Batter my heart, three-person'd God."