Donne's "Holy Sonnet 14" addresses God, but not in the way you'd expect. Like most sonnets, it's chock full of imagery, conceits, and dramatic turns. But when Donne uses the sonnet to talk to God, things get especially interesting.
This is no slow morning at church.
Donne covers a lot of ground in just 14 lines; he imagines his relationship with God as everything from a war to a marriage. Clearly, the Donne Dude was hard at work on contradictions –a.k.a. paradoxes—to draw out the complexity of man's relationship to a higher power.
Cleanth Brooks defines poetry in The Well Wrought Urn as "a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme." How could you talk about Donne's poem in terms of its balances and resolutions over the "time" of the poem?
Hm…