Holy Sonnet 18

Show me dear Christ, thy spouse so bright and clear.
What! is it she which on the other shore
Goes richly painted? or which, robb'd and tore,
Laments and mourns in Germany and here?
Sleeps she a thousand, then peeps up one year?
Is she self-truth, and errs? now new, now outwore?
Doth she, and did she, and shall she evermore
On one, on seven, or on no hill appear?
Dwells she with us, or like adventuring knights
First travel we to seek, and then make love?
Betray, kind husband, thy spouse to our sights,
And let mine amorous soul court thy mild Dove,
Who is most true and pleasing to thee then
When she'is embrac'd and open to most men.

In the Holy Sonnet 18, John Donne expresses a personal struggle with the Church and its true meaning. However, towards the end it sounds a lot more like the reader is engaging or being tempted by sexual activities. It concludes by saying that Christ is going to be pleased with the reader/speaker if they sleep with the wife of the Christ --she who is "embraced and open to most men"(14). So...my first time through reading this I thought it was a poem of unfaithfulness and sexual ecstasy rather than a holy sonnet. With this being said I was not too far off from what I feel John Donne meant by the poem. When you think about it, religion and the passion for the righteous life is a state of elated bliss in itself. Truly passionate religious people are just as pleasured and aroused by there faith and acceptance to Christ as anyone would be after intercourse.

Like all of John Donne's poem's they are personal records of personal struggles towards the true meaning of God and the church. After you get past the relation to religious satisfaction and sexual satisfaction you will find the deeper meaning to the poem. The pang and anguish from the seperations of the church and what or where the true church might be.