“Metaphysical” poet John Donne (1573-1631), Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, often used sexual metaphors in his poems of faith, sometimes almost blasphemously, and made religion as important a topic for the sonnet as love.

       Donne is unsurpassed in the effectively using the device of paradox. Akin is the “conceit,” an elaborate, exaggerated comparison. The ingenuity and intellectual challenge of the conceit make us think afresh to plumb our feel ings. The conceit finds the edges of reality around deep, otherwise formless, sentiment.

       Observe the conceit in one of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” 14, its torment typical. God is Trinity, blacksmith, glass-blower, battle chief, rapist. Donne, in the octave, is a city under siege (twisting a Petrarchan convention of the beloved’s heart as a fortress); in the sestet (beginning with “Yet”) he is a sexual partner desiring a different lover. The final tercet (which ends with a couplet) unites the two metaphors and brings the conceits to a climax all the more shocking because it seems irresistible. 

      Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You
      As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
      That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
      Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
      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 captived, and proves weak or untrue.

      Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved fain,
      But I 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.
 

John Adams: Doctor Atomic (2005), "Batter my heart" (Act I closer). 
The Metropolitan Opera, New York, October, 2008. 
Baritone Gerald Finley as Robert Oppenheimer; 
MET Orchestra, Alan Gilbert,conductor.