A soul batters against the walls of its own unworthiness, begging God to break down the door, ravish, imprison, overwhelm. John Donne composed these sonnets after his wife's death and his ordination as an Anglican priest, and they burn with a ferocity that makes devotional poetry feel like combat. The conceits are violent and erotic: the speaker is a town occupied by an enemy, a bride betrothed to the wrong lover, a traveller at the edge of a round earth's imagined corners. Donne's syntax strains against the sonnet form, enjambments crashing over line breaks as though feeling cannot be contained. Death, be not proud, he commands, and one hears a man who has looked into the grave and refused, with all the force of language, to be afraid.