As a young poet, John Donne often utilized metaphors of spiritual bond in many of his Songs and Sonnets in order to explain fleshly love. Once he renounced Catholicism and converted to the Anglican faith (circa 1597), Donne donned a more devotional style of verse, such as in his Holy Sonnets (circa 1609-1610), finding parallels to divine love in the carnal union. In many ways, however, his love poems and his religious poems are quite similar, for they both address his personae's deep-seated fear of isolation by women and God, respectively. For example, in "Song," Donne's speaker tells an unknown person (presumably male) that if he would "Ride ten thousand days and nights" he would return "And swear/ Nowhere/ Lives a woman true, and fair" (ll. 12; 16-18). Similarly, in Holy Sonnet 2, the speaker voices fear that God will not be with him on his day of reckoning: "Oh I shall soon despair when I do see/ That Thou lov'st mankind well, yet wilt not choose me" (ll. 12-13). Whereas many of Donne's love poems display a speaker's anxiety and anger about his inability to sustain affection from a woman, Donne transferred that theme of resentment towards wo

Why would Donne have felt unfulfilled spiritually during the time in which he wrote theHoly Sonnets? Witherspoon and Warnke posit that "Donne's religious doubts seem to have been...settled" because after his conversion to Anglicanism, he led attacks against Roman Catholicism and published a treatise which encouraged English Catholics to take the oath of allegiance (58). While Donne abandoned Catholicism for Anglicanism willingly, records indicate that he did so primarily for reasons of self-preservation and self-advancement (Carey 60). I propose that despite his genuine attempts to embrace the Anglican faith, he encountered seemingly insurmountable liturgical roadblocks that caused a long-lasting religious disorientation.

To leave one religion in order to embrace another with some fundamental differences with respect to eternal salvation must have troubled Donne greatly. As a Catholic, Donne probably believed that salvation was achieved by true contrition for sins, personal endeavor and virtuous behavior. As an Anglican, however, he was forced to adopt the Calvinistic approach that personal effort was futile and irrelevant; he must be chosen as one of the elect. Donne, then, reasonably must have felt that he was not one th

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