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ATAR Literature (11-12)
Poetics & Meter
The Metrical Sabotage
"Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;"
- John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV
The five-minute challenge
Scan the first line aloud. Where does Donne break the expected iambic heartbeat? In two sentences, explain how the violent trochaic substitution on word one ("Batter") performs the theological crisis before the reader even parses the syntax.
Sentence frame
"By slamming an initial trochee into an iambic meter, Donne physically forces the speaker's plea to..."
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