Holy John Donne!

I don't really know why I was thinking about sonnets while I was trying to fall asleep last night, but I was. I've written two. I don't know how good they really are, I mean, I like them, but I'm a little biased.

So I was trying to remember if an iamb went unstressed/stressed syllables or the other way around, and running through random first lines of sonnets that I can recite trying to scan them in my head, when I realized that they weren't all that consistent. That's poetry, I guess.

Anyway, since I was on the subject, I turned on a lamp, reached up above my head, and pulled down my Oxford Book of Sonnets. I thumbed through a few pages and decided that the iamb went the way I had thought. And then I was reading some Donne, and turned this up:

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.

It's one of the holy sonnets, and I'm not going to try to explain it thoroughly, but it's about the Church: the bride of Christ. What struck me most was that last couplet...

The Church is at her best--and most pleasing to Jesus--when she is "open to most men."

True in the 17th century, true today.