A Summary and Analysis of John Donne’s ‘A Hymn to God the Father’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘A Hymn to God the Father’ is one of John Donne’s most famous religious poems. As the Donne scholar P. M. Oliver observed, what makes Donne’s poem unusual and innovative is that, in ‘A Hymn to God the Father’, Donne has written a hymn that does not set out to praise God so much as engage him in a debate. The poem is one of Donne’s most masterly holy poems. Below are a few words of analysis.

As the numerous questions in the first two stanzas demonstrate, Donne is not aiming to sing God’s praises uncritically: rather, he wishes to ask God about sin and forgiveness, among other things. The to-and-fro of the poem’s rhyme schemes, where its stanzas are rhymed ababab, reinforces this idea of question-and-answer.

‘A Hymn to God the Father’: summary

We might paraphrase Donne’s argument in ‘A Hymn to God the Father’ as follows:

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

‘Will you forgive my sins, which I was responsible for, though many have committed them before me? If you will forgive me for those sins, then your work will not be done – for I have more sins to confess when we’ve done those.

Wilt thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallow’d in, a score?
When thou hast done, thou hast not done,
For I have more.

‘Will you forgive me when I have led others to sin, and even introduced them to the world of sin, acting like a door to welcome them in? Will you forgive me for the sin which, barring a couple of years of abstinence, I practised for twenty whole years? Again, if you will forgive me for those sins, then you should know: there are more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more.

‘I also have another sin – that of fear, or specifically, fear of death. But if you, God, can swear that when I die, I will see your son, Jesus Christ, shining and there to save me, then all is all right: I fear no more.’

‘A Hymn to God the Father’: analysis

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And, having done that, thou hast done;
I fear no more.

‘I have a sin of fear’ is a masterly inversion of the phrase we might expect (‘I have a fear of sin’). Similarly, the poem’s opening lines seem to refer to Original Sin, which partly lets Donne off the hook, since it’s what God should expect of mankind: ‘Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun, / Which was my sin, though it were done before?’ Adam and Eve started the whole sin game: Donne is weak for following them, but in a sense he is only being human. (If the first man couldn’t resist…)

Is Donne (pronounced ‘done’ or ‘dun’, we should remember) punning on his own name in ‘A Hymn to God the Father’? ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done.’ Perhaps: John Donne was, after all, the poet who wrote, after he landed in trouble for marrying Anne More for love, the bitterly punning line: ‘John Donne, Anne Donne, Un-done.’

The idea of God being ‘done’ with Donne would probably have struck the poet with its aptness, and it chimes nicely with the idea of things being, to an extent, predetermined (or already ‘done’) thanks to Original Sin – something hinted at in the poem’s opening lines.

‘A Hymn to God the Father’ is refreshing in its directness, and the no-nonsense, don’t-stand-on-ceremony way that Donne addresses God. The cheekiness of asking God to ‘swear by thyself’ – just as we mere mortals swear by almighty God – is almost irreverent, but the tone and meaning of the poem is sincere. Donne’s soul-searching self-analysis meant that he had, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, come to ‘know the anguish of the marrow’ and the ‘ague of the skeleton’. Like Webster, he was much possessed by death.

But he realised that his fear of God could be allayed, even extinguished, by putting his trust in God. ‘A Hymn to God the Father’, like many hymns, is a plea: a plea for a guarantee that that trust will not prove to have been misplaced.

Discover more about Donne’s poetry with our analysis of his poem ‘The Sun Rising’, our summary of ‘The Ecstasy’, and our commentary on one of his great holy sonnets. The best edition of Donne’s work is, in our opinion, the indispensable John Donne – The Major Works (Oxford World’s Classics).

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.