with military warfare and the other with matters of love and marriage. Accordingly, critics (such as Ribes, Beaston, Gosse, Shawcross, Ray) have identified two discourses in the text – one military and the other amorous (marital). When compared, both discourses seem to communicate the same idea: being taken by force by God is the only way to free oneself from Satan’s grasp. Ray explains that "the speaker asks for spiritual conquest by God in metaphorical terms as military and sexual conquest throughout the sonnet." In the words of Edmund Gosse, it is Donne himself that takes the role of the speaker and “conceives himself a helpless, beleaguered city held by a hateful and tyrannic foe” – Satan. The military discourse is prominent in the octave of the poem, manifested in such expressions as: batter, your force, break, blow, burn, usurp'd town, due, viceroy, defend, captivated. The speaker is like a usurped town during a siege, imprisoned by the enemy (Satan and sin), but is awaiting God to use his force and to liberate him. George Herman notes that this expected role of the "three-person'd God" brings together the poem with the image of a bigger force needed for redemption: Herman proposes that "God the Father needs to break rather than knock at the heart, God the Holy Ghost to blow rather than breathe, and God the Son to burn rather than shine on the 'heart-town-woman.'" The amorous discourse surfaces heavily in the sestet of the poem, asserted by words and phrases such as: dearly I love you, loved, bethroth'd, divorce me, untie or break that knot, enthrall me, chaste, ravish. The speaker here talks about himself as bethrothed unto God's enemy. Shawcross claims that, unlike the octave begging "for the mind" and "for the heart to be freed of sin," the sestet "involves both of the preceding by pleading for the body to be freed." Themes The overall imagery in the poem is strongly violent and sexual, but also bears clear traces of estrangement from God. The speaker craves to be violated by God not only because the speaker loves him and wants to be close to him, but also to be saved from sin and Satan, which is communicated in physical terms. The poem itself is a plea addressed directly to God, who is invoked in his Trinitarian form ("three-person'd God"). The speaker does not suffer from an internal