"Holy Sonnet XIV" – also known by its first line as "Batter my heart, three-person'd God" – is a poem written by the English poet John Donne (1572 – 1631). It is a part of a larger series of poems called Holy Sonnets, comprising nineteen poems in total. The poem was printed and published for the first time in Poems in 1633, two years after the author's death. In the 1633 edition the sequence of the poems was different from that found in Herbert Grierson’s edition from 1912; that is why Holy Sonnet XIV features as Holy Sonnet X in older publications. However, the majority of twentieth-century and later editions of Donne's Holy Sonnets are found to prefer and use the order proposed by Grierson and thus include the sonnet as the fourteenth in the cycle. Internal division There is no scholarly consensus regarding the structure of Holy Sonnet XIV; different critics refer to particular parts of this poem either as an octave and a sestet (following the style of the Petrarchan sonnet, with a prominent example being Robert H. Ray's argument), three quatrains and a couplet (the division established by the English sonnet, an example being an article by Purificación Ribes), or decide to avoid definite pronouncements on this issue by referring to line numbers only (seen in James Winny’s A Preface to Donne). This supposed difficulty has been circumvented here, with critics dividing the poem as they see fit in their readings, although there are instances where the style of this poem is addressed directly (especially when it comes to the imagery of the poem). William Zunder takes into consideration the entirety of work of Holy Sonnets, stating that Donne "combines the Italian with the English sonnet form, in order to attain the possibility of a resolution of sentiment in the English sonnet final rhyme." S. L. Bethell suggests that this poem is not restrained by any rules or style, as it is a combination of both intellect and emotion that results in a reflection "of the mind,” and harsh rhythms and words like "break" or "force" "do what they say," which would be breaking the rules of then standardly written poems by using a "concrete and immediate" language, and forcing the form to change into an imitation of "the speech of impassioned thought." Imagery There are two main sets of images in Holy Sonnet XIV, one associated