The first thing I noticed was the parallelism in lines 2 and 4: "knock, breathe, shine" and "break, blow, burn". These groups of three reflect the Trinity. I think the first pair addresses God the Father, the second pair addresses Jesus Christ, and the last pair addresses the Holy Spirit. I could have gotten those completely mixed up, but that was the impression I got from the poem. The whole poem is an apostrophe to God from a devout believer. The reason I say the speaker is devout is because line 9 says "yet dearly I love you . . ."; the speaker truly wants to be saintlike. The speaker is a sinner like all of us; line 10 says "but am betrothed unto your enemy", the enemy being sin. However, he wants to be forgiven, as shown in the last four lines where the speaker states he wants to be rid of sin- "untie or break that knot again".
One of the questions in the book asks about a paradox in the first quatrain. Obviously, since this poem is in a section about paradoxes and irony, there has to be one of those two things. I am finding neither. I think the paradox may be that the speaker uses some destructive words- "knock", "o'erthrow me", "break"- to describe how God is to renew him, but I could be way off.
Until Next Time,
Alysse
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