/lit/ - Literature

Why does the best religious poetry sound gay to modern ears? For example:

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Why is he considered among the greats of English poetry? What's the appeal?
His command of meter is clumsy and his imagery is poor, especially in his love poems.
His poems that are neither religious nor erotic nor related to love are even clumsier and come off as cold even when they're addressed to people he knew. The subject matter of his satires have been done better by better poets.

His only genuinely great poems are the Holy Sonnets and the Metempsychosis, but even his religious lyric poems have an awkward prosody and feel more like dramatic monologues or translations of the psalms than English poems. Marvell, Herbert, Milton, and Hopkins have all done religious poetry better.

It's like he read from Shakespeare but only took influence from his blank-verse soliloquys that weren't imagery-laden, had prosodic highs, or had extended metaphors.

For me, it's Donne (pbuh!)