Donne treats salvation like an inheritance case, and he argues it with a lawyer's precision and a beggar's urgency. The speaker addresses God the Father directly and explains that Christ, the Son, has divided his wealth. Part of it is Christ's own share in the kingdom, and part is the "conquest" of death. All of it has been handed on to the speaker. The sestet then raises a worry. Humans debate whether anyone can keep God's laws, and the answer is "None doth." Only grace can revive what strict law destroys. The poem ends by reducing the whole code to one command, love, and asking that this "last Will stand."
The legal vocabulary carries the poem. "Interest," "jointure," "Legacy," "invest," "statutes" and "abridgement" all belong to the world of property and courts, and Donne uses them to make a vast doctrine feel like a document one could actually read. Even the Trinity gets a legal-sounding obstacle, since "jointure" suggests shared holdings and the adjective "knotty" admits that this doctrine is hard to untie. The word is oddly casual for a theological mystery, and the casualness is part of the poem's honesty. The "two Wills" are most likely the Old and New Testaments, since "testament" and "will" are the same thing. That pun lets scripture itself become the paperwork of the legacy. The line about the Lamb "slain from the world's beginning" echoes the Bible's language about Christ's sacrifice, and it puts the death outside ordinary time. The inheritance was arranged before anyone was born.
The turn comes with "Yet," which opens the sestet and pushes against the confidence of the octave. The rhythm shifts too. The longer, clause-heavy sentences of the first eight lines give way to the blunt, almost embarrassed "None doth," where the semicolon makes a pause like a held breath. Then the sentence finds a way out: "all-healing grace and spirit / Revive again what law and letter kill." The word "Revive" starts the new line, so the revival literally spills over the line break. This also echoes a famous New Testament contrast between the killing letter and the life-giving spirit. Donne sets rule-keeping against mercy and lets mercy take the stronger verbs, "heal" and "revive."
The form supports this movement. The octave rhymes ABBA ABBA like a Petrarchan sonnet, with its closed, symmetrical feel. The sestet runs CDCD and then ends on an English-style couplet, "command" and "stand." The first rhyme there is loose, because "yet" and "spirit" only half-match, and the looseness suits a passage about human failure. The couplet then snaps shut with full rhyme. The lines are in iambic pentameter, but Donne often lets natural speech rhythm roughen the meter, so the opening "Father" lands as a stressed, direct address rather than a polished musical beat.
The last line is the most interesting. "Is all but love" can trip up a modern reader, because Donne means "nothing except love," not "almost love." The law, in other words, comes down to a single obligation. Then comes "Oh," the most human sound in the poem, and the legal calm breaks into a plea. The word "Will" works twice. It is the testament, and it is also divine intention, what God wants. To ask that it "stand" is to ask for the document to be upheld in court, but also for God's love to hold firm, even though the speaker has just admitted he cannot meet the law's standards.
That double movement, from argument to appeal, is what makes the poem matter. Donne, famous for wit and for love poetry as well as devotion, uses the metaphysical habit of pulling an image from a very different field and pressing it until it yields meaning. Here the cold language of property shows how personal grace is. A will is something you receive because someone chose you, not because you earned it. By ending with love, Donne makes the inheritance an act of affection, and the sonnet's clever legal machinery turns into a prayer.