Donne opens by handing himself over like a man signing a deed. "As due by many titles I resign / My self to Thee": "titles" means legal claims of ownership, and "due" and "resign" keep us in the world of contracts and courtrooms. The rest of the octave is an inventory of those claims. God made the speaker, then bought him back with blood when he "decayed". He is God's son, servant, sheep, image and temple. That is five roles squeezed into a few lines, each a different kind of belonging: family, work, farming, art, worship. The pile-up is the argument. However you look at it, the speaker is God's.
Then the poem turns on a question that is half prayer, half complaint: "Why doth the devil then usurp on me?" If the title deeds are so clear, why is someone else living on the property? "Usurp" is the language of illegal seizure, and Donne sharpens it mid-line. "Steal" isn't strong enough, so he corrects himself: "nay ravish". We can hear the speaker getting angrier as he talks.
The form follows this shape. The octave rhymes abba abba in iambic pentameter, and its rhyme words almost tell the story on their own: "made," "decayed," "repaid," "betrayed" give us creation, fall, redemption and betrayal in sequence. The sestet breaks the pattern and becomes tighter and more crowded. Its last four lines close on the same sound, with "see," "me," "choose me," "lose me" ringing like a repeated cry. There is also a shift in pronouns. The octave is thick with "Thee," "Thy" and "Thine," as if God owns every line. In the sestet "me" takes over the line endings, and the focus moves from what God possesses to what the speaker fears.
Small details carry a lot. The poem's first sentence ends a line on "resign" and begins the next with "My self", the thing given away. When the speaker admits his own fault, he uses the same two words in the same position: "till I betrayed / My self". His guilt is tucked into the middle of the list, quick and unemphasised, almost as if he hopes God won't linger on it. Then comes the startling demand, "Except thou rise and for thine own work fight." The speaker tells God to get up and defend his property, like a champion called into the ring. "Rise" may also echo the resurrection, though that is an inference. His despair is conditional, a threat as much as a confession.
The last two lines are balanced almost like scales:
"That thou lov'st mankind well, yet wilt not choose me,
And Satan hates me, yet is loth to lose me."
Each line has its "yet," and each ends with a verb and "me". The rhyme of "choose" and "lose" pulls them together, though the situations are opposites. God's love seems wide but may skip this one person, and the word "choose" hints at anxiety over who is picked for salvation. Satan's hatred is real, but he still doesn't want to let go. The speaker is trapped between a God whose care he can't be sure of and an enemy who holds on to him out of possessiveness. It's an unsettling place to stop, and the poem offers no reassurance.
That refusal to comfort is what makes the sonnet worth reading. It treats faith as an argument rather than a calm acceptance, and it dares to put God on the spot with a case built from his own claims. Donne's style is famous for startling, intellectual turns of thought, and here the legal logic makes the fear feel sharper. The neat sonnet form, with its confident list and its tidy rhymes, sits over a speaker who is not confident at all. That gap between the polished argument and the panic underneath is the poem's real drama.