Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

allegiance or religious state is uncertain. When the speaker claims that he is engaged to the Devil, he is at
the very least saying that he is closely connected to and under his power. This makes it impossible to
determine the speaker’s character.
The ambiguity of the speaker’s character or religious loyalty demonstrates a conflict between belief
and disbelief. Therefore, the binary opposition clouding the character of the speaker is faith/doubt. Since he
is addressing God, it seems that he must believe in His existence and feel a need for prayer. On the surface,
the speaker seems to be asking God to redeem him and change his life and heart so that they please Him.
But the despairing tone and ambiguous diction suggest disbelief or the impossibility of an answer to his
prayer, inverting the opposition to doubt/faith. This is most strongly shown by his contradictory,
impossible requests, that God enslave him to free him and “ravish” him to make him pure (lines 12-14).
Also, the majority of the poem is dedicated to describing the speaker in sinful, doubting terms. He calls
himself “a usurped town, to another due” that wants to let God rule his life but struggles “to no end” (lines
5-6) and the Devil’s lover (line 10). He states that his reason, or the part of him that is God’s representative
“proves weak or untrue” (lines 7-8), which is equivalent to saying his faith is faltering. Only once does he
describe himself as a believing Christian when he says to God, “Yet dearly I love You, and would be loved
fain” (line 9). But he negates that claim by saying directly afterward, “But I am betrothed unto Your enemy”
(line 10). Because the speaker spends much more time portraying himself as a sinner controlled by doubt,
he privileges doubt over faith.
The reversal of this and other binary oppositions in the poem shows what Derrida termed “the
impossibility of ever choosing a correct interpretation because meaning is an ongoing activity that is always
in progress, always based upon différance” (Bressler 127). This means that because “meaning is derived from
differences” (Bressler 126) between concepts, and every person possesses his or her own unique worldview,
there is an infinite number of possible interpretations for any given text. There is no single source of
absolute truth because the significance of everything is based on the differences between concepts. For
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