What are the salient features of devotional poetry of the seventeenth century?

Among the
most noticeable features of devotional poetry of the seventeenth century are meditations on sin,
redemption, and salvation. In John Donne's Divine Meditations 4, the
speaker wonders if he can ever be worthy of God's
grace:

Yet grace, if thou
repent, thou canst not lack;
But who shall give thee that grace to begin?
Oh
make thyself with holy mourning black,
And red with blushing, as thou art with
sin.

In Donne's Divine Meditations
14, the speaker beseeches God to help him rid himself of sin:

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for, you
As yet but knock, breathe,
shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, oerthrow me, and
bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

Donne became a deacon, and then an Anglican priest in 1615, and though he took Holy
Orders, it was only at the insistence of King James I.

George Herbert
expresses similar sentiments about sin, redemption, and salvation in some of his poetry. In
Easter Wings, for example, the speaker explicitly seeks a connection with
God to end his sinful existence and achieve the victory of salvation:

My tender age in sorrow did beginne

And
still with sicknesses and shame.

Thou didst so punish sinne,

That I became

Most thinne.

With
thee

Let me combine,

And feel thy
victorie:

For, if I imp my wing on thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Unlike Donne, Herbert had long intended to enter the priesthood.
He eagerly took Holy Orders in his thirties and spent the remainder of his life as a
rector.

Henry Vaughn is another poet of this
period who acknowledges the sinful state of humanity and expresses, through his speaker, an
admission of his own sinfulness and a desire to cleanse himself through his devotion to Christ.
This can be seen clearly in these lines from Christ's Nativity:

I would I had in my best part

Fit rooms for thee! or that my heart

Were so clean
as

Thy manger was!

But I am all filth, and
obscene;

Yet, if thou wilt, thou canst make clean.

Vaughn credited Herbert with inspiring both his
religious conversion and his devotional poetry, and there are similarities in the two poets'
works.