The active verbs in the first quatrain suggest that God is
a being with awesome, overwhelming power. The “three-personed God” is the Trinity:
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Knock and break can be associated with God the Father,
breathe and blow with the Holy Spirit (spiritus = spirit, breath, wind, blowing), and
shine and burn with God the Son (the pun lurking here is the traditional play on son and
sun). The effect of the altered word order is to throw emphasis on the me as the object
of the verb defend and, similarly, to put fain into a position of stress so that the
speaker may show that his will is to love God, but that his character is such that he is
weak and cannot follow his own will without the control of God.
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