"Batter my heart" is a devotional poem, a genre of poetry that expresses love for and commitment to God. While there is no particular physical setting of the poem, the speaker dramatizes the questions, uncertainties, and paradoxes of the Christian conscience through his address to the divine. One could therefore argue that the poem takes place within the speaker's own mind as he grapples with the impossibility of receiving God's grace. The speaker's desire for imprisonment, then, is not an actual prison but instead a symbol of a liberated Christian soul, one destined for God's mercy and eternal life after death.