LET man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
Th’ intelligence that moves, devotion is;
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey ;
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirl’d by it.
Hence is’t, that I am carried towards the west,
This day, when my soul’s form bends to the East.
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
But that Christ on His cross did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for me.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die ;
What a death were it then to see God die ?
It made His own lieutenant, Nature, shrink,
It made His footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands, which span the poles
And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes ?
Could I behold that endless height, which is
Zenith to us and our antipodes,
Humbled below us ? or that blood, which is
The seat of all our soul’s, if not of His,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God for His apparel, ragg’d and torn ?
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
On His distressed Mother cast mine eye,
Who was God’s partner here, and furnish’d thus
Half of that sacrifice which ransom’d us ?
Though these things as I ride be from mine eye,
They’re present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them ; and Thou look’st towards me,
O Saviour, as Thou hang’st upon the tree.
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections till Thy mercies bid Thee leave.
O think me worth Thine anger, punish me,
Burn off my rust, and my deformity ;
Restore Thine image, so much, by Thy grace,
That Thou mayst know me, and I’ll turn my face.
This poem by John Donne is one of the finest pieces I studied last semester, but I wanted to write about it not to praise its beauty but rather because the reading we did of it in class was far from satisfactory. The reason was not lack of literary or historical knowledge, but the ignorance of the most basic Christian images. This is a problem that keeps bothering me. If we are not able to read and understand those images, centuries and centuries of our history suddenly become unintelligible, and because we don’t understand them, we tend to underestimate their value.
I remember some years ago the puzzled look of a couple who was in front of the Tree of Jesse’s altarpiece in the Cathedral of Burgos: they seemed completely at loss by the huge tree coming out of the bowels of the poor man laying there. Surely if you don’t know who Jesse was, you can only think that medieval artists were some kind of weirdos. In the same cathedral another couple asked me if the chapel we were in was the one of Saint Joseph. They were carefully looking at the plan of the cathedral on their travel-guides. Believe me, it was much easier to look at the biggest statue of the chapel and connect the bearded man with the lily with Saint Joseph than to find your way through the map… Their problem was not the complicated architecture of gothic cathedral it was they did not know what lilies represent. I’m sot expecting people to recognize Saint Agnes with the lamb, Catherine of Alexandria’s wheel or the the woman with a couple of eyes balls in a tray as Saint Lucy, but Saint Joseph should certainly be recognizable…
Yet, going back to Donne. In “Riding Westward” we have two sources for imagery: the Ptolomeic world and the Christian one. Both are absolutely necessary to grasp the meaning of the text. It is impossible to get the parallel soul-sphere if the reader is not acquainted with concepts like the foreign motions, the intelligence that moves, the primum mobile and the empireum -all part of the medieval model- which act like the backbone of the poem. An excellent explanation of all these concepts and the way they are used in literature can be found in “The Discarded Image” of C.S. Lewis).
All these issues were thoroughly explored in our class, but the pun Sun-Son and the play with set (the Son) and rise (the Cross) of the following verses was ignored
There I should see a Sun by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget.
The idea of Christ as dawn of a new day, as light that lightness up the people living in the darkness of sin is one of the most frequent Christian images used in the liturgy:
“O Oriens, splendor Lucis aeternae et Sol Justitiae: veni et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis”
“O Radiant Dawn, splendor of eternal light, sun of justice: Come, shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death”
(Entrance antiphon 24th of December)
Only with the opposition: light-east-Christ vs darkness-sin-speaker, we can take part of the drama of the poem: the battle between his desire to turn east and the foreign motions that drive him westward turning his back to Christ who looks at him hanging from the Cross. Only poetical genius is able to produce this power of association.
