Today's Poem: And Ran Away Naked

A sonnet by Maryann Corbett

Betrayal of Christ, with a soldier in pursuit of Mark the Evangelist, Antonio Correggio, circa 1522 (Wikimedia Commons)

A poet and translator with a Ph.D in medieval English literature, Maryann Corbett spent thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota State Legislature before returning to a scholarly and literary vocation. She is the author of six full-length books of poems, including The O in the Air in 2023, and has translated works in Latin, Old English, French, and Old Occitan. The recipient of many accolades, including the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, Corbett is a frequent book reviewer for such publications as the Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Today’s poem by Corbett homes in on a small, strange moment in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of St. Mark: that torchlit melee in the Garden of Gethsemane, in the small hours between the Last Supper and the cock-crow that heralds the dawn of Good Friday. Mark’s account highlights the surreality and chaos of the scene. In 14:51–52 the gospel describes a young man (often supposed to be the evangelist-saint himself), “having a linen cloth cast about his naked body,” is seized by the soldiers but slips away, leaving them holding the empty cloth.

Corbett’s Petrarchan sonnet re-imagines the scene as the young man experiences it, relaying the “fragments” of his waking perception, then his panic. The poem’s form suggests the dissolution of order, breaking from the cyclical abbaabba scheme of the usual Petrarchan octet, to move the action forward through a new set of rhymes in the second quatrain. The loose rhymes, too — “arrested/twisted,” “smell/feel,” “head/sweaty” — take up the sense of a whole plan falling apart, even if in the greater scheme of things, the falling apart was the plan all along, disruption the intended order.

Readers familiar with the gospel narrative will remember a later echo of this moment, when the sequence of events begun here ends with Joseph of Arimethea’s bringing a “linen cloth” in which to wrap the crucified, dead Christ, who unlike his disciple has not “run away naked.” Seen in hindsight, the young man’s escape from a garment like a winding cloth points to the resurrection, and to the hope of escape from eternal death that this resurrection offers to humankind. The young man’s naked flight might be understood as a figure for rebirth. But the poem concerns itself only with a single moment, suspended in time, and with the small, the seemingly irrelevant detail. Its drama is a human drama, not a theological one: a dazed young man, startled out of sleep and into nightmare, who — caught like a lizard by the tail — does the reflexive, self-preservative, prudent thing.

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“. . . and ran away naked . . .”

by Maryann Corbett

Foggy with sleep, with the long feast, with wine,
he heard in fragments. State police. Arrested.
Master. Bolt upright, panicking, he twisted
the sheet around himself and groped half blind
downstairs, outside, to the teacher’s place of prayer.
That there was blood already he could smell,
and hear the barking of commands, and feel
the noose of tension, and then see — there, there —
backlit with lamps and torches, the bowed head
of the man in whom all freedom’s hopes had lain.
And his soul drained away because he knew,
then, it was over. Sudden fierce and sweaty
hands yanking his bedsheet snapped him sane.
He dropped it, running. As prudence bids one do.

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