Today’s Poem: Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward

John Donne undone in Holy Week

Detail from Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, c. 1514 (Wikimedia Commons)

John Donne is hard: knotty and complex. And among his knottiest and most complex poems is his 1613 poem set on Good Friday. It’s also among his best: brutally honest about the excuses we offer ourselves, deeply thought, and captured by the immensity of what he is riding west away from: “Who sees God’s face, that is self-life, must die; / What a death were it then to see God die?”

The 17th-century Metaphysical Poets were not metaphysical in the philosophical meaning of the word, exploring the full nature of reality. When Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) gave them the name, he meant only that they were more abstract than emotional: “Not successful in representing or moving the affections,” he wrote, they created complex conceits of “heterogenous ideas . . . yoked by violence together.” Only the 20th century, dominated by T.S. Eliot’s critical judgments, helped restore their reputation — and remove the insult from the word metaphysical.

In that sense, “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward” is determinedly metaphysical. Yet within its swirls of conceits and figures for the speaker’s own failures, the poem presents the self-analysis, the self-awareness, that all believers are supposed to have today, on Good Friday.

Bust of Donne at St. Paul’s (Wikimedia Commons)

That Friday was April 2 in 1613, and John Donne (1572–1631) found himself riding from London westward toward Wales to take up an appointment — traveling as he knows he ought not to have been on such a solemn day. And so he sets down, in rhymed pentameter couplets, his excuses.

Donne begins by blaming nature, suggesting that he is just like the planets: a natural sphere that is tugged along its elliptical path in “foreign motion.” He ought to be looking east, toward Golgotha, the place of Christ’s crucifixion in Jerusalem, but like the motions of the spheres, he is drawn instead to the west (past the gallows of Tyburn and toward the setting sun, a direction of death instead of the life that rises in resurrection in the east).

His second excuse is the biblical idea that to see God directly is to be destroyed. And so, by turning away from the Crucifixion, he is actually being pious — by acknowledging the cosmic power of Christ’s death. His third excuse is that he cannot bear to observe the suffering of Mary, who must watch her son die, while his fourth is that he really is seeing Mary and Jesus, in a way, by thinking of them in memory. And his fifth excuse is that he will submit to God’s punishment for his Good Friday failure — and receiving that punishment will, in its way, be a seeing of God.

The judgment of himself that Donne offers is brutal: He is without self-control, he is a coward, and he is a maker of weak excuses. He is a sinner who does not deserve the forgiveness for his fallenness that Christ’s death will repay. All of which is true, of course — but, then, who does deserve forgiveness?

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Today’s Poem: Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward

by John Donne

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, 
The intelligence that moves, devotion is, 
And as the other Spheares, by being growne 
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne, 
And being by others hurried every day, 
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey: 
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit 
For their first mover, and are whirld by it. 
Hence is’t, that I am carryed towards the West 
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East. 
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, 
And by that setting endlesse day beget; 
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall, 
Sinne had eternally benighted all. 
Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see 
That spectacle of too much weight for mee. 
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; 
What a death were it then to see God dye? 
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke, 
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. 
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, 
And tune all spheares at once peirc’d with those holes? 
Could I behold that endlesse height which is 
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, 
Humbled below us? or that blood which is 
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his, 
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne 
By God, for his apparell, rag’d, and torne? 
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I 
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye, 
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish’d thus 
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom’d us? 
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye, 
They’are present yet unto my memory, 
For that looks towards them; and thou look’st towards mee, 
O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree; 
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive 
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. 
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, 
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, 
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, 
That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face.

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