Today’s Poem: The Burning Babe

Robert Southwell and the martyr’s Christmas

William Blake, The Nativity, c. 1795 (Wikimedia Commons)

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The Burning Babe

by Robert Southwell

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow, 
Surprised I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow; 
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near, 
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear; 
Who, scorchéd with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed 
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed. 
‘Alas!’ quoth he, ‘but newly born, in fiery heats I fry, 
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I. 
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns, 
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shames and scorns; 
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals, 
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiléd souls, 
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good, 
So will I melt into a bath, to wash them in my blood.’ 
With this he vanished out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away, 
And straight I calléd unto mind that it was Christmas day. 
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The English priest-poet Robert Southwell (1561–1695) did nothing halfway in his short life. Prophetically nicknamed “Father Robert” as a child, at seventeen he walked from Douai, in France, where he had been sent to study, to Rome, in order to beg entry to the Society of Jesus. Ordained a Jesuit priest in 1584, he returned to England two years later, at his own request, as a missionary to recusant Catholics under Elizabeth I.

In the year of his ordination, an act had gone into effect decreeing that any English-born Catholic priest remaining more than forty days in the country should face a traitor’s death: execution by hanging, drawing, and quartering. Southwell stayed six years before his eventual betrayal and capture. Moving from household to household under various disguises, he eluded the Crown’s pursuivants. In 1592, he was run to earth by the Queen’s chief priest hunter, Richard Topcliffe, who was, among other things, the sort of person who didn’t scruple to use rape as a tool for extracting information from women.

Robert Southwell, illustration from the frontispiece of Saint Peter’s Complaint, late 16th-early 17th century (Wikimedia Commons)

It was by this method, in fact, that Topcliffe had induced a woman, Anne Bellamy, to divulge the identity of the strange young man inexplicably resident in her father’s house. On his arrest, Southwell endured periods of interrogation by Topcliffe personally, then by Privy Council torturers, before spending three years in solitary confinement in the Tower of London. He was executed at Tyburn Gallows, at the junction of two old Roman roads, on February 21, 1595.

Unsurprisingly, given the constant danger under which he performed his priestly ministry, Southwell’s devotional imagery doesn’t exactly suggest comfort. One Christmas poem, “New Heaven, New War,” transforms the tender, helpless babe of the stable, surrounded by angels, into a warrior, come to “rifle Satan’s fold.”

And in Today’s Poem, “The Burning Babe,” the same infant appears in a fiery vision like the burning bush, blazing away yet unconsumed. He seems simultaneously to suffer in a furnace and to be the furnace himself. In heptameter couplets whose insistent lines lick at the page like flames, the poem presents a Christ Child whose love and mercy, as well as his justice, are an immolation. This strange, suffering infant (not the sweetly sleeping babe in the manger) heralds the martyr’s Christmas.

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