Donne—Good-Friday 1613

By Scott Horton

Tiziano Vecellio (Titian), The Crowning with Thorns (1572)

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.

–John Donne, Good-Friday 1613: Riding Westward (1613) in The Poems of John Donne, vol. 1, pp. 172-73 (E.K. Chambers ed. 1896).