Guido Reni, “Repentance of St. Peter”
Spiritual Sunday
For a long time I have known Dorothy Sayers as the Oxford scholar who translated Dante and wrote the Peter Wimsey novels. Only recently did I discover that she also wrote Christian poetry. Here is a poem that she wrote in her twenties that is very much in the George Herbert tradition. By this I mean she describes herself fighting against Christ’s love before finally succumbing. For most of the poem we see her rejection: I didn’t ask you to die for me, she angrily tells Jesus.
It is as though she is so hunkered down in her suffering that she doesn’t trust the hope that is offered. “I am I,” she cries out, so
What wouldst Thou make of me? O cruel pretense,
Drive me not mad with the mockery
Of that most lovely, unattainable lie!
She is also appalled by the suffering of the crucifixion, by the claims on her that she feels have come from such a sacrifice, and by the call to become something more than she feels she can be (“Men were not made to walk as priests and kings”).
And yet, in the end—like Herbert in, say, “Love (III)”–she is won over by God’s loving persistence, which relentlessly urges on “thy maimed and halt that have not strength to go.”
And so, as in so many Herbert poems, the last line signals her surrender to God’s love: “Peace, peace, I follow. Why must we love Thee so?”
The Greek title is taken from the Book of John in the days before the crucifixion: “‘And I, when I am lifted up[from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ He said this to show the kind of death he was going to die.”
Pantas Elkyso
(“I will draw all men.” – John 12:32)
By Dorothy Sayers
GO, bitter Christ, grim Christ! haul if Thou wilt
Thy bloody cross to Thine own bleak Calvary!
When did I bind Thee suffer for my guilt
To bind intolerable claims on me?
I loathe Thy sacrifice; I am sick of Thee.
They say Thou reignest from the Cross. Thou dost,
And like a tyrant. Thou dost rule by tears,
Thou womanish Son of woman. Cease to thrust
Thy sordid tale of sorrows in my ears,
Jarring the music of my few, short years.
Silence! I say it is a sordid tale,
And Thou with glamour hast bewitched us all;
We straggle forth to gape upon a Graal,
Sink into a stinking mire, are lost and fall . . .
The cup is wormwood and the drink is gall.
I am battered and broken and weary and out of heart,
I will not listen to talk of heroic things,
But be content to play some simple part,
Freed from preposterous, wild imaginings . . .
Men were not made to walk as priests and kings.
Thou liest, Christ, Thou liest; take it hence,
That mirror of strange glories; I am I;
What wouldst Thou make of me? O cruel pretence,
Drive me not mad with the mockery
Of that most lovely, unattainable lie!
I hear Thy trumpets in the breaking morn,
I hear them restless in the resonant night,
Or sounding down the long winds over the corn
Before Thee riding in the world’s despite,
Insolent with adventure, laughter-light.
They blow aloud between love’s lips and mine,
Sing to my feasting in the minstrel’s stead,
Ring from the cup where I would pour the wine,
Rouse the uneasy echoes about my bed . . .
They will blow through my grave when I am dead.
O King, O Captain, wasted, wan with scourging,
Strong beyond speech and wonderful with woe,
Whither, relentless, wilt Thou still be urging
Thy maimed and halt that have not strength to go? . . .
Peace, peace, I follow. Why must we love Thee so?