Good Friday
In her poem “Good Friday,” Christina Rossetti laments that she responds to Christ’s death like a stone, not a faithful sheep. Why can’t she be like the women who wept at the foot of the cross, or Peter who wept for his betrayal, or the sun and the moon that hid their faces? Why will no tears come?
Lamenting over hardness of heart is a theme found often in the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert, major Rossetti influences. “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” Donne pleads in “Sonnet 14,” while in “The Altar” Herbert writes,
A HEART alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy pow'r doth cut.
In Rossetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter,” the earth stands “hard as iron” and water is “like a stone.” What can the poet, “poor as I am,” give the Christ chlld? “Give my heart,” she thinks. Yet the giving is the problem.
In “Good Friday,” she asks Jesus, like Moses before him, to strike this rocky heart so that the tears will flow. If we are having difficulty receiving God’s grace, the best thing to do is ask God for help.
Am I a stone, and not a sheep,
That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,
To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,
And yet not weep?
Not so those women loved
Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;
Not so the Sun and Moon
Which hid their faces in a starless sky,
A horror of great darkness at broad noon –
I, only I.
Yet give not o’er,
But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more
And smite a rock.
