Lately the lover, shortly to be priest,
although ‘my Soules forme bends toward the East’,
his horse’s head faced firmly to the west.
‘Pleasure or businesse’ called him, he confessed,
despite the new ‘devotion’ he had learned
to One who suffered while his back was turned.
And is ‘mans Soule’, as he proposed, ‘a Spheare’,
subject to sudden lurches of career
as other spheres exert their influence,
distracting reason by the lure of sense?
(His light of reason was the fire of faith,
sparked by ‘a Sunne’ who, setting, banished death.)
I would say yes; and we part company
only in this: reason and sense for me
act on the soul merely within the skull.
I know no other, outer Agent’s pull.
Donne knew an Other; in his memory
he sees Christ in His bloody agony,
‘Made durt of dust’, that sinners might be clean.
His mind relives the drama of the scene —
darkness at noon, the cracking of the rocks.
He argues for his faith by paradox.
The hands that ‘tune all spheares’, so wide their ‘span’,
though ‘peirc’d with… holes’, still play upon this man;
in him, the Master of the universe
is dextrous in resolving Adam’s curse.
On this ‘good’ Friday, best and worst of days,
with reins and whip in hand the rider prays
the All-in-All who made Himself as nought,
consenting to be mocked and flayed for sport,
to scourge his back to make his sickness whole.
Christ’s gravity is hauling in his soul.
He cantered and I drive through Warwickshire
this evening in the hesitating year,
both heading into Wales’s baffled spring.
What comfort can a real sunset bring
now God is dead and shut up in the tomb
and it is hard to say, ‘Thy kingdom come,’
even for one who, to his soul, believed?
And yet — his final paradox achieved —
if ‘Soules’ be ‘Spheares’ and rolling westward, we
will come at last to that from which we flee.
