Jesus Christ

Jesus Christ is the figure through whom the poems’ movement from burial to resurrection takes on its decisive shape. He appears first in the image of a god being interred, while the laws governing the earth are shaken; later, he travels from Bethany toward Jerusalem under the sadness of premonitions, and finally accepts voluntary torment and the grave with the expectation of rising on the third day. His story makes suffering neither an accidental interruption nor a final defeat: it becomes the passage by which mortal history can be imagined as open to renewal.

Burial and the Shaken World

The poem’s image of Jesus begins with burial rather than birth or public triumph. A god is being interred, and the event unsettles the ordinary order of the world: the laws that govern the earth are shaken. The gardens themselves seem to exceed their boundaries, as though the disturbance of death were not contained by the place of burial. Around the altar screen are a glow, a black pall, and tapers in a row. These details give the scene the form of a funeral rite, but its scale is cosmic: what is being mourned is divine, and the earth’s familiar laws no longer seem secure.

The tension between ritual order and upheaval shapes the poem’s treatment of death. The pall and tapers mark a formal act of mourning; the shaken laws and boundary-crossing gardens suggest that the event exceeds any settled human arrangement. Jesus is thus introduced not simply as a sacred presence in a funeral scene, but as the center of a crisis in which death appears to challenge the world’s structure. The burial is a threshold: an ending that already carries the possibility of a transformation beyond what the mourners can see.

The Road from Bethany

In “MIRACLE,” Jesus is on his way from Bethany to Jerusalem, languishing under the sadness of premonitions. The movement is direct and consequential: he travels toward the city while bearing an apprehension that gives the journey the gravity of an approach to suffering. The poem does not present this foreboding as a reason to turn back. Instead, the road draws him toward the events he anticipates, setting awareness of danger beside continued movement.

The brief image makes the journey itself a form of dramatic knowledge. Jesus’s sorrow belongs to the time before the decisive events, when what is coming is sensed but not yet undergone. The title “MIRACLE” places that foreknowledge within a larger frame than ordinary misfortune: the journey toward Jerusalem belongs to a story whose meaning will exceed the immediate experience of suffering. The poem preserves the sadness rather than smoothing it away, so that the later promise of resurrection does not erase the cost of the passage toward it.

The Last Week and the Garden

“EVIL DAYS” recalls Jesus entering Jerusalem during the last week. The poem locates his arrival within a bounded, momentous period, giving the city an association with the approaching Passion. Its emphasis is not on a detailed public scene but on the charged relation between entry and what follows: the movement into Jerusalem begins the final interval in which the pattern of suffering will unfold.

In “GARDEN OF GETHSEMANE,” the turn in the road is illuminated by the indifferent glimmer of remote stars. The setting offers no visible sign that the universe will intervene to spare Jesus. Against that impersonal distance, the poem gives him a precise sense of time: he believes that during the brief interval remaining, even before the Resurrection, he will attain his full stature. The anticipation does not make the suffering unreal; it gives suffering a measure and a direction. The stars remain indifferent, while his understanding of the coming ordeal is inwardly purposeful.

This contrast is central to the poem’s portrait. The world beyond the immediate human scene offers neither reassurance nor an answering gesture. Yet Jesus does not interpret that silence as the final meaning of events. The approaching death becomes part of a conscious passage toward a fullness that is already imaginable before resurrection has occurred. The garden and the illuminated turn in the road therefore join external stillness to inward resolve, without confusing hope with rescue from pain.

Voluntary Death and Resurrection

The poem makes Jesus’s acceptance of death explicit: in the name of its awesome majesty, he will descend into his grave in voluntary torments. The language holds two ideas together that might otherwise seem opposed. His suffering is voluntary, but it is still torment; his descent is a graveward movement, but it does not end the poem’s account of him. The force of the act lies in accepting death without treating death as the ultimate boundary of existence.

The declaration that he will descend into the grave and rise again on the third day gives the Passion its temporal structure. Burial is followed by an interval and then by resurrection. That sequence changes the meaning of the earlier images: the black pall is not the poem’s last word, and the shaken laws of the earth anticipate a transformation rather than merely registering catastrophe. The resurrection remains a promised event in the poem’s vision, not an evasion of the grave; it depends on the passage through it.

A Pattern for the Centuries

The closing image extends beyond Jesus’s individual fate. As rafts float down a river, the centuries drift, trailing like a caravan. Set beside the promise of resurrection, this image makes historical time appear as continuous onward movement. Jesus’s descent and rising do not arrest the passage of the centuries; they give that passage a pattern in which death can be confronted without being granted final dominion.

The poems’ Jesus therefore joins a particular sacred story to the continuing life of history. His burial shakes the earth’s laws; his journey toward Jerusalem carries foreknowledge of suffering; and his acceptance of the grave opens onto resurrection. The movement does not promise that grief or torment will vanish. Instead, it places them within a larger sequence of passage and renewal, through which the history of the centuries can continue beyond the apparent finality of death.