Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene is the speaker of a dramatic monologue in the book’s concluding poems, a figure poised between the care of Jesus’ body and the vision of his Crucifixion. Her voice brings together remembered sin, intimate acts of devotion, and an almost unbearable foreknowledge of what is to come. Through her, the poem makes the approach of death at once bodily and cosmic: she prepares the dead man for burial while seeing the Cross strain toward the sky.

Identity and Introduction

Mary Magdalene enters here not through a narrated biography but through the name of the poem’s speaker. The first-person voice is unmistakable: she speaks of her past, her memories, and the work of preparing Jesus for interment. The form gives her an interior presence, rather than placing her at a distance as a figure observed by someone else.

The scene belongs to the Passion story, but the poem’s emphasis is on the interval of tending and anticipation. Magdalene is beside Jesus’ body, while the world around her continues with its ordinary preparations for a holiday. Her solitude within that public bustle establishes the central tension of her appearance: a private act of care unfolds against the habits and expectations of communal life.

Remorse and the Returning Past

Magdalene describes night as the time when a demon rises from the ground, and calls this the price she pays for her past. Memories return as a visitation rather than as a settled account: they seize her senses and accompany her into the present. The poem identifies her remorse without spelling out a catalogue of past acts, leaving the weight of that history audible in her words but not reducing her to an explanation of it.

That past does not prevent her from approaching Jesus. Instead, it sharpens the extremity of her attention: she strains toward his body, overcome by the work before her. Remorse and devotion therefore occupy the same consciousness. The poem does not resolve them into a simple redemption narrative; it lets the remembered burden remain present even as Magdalene performs an act of intimate service.

The Work of Anointing and Burial

As people tidy up in preparation for the holiday, Magdalene stands apart from the bustle and anoints Jesus. She has woven her hair with a string of beads from around her neck, and the image of the hair folded around them gives the scene a specific, personal materiality. Her attention is directed not toward the surrounding preparations but toward Jesus and the body she is preparing for burial.

The anointing is also described as a moment of heightened perception. Magdalene says she sees the future in such detail that it seems to have been made to stand still, and she can foretell events. The poem thus holds physical care and prophetic insight together: the hands occupied in preparing the body belong to a speaker who sees beyond the immediate scene, although the vision does not relieve her of the emotional force of what she foresees.

Vision of the Cross and Narrative Significance

The poem’s vision gathers around the Cross. Magdalene sees it straining upward toward the sky like a waterspout in a storm, a comparison that makes the instrument of execution seem to rise with elemental force. Her prophecy does not remain abstract: she imagines herself prostrate on the earth at the foot of the crucifix, trying to still her heart and biting her lips. The future is seen in detail, but it is also endured in the body.

Her final vision widens beyond her own grief. Jesus has spread his arms to embrace far too many, an image that places the Crucifixion within a scale of human need exceeding the capacity of any one witness to contain. Magdalene’s monologue moves from a returning personal past, through the focused task of anointing, to an anticipated death whose significance reaches outward. She is both a penitent and a seer, but above all the poem makes her the human presence at the threshold where burial, suffering, and an embrace of many meet.