The Sun has offered as Poem of the Day two previous works by John Donne (1572–1631): “I Am a Little World Made Cunningly” and “Air and Angels” — both knotty, complex poems, and both examples of why he and some members of his post-Shakespeare generation were called the Metaphysical Poets. If anything, today’s poem, “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward,” is even more knotty and more complex. Even more metaphysical — as difficult a poem as the Sun has published. Yet within its swirls of conceits and figures for the speaker’s own failures, the poem presents a self-analysis, expressing something that believers are supposed to think today, on Good Friday.

Good Friday came on April 2 in 1613, and Donne was not forgoing travel in sympathy with Christ’s death, as he ought to have been. He was instead riding from London westward toward Wales. In rhymed pentameter couplets, Donne offers his excuses. He begins by blaming nature, suggesting that he is just like the planets: a natural sphere that is tugged along its elliptical path in “foreign motion.” He ought to be looking east, toward Golgotha, the place of Christ’s crucifixion in Jerusalem, but he is drawn to the west (past the gallows of Tyburn and toward the setting sun, a direction of death instead of the life that will rise in resurrection in the east).

His second excuse is the biblical idea that to see God directly is to be destroyed. “Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; / What a death were it then to see God dye?” His third excuse is that he cannot bear to observe the suffering of Mary, who must watch her son die, while his fourth is that he really is seeing them, in a way, by thinking of them in memory. And his fifth is that he will submit to God’s punishment, which, in its way, will be a seeing of God.

The judgment of himself that Donne offers is brutal: He is without self-control, he is a coward, and he is a maker of weak excuses. He is a sinner who does not deserve the forgiveness for his fallenness that Christ’s death will repay. All of which is true, of course — but, then, who does deserve forgiveness? Such thoughts are, Donne thinks, the kind that everyone should have on Good Friday.

Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward
by John Donne

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this, 
The intelligence that moves, devotion is, 
And as the other Spheares, by being growne 
Subject to forraigne motion, lose their owne, 
And being by others hurried every day, 
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey: 
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit 
For their first mover, and are whirld by it. 
Hence is’t, that I am carryed towards the West 
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East. 
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set, 
And by that setting endlesse day beget; 
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall, 
Sinne had eternally benighted all. 
Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see 
That spectacle of too much weight for mee. 
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye; 
What a death were it then to see God dye? 
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke, 
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke. 
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles, 
And tune all spheares at once peirc’d with those holes? 
Could I behold that endlesse height which is 
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes, 
Humbled below us? or that blood which is 
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his, 
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne 
By God, for his apparell, rag’d, and torne? 
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I 
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye, 
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish’d thus 
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom’d us? 
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye, 
They’are present yet unto my memory, 
For that looks towards them; and thou look’st towards mee, 
O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree; 
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive 
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. 
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee, 
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity, 
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace, 
That thou may’st know mee, and I’ll turne my face.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past, together with the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.