15 March 2012

Poems for Lent (20): ‘Christ’s Bloody Sweat’ by Robert Southwell

‘ Fat soil, full spring, sweet olive, grape of bliss’ ... grapes ripening on the vine in the Hedgehog in Lichfield last summer (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

As we continue our journey in Lent with Christ towards Gethsemane and Calvary, my chosen Poem for Lent this morning asks us to join Christ in his Agony in the Garden. ‘Christ’s Bloody Sweat’ was written by the English Jesuit poet and writer, Robert Southwell (ca 1561-1595), who was martyred at age of 33 for his activities as a Jesuit priest in Post-Reformation England.

Before his death he had earned a reputation among Roman Catholics as a tireless missionary. He wrote prose and poetry the focused on the need for faith in times of persecution and on the importance of repentance.

His best-known works include the long poem ‘Saint Peter’s Complaint’ (1595), the lyric poem ‘The Burning Babe’ (1595), and the prose meditation Mary Magdalen’s Funeral Tears (1591). His devotional works are unusual for their emphasis on passionate love and the interior state of the believer and are generally regarded as important antecedents to the works of poets such as John Donne, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He was admired by his contemporaries, including Ben Jonson, for his emotionally charged poetry.

Robert Southwell was born in Norfolk ca 1561, was educated at the French Jesuit school in Douai, and was ordained priest in Rome in 1584. Two years later, he returned in secret to England. He spent six years as a missionary, hiding or in disguise to avoid arrest. During this time, he also wrote religious poetry and prose.

He was arrested in 1592 at Uxendon Hall, Harrow, after he was betrayed by a young Catholic woman, Anne Bellamy.

He was questioned 13 times under torture before being sent to the Tower of London. After three years in the Tower, he was hanged for treason at Tyburn on 21 February 1595. He was canonised as a saint in 1970.

None of his English poems was published during his lifetime, but many of them were circulated widely as manuscripts.

His poem ‘Christ’s Bloody Sweat’ is about Christ’s agony in Gethsemane.

Later, his works began to be sold openly by booksellers, and it is said William Shakespeare may have read and imitated Southwell. Ben Jonson declared that he would gladly have forfeited many of his own poems to have written ‘The Burning Babe.’

Like many minor poets of the 16th century, his later reputation has been overshadowed by contemporaries such as Shakespeare and Jonson as well as the great 17th century devotional poets, John Donne and George Herbert.

In 1954, Louis Martz argued that 17th century English religious poetry drew its distinctive qualities from spiritual exercises, included what is now regarded as a seminal work of Southwell scholarship. Martz compared Southwell’s work with that of Herbert and Donne and claimed that he anticipated many of the themes and concerns found in later writers.

Southwell’s verse is uneven and some of his poems are awkward, melodramatic, and unconvincing, but others are written with great simplicity, power and clarity of thought. Yet, his poetry presents religious ideas in a beautiful and a passionate form.

In Stanza 1 of this morning’s poem, ‘Christ’s Bloody Sweat,’ Southwell introduces various fluids that represent the creative effusions of Christ’s love, with an extravagant reiteration of images that emphasises the extravagance of that love:

Fat soil, full spring, sweet olive, grape of bliss,
That yields, that streams, that pours, that dost distil,
Untilled, undrawn, unstamped, untouched of press,
Dear fruit, clear brooks, fair oil, sweet wine at will!
Thus Christ unforced prevents in shedding blood
The whips, the thorns, the nails, the spear, and rood.


Christ is the “fat soil,” the full partaker in our earthly nature. He is the “full spring,” the eternal source of living water. He is the “sweet olive” promising peace on earth and the holy chrism used to anoint the newly baptised and the newly ordained. He is the “grape of bliss,” whose sweet wine intoxicates all who drink it with a divine drunkenness in which the “self” is lost.

In the spontaneity of his love, Christ freely both “streams” and distils love “at will” and “unforced.” The word “prevents” here means go before – as in the traditional Anglican Collect and Post-Communion Prayer, “Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings with thy most gracious favour …” (The Book of Common Prayer (2004), pp 195, 526), which has been rephrased in most Anglican prayer books as: “Go before us, Lord, in all our doings, with your most gracious favour …” (see The Book of Common Prayer (2004), p. 114).

In the closing couplet, Christ’s submission to his Father’s will in the Agony in the Garden is sufficient to redeem humanity.

The word “rood” here means cross, a word we seldom use today, altough it survives in words such as the “roodscreen” in a church or cathedral, or Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, where “Holyrood” means “Holy Cross.”

‘He pelican’s, he phoenix’ fate doth prove’ ... a pelican rather than an eagle shapes the lectern in Saint Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

In Stanza 2, Southwell borrows from the Church Fathers and other sources to express an “incomprehensible certainty,” as he combines fluid with fire imagery:

He pelican’s, he phoenix’ fate doth prove,
Whom flames consume, whom streams enforce to die:
How burneth blood, how bleedeth burning love,
Can one in flame and streame both bathe and fry?
How could he join a phoenix’ fiery pains
In fainting pelican’s still bleeding veins?


Here Southwell reiterates the sufficiency and efficacy of Christ’s love. The choice Christ made in the Garden combines the fate of the pelican and the phoenix fate. In mythology, the pelican gave her blood for the lives of her children while the phoenix, rising from the flames of death, anticipates the Resurrection.

Stanza 3 continues the quest to understand divine love by tracing the poet’s personal attempt to know God, and his attempt to teach the faithful. He seeks an answer to the question he had posed in Stanza 2’s closing couple, by drawinmg on the story of Elijah:

Elias once, to prove God’s sovereign power,
By prayer procured a fire of wond’rous force.
That blood and water and wood did devour,
Yea, stones and dust beyond all Nature’s course:
Such fire is love, that, fed with gory blood,
Doth burn no less than in the driest wood.


In turning Elijah, Southwell moves from classical or mythological types to Old Testament types. Through prayer, Elijah calls down fire from heaven that consumes the captains and men of the king who come to apprehend him. The fire shows the efficacy and sufficiency of God’s love, just as the fluid images in Stanza 1 have done. Elijah is taken into heaven in a fiery chariot, and so is preserved from death.

The emphasis on Elijah’s prayer is implicit in the meditation on the Agony in the Garden. Christ’s intensely human prayer that the cup would pass ends in submission to his Father’s will. By his prayer, Christ “prevents” and yet merits all the grace of his Passion and his death on the Cross. Similarly, by the power of his prayer, Elijah overcomes death and enters heaven in a whirlwind of fire. Thus, prayer becomes our answer to the question of the phoenix and the pelican. Through prayer, we become part of the consequences of Christ’s Crucifixion and the Resurrection.

And so, Southwell moves from the fluids of Stanza 1 into the fire of Stanza 3 by moving from Christ at prayer in of Gethsemane, through the questioning of the fate of the pelican and the phoenix in Stanza 2, to the prayer of Elijah in Stanza 3.

Stanza 4 is a prayer, and here Southwell puts into practice the principle he has established:

O sacred fire! come show thy force on me,
That sacrifice to Christ I may return.
If withered wood for fuel fittest be,
If stones and dust, if flesh and blood will bum,
I withered am, and stony to all good:
A sack of dust, a mass of flesh and blood.


Like Elijah, Southwell calls down the sacred fire of divine love, whose force will equip him to offer a sacrifice like Christ’s. In the final line, he reconciles all the poem’s images by equating himself with “a sack of dust, a mass of flesh and blood.” We know that Christ too fits this description, for Southwell tells us that “He pelican’s, he phoenix’ fate doth prove.” And so, finally, Southwell seeks his identity with Christ through the prayer he offers in this meditation.

‘In fainting pelican’s still bleeding veins’ … The Pelican, a symbol of Christ’s self-giving sacrifice and the symbol of Corpus Christi College, on a hassock in Saint Bene’t’s Church, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Christ’s bloody sweat by Robert Southwell.

Fat soil, full spring, sweet olive, grape of bliss,
That yields, that streams, that pours, that dost distil,
Untilled, undrawn, unstamped, untouched of press,
Dear fruit, clear brooks, fair oil, sweet wine at will!
Thus Christ unforced prevents in shedding blood
The whips, the thorns, the nails, the spear, and rood.

He pelican’s, he phoenix’ fate doth prove,
Whom flames consume, whom streams enforce to die:
How burneth blood, how bleedeth burning love,
Can one in flame and streame both bathe and fry?
How could he join a phoenix’ fiery pains
In fainting pelican’s still bleeding veins?

Elias once, to prove God’s sovereign power,
By prayer procured a fire of wond’rous force.
That blood and water and wood did devour,
Yea, stones and dust beyond all Nature’s course:
Such fire is love, that, fed with gory blood,
Doth burn no less than in the driest wood.

O sacred fire! come show thy force on me,
That sacrifice to Christ I may return.
If withered wood for fuel fittest be,
If stones and dust, if flesh and blood will bum,
I withered am, and stony to all good:
A sack of dust, a mass of flesh and blood.

Supplementary reading:

Karen Batley, ‘Southwell’s ‘Christ’s Bloody Sweat’: A Jesuit Meditation on Gethsemane,’ UES 30.2 (1992), pp 1-7.
AD Cousins, The Catholic Religious Poets from Southwell to Crashaw: A Critical History (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1991).
John F Deane, The Works of Love: incarnation, ecology and poetry (Dublin: Columba, 2010).
Mary Lowe-Evans, ‘Southwell’s Christy’s Bloody Sweat,’ Explicator, Summer 1996, Vol 54, Issue 4.
JH McDonald (ed), The Poems of Robert Southwell SJ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967).
Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism and Liturgy, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

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