Good Friday Flashcards
sheep
Am I a stone and not a sheep,
A stone is traditionally a metaphor: someone who is unfeeling. English is peppered with idioms like ‘stony-hearted’ and ‘blood out of a stone’. The speaker is examining her she is unmoved by Christ’s crucifixion. The stone imagery throughout the poem.
Note that ‘sheep’ is a traditional metaphor for Christ’s followers.
drop
To number drop by drop
Thy blood’s slow loss And yet not weep?
She reinforces her speculation with the gruesome imagery and onomatopoeia of counting Christ’s blood ‘drop by drop’. Her Victorian delicacy doesn’t preclude her from facing in her mind the torture Jesus suffered.
peter
Not so fallen Peter weeping bitterly;
Not so the thief was moved;
Rossetti repeats ‘Not so’ to give emphasis, a refrain, sometimes described as anaphora. This a compelling rhythm.
The reference to Peter is from the Gospel of Luke 22:26. The thief is also referred to in Luke 23:42. Rossetti invokes those who were witness to and moved by Jesus’s crucifixion as a contrast to her inability to be affected
smite
Greater than Moses, turn and look once more,
And smite a rock.
The last stanza is an invocation to Christ to ‘seek’ her. She invokes the Old Testament story of Moses who, in Exodus 17:6, at the instruction of God, struck a rock from which water poured, so the Israelites would not die of thirst in the desert.
The imagery of the stone in the first stanza is picked up again in the last in the form of a rock that yields the source of life. The barren, stone-hearted women is now spiritually awakened. There is power in the verb ‘smite’, an archaic form of ‘hit’ or ‘strike’, that matches the impact of her religious rebirth.
Note also that the sheep of the first stanza also reappears in the last. There is therefore a unity and circularity in this poem. One can imagine that the poet may face and resolve her doubts again and again.
A perceptive comment by one contributor is that Jesus is frequently referred to as ‘a rock’ in the New Testament. There is a sense that she paints the rock as the witness, as well as being the source of life-giving water when struck by Moses. Because Christ suffered for everyone it’s Rossetti’s way of saying she suffers for him; a sort of solidarity of stoic suffering. (Thank you to EwokABdevito for this).
