[In the essay which follows, Schten argues that “Christs Bloody Sweat” is not about Christ's agony in Gethsemane but is a meditation on Calvary, Christ's sacrifice, and the Eucharist.]

In her recent edition of Robert Southwell's Poems, Nancy Pollard Brown identifies “Christs bloody sweat” as part of a “Gethsemane sequence”¹. However, despite its title, “Christs Bloody sweat” is not a meditation on Christ's agony in Gethsemane and is incorrectly linked with “Sinnes heavie loade” and “Christs sleeping friends”. Each of these other poems borrows its theme from the story in Luke when Christ went apart from his disciples to pray: “And being in an agony … his sweat was as it were great drops of blood, falling down to the ground” (Luke 22:44). Each refers directly to the “sweat” that dropped like blood: “And bloody sweat runs trickling from thy brow” (“Sinnes heavie loade”, lines 3-4); “When Christ with care and pangs of death opprest / From frighted flesh a bloody sweat did raine” (“Christs sleeping friends”, lines 1-2).

How the poem, “Christs bloody sweat”, received its title is difficult to explain. The title is misleading, for it obscures initially the nature of the poem. There is nothing within “Christs bloody sweat” to connect it with the moment of agony at Gethsemane. Its entire focus is on Calvary, the sacrifice of Christ, and the embodiment of this sacrifice in the Eucharist.

The first two stanzas of the poem convey traditional Christian beliefs in Redemption and Atonement, and the inherence of these in the Eucharist. The last stanzas, however, slant the Christian thought in a Catholic direction, and the Eucharist becomes identified with the Holy Mass of the Roman Catholic Church.

The poem's symbolism is primarily Eucharistic. In stanza one the Eucharist is represented, as it was in late Gothic art, by “Christ crucified amid the Sacraments”². Lines 5-6 depict the Crucifixion: “Thus Christ unforst prevents in shedding blood / The whips, the thornes, the nailes, the speare, and roode”. The stanza's quatrain enumerates, doxologically, the blessings which flow from Christ's sacrifice. They parallel roughly the Sacramental Blessings. “Fat soile”, symbolic of the Church, receives the initial blessing:

Fat soile, full spring, sweete olive, grape of blisse,
That yeelds, that streams, that pours, that dost distil,
Untild, undrawne, unstampt, untoucht of presse,
Deare fruit, cleare brookes, faire oile, sweete wine at will …

The “Deare fruit” suggests the twelve fruits of the Spirit which come to man from Christ, through the Church. “Full spring” and “cleare brookes” represent the water used in both the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, when the water is commingled with the wine, water denotes Christ's humanity, the wine His divinity. The “faire oile” from the “sweete olive” refers to the oil used in the Sacraments of baptism, confirmation, ordination, and unction. It signifies the Grace of God. The “grape of blisse” and the “sweete wine at will” hardly need clarification. Both are standard Eucharistic symbols of the Blood of Christ³.

The Eucharistic theme is underlined in stanza two by the symbol of the pelican. The sacrifice of the pelican who, according to The Bestiary, pierces its breast in order to feed its young with its own blood, is an icon representing Christ's sacrifice and thus symbolizes the Eucharistic Sacrament⁴.

The paradox explored in stanza two—the joining in Christ of the disparate realities of life (the phoenix represents the resurrected Christ)⁵ and death (the pelican)—is a conventional argument: “How could he joine a Phenix fiery paines / In fainting Pelicans still bleeding vaines?” (lines 11-12). If the poem had been intended to end here, the lines would be a harmless vignette on the crucifixion and its immanence in the Eucharist. However, the poem does not end here, and the last stanzas recast the poem's Eucharistic symbolism, add political innuendoes, and consequently alter the poem's “harmless” aspect.

Its first editor, John Busby, was sufficiently suspicious of the poem to exclude these last stanzas from his Moeoniae (1595)⁶. The exclusion coincided with Busby's general design for Moeoniae: “to cull from manuscript sources a group of Southwell's lyrics that would appeal to readers of religious verse without expressing obviously Roman Catholic doctrine”⁷. The first twelve lines of “Christs bloody sweat” were all that Busby used. As we have seen, these lines are not overtly Catholic.

In stanza three, however, the poem begins to lose much of its theological neutrality. On the literal level the lines continue the poem's altar atmosphere. Elijah's story, like the legends of the pelican and the phoenix, reenforces the sacrifice of Christ. The stanza's couplet provides an appropriate moral for the story: it enjoins man to act upon Christ's sacrifice by an emulation of his ways.

But Elijah's story offers more than this analogy between his sacrifice and that of Christ. The tale provides a parallel between Elijah's position in Ahab's country and the position of the Jesuit priests (such as the poet himself) in Elizabethan England. If Ahab's people were worshipping Baal, English people, in acknowledging their ruler as “Defender of the Faith”, were doing no less, at least in the eyes of those who remained faithful to the “Old Religion”. The poet does not mention Ahab, nor Baal, nor the even more offensive Jezebel, Ahab's wife. But there is no reason to believe that a late sixteenth-century reading audience would have missed the allusions.

The last stanza is more incriminating than the third. It reflects the peculiarly Jesuitical desire for martyrdom⁸ and makes a blatant reference in the last line to the forbidden rite of the Holy Mass: “If stones and dust, yf fleshe and blood will burne, / I withered am and stonye to all good, / A sacke of dust, a masse of fleshe and bloode” (lines 22-24).

The Mass “of fleshe and bloode” is ostensibly part of the speaker's rhetoric of worthlessness. Utilizing the vocabulary of Elijah's burnt sacrifice, the speaker becomes the “withered wood”, the “fuell”, the “stones and dust”, the “masse of fleshe and bloode”. “Masse” extends this theme of baseness, but it more expressly serves to unlock the covert reference to the Holy Rite. The speaker's desire for immolation leads to an immediate analogy between his sacrifice and that of Christ: the speaker identifies himself with Christ, and his body becomes, like Christ's, the elements of the Sacrament, the “fleshe and bloode” of the Mass.

The popish glow of the last two stanzas illumines the poem's first lines; and the Eucharist becomes circumscribed within the framework of the Mass. It is very odd therefore that the poem was entitled “Christs bloody sweat”, but its very survival may have depended on this deliberate obscurantism. Surely without judicious editorial tampering such as John Busby exercised in Moeoniae, the poem could never have been legally circulated in sixteenth-century England.

It remains unaccountable, though, why a modern editor would add to the poem's already confusing history by joining it to a “Gethsemane” group. The fact that the poem's title is reminiscent of Christ's experience at Gethsemane does not vindicate Mrs. Brown's misinterpretation of the poem's obvious internal Eucharistic symbolism.

Her initial error is perpetuated in her analysis of the poem's additional stanzas that appear in one of the extant Southwell manuscripts (Folger Shakespeare Library, Harmsworth MS)⁹. She justifiably considers the stanzas spurious and attributes their existence to an overzealous compiler, anxious to expand a poem of “unusual compression of imagery”. It is true that the stanzas, intended to be inserted after line 6¹⁰, add “neither stylistic grace nor theological clarity” to the poem¹¹. But she extends her original misconception about the nature of the poem: “In these lines a clumsy change is made from the objective contemplation of Christ in Gethsemane to Christ as speaker. The second stanza … in which the poet is again speaker, interprets the events in Gethsemane as a sacrifice …”¹². As grotesque as the additional lines are, their language is still Passion rhetoric. The “hart and veines” which “gush out a bloudie floud” come from the sacrifice at Calvary, the wounds of Christ on the cross, and not from the sweat like “drops of blood”. The “Hoast”, the “altar”, “the bloudie streames” are all Eucharistic symbols.

“Christs bloody sweat” thus must be regarded as a poem which focuses entirely on the crucifixion and the Eucharist, and, despite its misleading title, may hardly be placed in a “Gethsemane sequence”. At the heart of the poem is indeed the “masse of fleshe and blood”—i.e., the Roman Catholic Sacrifice of the Mass.

Notes

1. The Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J., ed. James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (London, 1967), p. xcv.

2. P. Verdier, “Iconography of the Sacraments”, New Catholic Encyclopedia (Washington, D.C., 1967), XII, 804.

3. George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York, 1961), pp. 31-45.

4. Ferguson, p. 23.

5. The Bestiary, trans. T. H. White (New York, 1960), pp. 126-127.

6. London: V. Sims for John Busby. STC 22954.

7. “Textual Introduction”, Poems, p. lxix.

8. See Christopher Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell (New York, 1956), p. 85.

9. “Textual Introduction”, Poems, p. 1.

10. Reprinted in “Commentary”, Poems, p. 126.

11. Poems, p. lxxxv.

12. Poems, p. lxxxiv (Italics mine).