Resurrection, imperfect
Resurrection, imperfect
By John Donne
Sleep, sleep, old sun, thou canst not have repassed
As yet, the wound thou took'st on Friday last;
Sleep then, and rest; the world may bear thy stay,
A better sun rose before thee today,
Who, not content to enlighten all that dwell
On the earth's face, as thou, enlightened hell,
And made the dark fires languish in that vale,
As, at thy presence here, our fires grow pale.
Whose body, having walked on earth, and now
Hasting to heaven, would, that He might allow
Himself unto all stations, and fill all,
For these three days become a mineral;
He was all gold when He lay down, but rose
All tincture, and doth not alone dispose
Leaden and iron wills to good, but is
Of power to make even sinful flesh like his.
Had one of those, whose credulous piety
Thought, that a soul one might discern and see
Go from a body, at this sepulchre been,
And, issuing from the sheet, this body seen,
He would have justly thought this body a soul,
If not of any man, yet of the whole.
Desunt caetera.
The poem takes place early Easter Sunday morning, before the sun gets up, and the poet tells the sun to stay asleep. He says the sun cannot have recovered yet from Good Friday when he was struck and his light failed (from noon to 3pm) while Christ was dying on the cross. What’s more, the poet tells the sun we will be fine without him because a “better sun” has already risen this morning, long before the dawn. This new sun is Christ, and while the old sun can only give light to the surface of the earth, Christ the new sun gave light even under the earth, when He descended into hell. Earthly flames look weak and pale in the full light of day, but even the fires of hell grew faint in the light of the resurrected Christ.
The poet continues to delve deeper into the mystery of Christ’s time in the grave. In His life, Christ walked on the earth, and He will soon ascend to heaven above the earth. But for the past three days, He has been in the earth and so “become a mineral.” He is buried in the place of men, as all men are dust and must return to the dust of the earth. Further, it is His desire to fill all things (Eph. 4:10), including the earth itself.
But in the following lines, we see the poem is really taking an alchemical turn. Christ is not merely any mineral, but the purest of all: gold. There is also a correspondence between the images of Christ as the Sun and Christ as Gold. In the ancient cosmology, one of the influences of the sun was to produce gold in the earth. The poem implies that the grave (in the earth) is where men’s bodies (base metals) are purified of their dross and transformed into gold (1 Cor. 3:15; 1 Pet. 1:7). However, when Christ died and was buried, He was already pure gold. So having risen, He is the tincture, in the oldest sense of the word as an active agent, an extract that dyes or alters what it is applied to. In this case, Christ is not only pure gold, He is the very essence of gold and has the power to change base metals into gold. By His death and resurrection, Christ has the power to recreate mankind. He converts the sinfully “leaden and iron wills” to be one with His will. This is the new birth we are given in this life. But more than that, Christ is able to make our fallen flesh truly alive and pure like His.
The last few lines mention that there are some who believe they can see the soul leave the body at death. If someone like that had been sitting in the tomb on Easter morning, they would not have seen Christ’s soul leave His body, but His body leave the grave sheets. The observer would see not the soul of one man, but the “soul,” the life, of all men. To extend the image of the Church as Christ’s Body: just as we together are His Body, so Christ Himself is our soul, the life of this Body, of which we are members. More simply: When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory (Col. 3:4). This Biblical reference also points us in the direction of a possible conclusion for the poem.
The poem is “imperfect” in the sense that it is not finished. The comment included at the end, Desunt caetera, means “the rest is lacking.” And yet, there is another sense in which the work of resurrection itself is also imperfect, unfinished. Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep… In the order of God’s saving work, Christ the firstfruits is raised first, then at His coming those who belong to Christ (1 Cor. 15:20–23). The conclusion to this poem on the resurrection of Christ may be found in Christ’s final work on the Last Day when we are raised from death, purified as gold, and finally made like Him in our glorified bodies. Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is. And everyone who thus hopes in Him purifies himself as He is pure (1 John 3:2–3).
Some of my commentary has been drawn from the notes in John Done, The Complete English Poems, edited by A.J. Smith, Penguin Classics.