Christina Rossetti, “Good Friday”

My two favourite poets of the Victorian era are Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) and Christina Rossetti (1830-1894). Both wrote poems that offer tremendous devotional avenues.

Here is Rossetti’s “Good Friday,” which was published in her 1866 collection The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. Pace those who have seen in this poem the challenge to faith that a number of Victorian intellectuals experienced, I think it bears witness to a faith both thick and deep:

Good Friday

Am I a stone, and not a sheep,

That I can stand, O Christ, beneath Thy cross,

To number drop by drop Thy blood’s slow loss,

And yet not weep?

Not so those women loved

Who with exceeding grief lamented Thee;

Not so fallen Peter, weeping bitterly;

Not so the thief was moved;

Not so the Sun and Moon

Which hid their faces in a starless sky,

A horror of great darkness at broad noon –

I, only I.

Yet give not o’er,

But seek Thy sheep, true Shepherd of the flock;

Greater than Moses, turn and look once more

And smite a rock.

Michael A.G. Azad Haykin is chair and professor of church history at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Director of the Andrew Fuller Center for Baptist Studies in Louisville, KY. He is the author of a number of books and articles on Christianity in both late Antiquity and the long eighteenth century. He has recently completed a monograph on revival entitled “Times of refreshing”: The Holy Spirit & revival in the eighteenth century.