Once again, as in “Friday”, and as in Catholic devotional tradition, these failures are the “daily wounding” that continues to nail Christ to the “eternal Cross” of the poem’s title.
In one of Jennings’ early collections, Song for a Birth or Death a sequence of poems entitled “The Clown”, the circus clown becomes a clear image of the crucified Christ. The similarity is apparent in a variety of terms that include innocence “you seem like one not fallen from grace”, “helplessness” and the “acceptance of suffering “the seeming surrender…. the acceptance of loss”, as well as the element of mockery “play the fool and entertain the crowds”. However the most important similarities between the clown and “Christ on the Cross” seem to lie elsewhere: in his loneliness: “If I painted you /… I would have you entirely alone,/Thoughtful and leaning/ Against a dark window that needed cleaning” in his inscrutability : “his face will never show /You any hint of what you ought to feel” and above all is the suggestion that somehow, despite appearances to the contrary, he , not the “crowds” is in fact the one in control: “I would want to show you/ Not as victim or scapegoat,/ Not like one who is hurried away, loaded/ with other people’s fears”(102) Instead of being …show more content…
The word “scapegoat” as used here deserves particular attention. It appears initially as little more than a synonym for “victim”, as in general colloquial usage, but is then allowed to recover its full Biblical context in a description that reminds the reader of the Hebrew practice of sending a goat into
In one of Jennings’ early collections, Song for a Birth or Death a sequence of poems entitled “The Clown”, the circus clown becomes a clear image of the crucified Christ. The similarity is apparent in a variety of terms that include innocence “you seem like one not fallen from grace”, “helplessness” and the “acceptance of suffering “the seeming surrender…. the acceptance of loss”, as well as the element of mockery “play the fool and entertain the crowds”. However the most important similarities between the clown and “Christ on the Cross” seem to lie elsewhere: in his loneliness: “If I painted you /… I would have you entirely alone,/Thoughtful and leaning/ Against a dark window that needed cleaning” in his inscrutability : “his face will never show /You any hint of what you ought to feel” and above all is the suggestion that somehow, despite appearances to the contrary, he , not the “crowds” is in fact the one in control: “I would want to show you/ Not as victim or scapegoat,/ Not like one who is hurried away, loaded/ with other people’s fears”(102) Instead of being …show more content…
The word “scapegoat” as used here deserves particular attention. It appears initially as little more than a synonym for “victim”, as in general colloquial usage, but is then allowed to recover its full Biblical context in a description that reminds the reader of the Hebrew practice of sending a goat into