Mary Magdalen’s Blush, by Robert Southwell

My “translation” of a poem about the inner turmoil of sin

I’ve cleaned up the spelling and modernized some of the words of the early modern English, while attempting to maintain the syllables per line and rhyme scheme. I know my replacements don’t always fit the style, even when they fit in rhyme and syllables. A link to the original, posted by

Peregrinus

, is included at the end.

Gardens at Magdalene College, Cambridge, 2024-03-14

Mary Magdalen’s Blush

I

The signs of shame that stain my blushing face,

Rise from the feeling of my raving fits,

Whose joy annoy, whose payment¹ is disgrace,

Whose solace flies, whose sorrow never flits:

Bad seed I sowed, worse fruit is now my gain,

Soon-dying mirth begat long-living pain.

II

Now pleasure ebbs, and payback starts² to flow;

One day now wreaks the wrath that many wrought;

Remorse does teach my guilty thoughts to know

How cheap I sold what Christ so dearly bought:

Now conscience rues the faults so long in play:

Which cares must cure and tears must wash away.

III

The holy shots that Grace threw at my heart

Like stubborn rock I forced all to recoil;

To other weapons made myself a mark,

So I, by wounds, once welcome, have been foiled.

Woe worth the bow, woe worth the Archer’s might,

That drew such arrows to the mark so right!

IV

To pull them out, to leave them in is death,

One to this world, one to the world to come;

Wounds may I wear, and draw a doubtful breath,

But then my wounds will work a dreadful sum³;

And for a world whose pleasure pass away,

Would lose a world whose joys are past decay.

V

O sense! O soul! O mirth! O hoped for bliss!

You woe, you wean; you draw, you drive me back;

Like meeting with the cross their combat, this,

That never ends but with some deadly wreck⁴;

When sense is winning, soul has lost the field,

And future hopes to present mirth must yield.

VI

O heaven, lament! Sense robs thee thus of saints,

Lament, O souls! Sense plunders you of grace;

Yet scarcely sense deserves these hard complaints,

Lust⁵ is the thief, sense but the entry place;

Yet grant I must, sense is not free from sin,

For thief he is that thief admits within.

Here is the original from the substack of

Peregrinus

:

Madness

1. payment: guerdon

2. payback starts: revenge begins

3. original “dome” means fate, not sum. But both fate and sum refer to results.

4. wrack: wreck. Couldn’t come up with a word that preserved both meaning and rhyme

5. The original is “love”, not “lust.” I personally think the poet is distinguishing between Christian love, which would be “caritas”; the simple physical reaction caused by the senses, which he calls “sense”, which is morally neutral; and the actual vice of lust, which is sinful. I think we are starting to see the conflation of all these meanings into the single word “love.”