by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
If you would speak with me on any matter,
At any time, come where these grapes are grown;
And you will find me treading them to must.
Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter
Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
Three women come to wash me clean
Shall not erase this stain.
Nor leave me lying purely,
Awaiting the black lover.
Death, fumbling to uncover
My body in his bed,
Shall know
There has been one
Before him.
Reflections on the poem
Stephanie A. Hart
This is one of my favorite poems, but why would the author, a wildly promiscuous woman living in bohemian Greenwich Village at the height of the roaring 20's, care to write something which seems to evoke such a powerful image of Christ. Perhaps, Edna never meant it to be Christian, but in reading her work, I often discover religious themes coming through the pages.
Yearly around Easter time, this poem pushes its way to the foreground of my thoughts. This year, my books boxed away, I searched four libraries and the internet to find a copy. When I finally found it on a dusty shelf and turned its brittle pages, its words hit me again with their rich themes.
Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
Christ was in the business of redeeming the ordinary, of taking on the hard, messy work of transformation. He did not shy away from the pain and stain of the labors that he knew would ultimately produce something wonderful. Christ was a true winemaker, from his first miracle in Cana to his last days, Christ was working in large ways and small at turning the ordinary into something extraordinary. No time for rest, his work goes on morning and noon and night.
If you would speak with me on any matter,
At any time, come where these grapes are grown;
And you will find me treading them to must.
Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter
Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.
Christ was in the business of transforming people, his work was in the vineyard. We are all welcome, but if we seek his council, we must be careful, Christ is in the business of transforming the ordinary. If we ask for advice, we must come to where the work is, and we may find ourselves spattered and stained and changed by it. Be careful, Christ is in the business of redeeming the ordinary morning and noon and night.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
Three women come to wash me clean
Shall not erase this stain.
Nor leave me lying purely,
Awaiting the black lover.
In death, his body bore the physical markings of his work. With dirt under his nails and wounds in his flesh, he could not be washed clean of all that this world had done to him. Christ was stained by his work, and as much as it transformed the ordinary around him, it also transformed his body. That body became a sign pointing to the extraordinary work of his life.
Death, fumbling to uncover
My body in his bed,
Shall know
There has been one
Before him.
And then there is the resurrection. The duping of death who comes to find only bedclothes where a broken body should have been. This master of re-creation and transformation finds himself the ultimate example of the transforming power he came to show us all.
It is a beautiful tale for the Easter season. That Christ was in the work of redemption and resurrection of taking the ordinary and making it holy should seem an odd theme for the poetical meanderings of this wild woman of words, but maybe that is precisely where his story is best told. After all, it was a woman of ill repute that Christ met at the well, a sinner that washed his feet with her tears, a tax collector in whose house he dined, a betrayer, a doubter and a denier with whom he shared his last days and it is to us, the broken, unfaithful, dispossessed, lost, wandering, stumbling souls that he continues to come and work his redemption, looking into our lives and seeing us lost, seeing our disobedience, the searching and seeking and sulking for pleasure. It is the self-entitled rantings with which we justify our selfish actions to which he listens, as exhausted as to Peter's persistent missteps and mis-theology, continuing to offer his measured and long-suffering way to peace each time we return to him unchanged.
Christ is in the business of redeeming us, of trampling us into wine. We drift along unaware of the forces shaping us, we glut ourselves on the wrong kinds and wrong minds of thought we turn from instruction that would heal us and play the physician to our own ailing souls. And yet he is there morning and noon and night treading grapes into wine, waiting for us to join him.
I imagine that if we were to come, to lean over the Savior sagely, hoping to avoid getting spattered by this messy work of transformation, we might seek his council for a time and might even find him attentive, but eventually he would need to get back to work and eventually we would need to either join in or leave him to his labors. Christ is in the business of redeeming the ordinary in us all—morning and noon and night. But we are not invalids in this process, not helpless. Christ waits for us to join the work, which is daily transforming our ordinary into something divine.
We find ourselves at Easter going to the Lord's house again and again and again, to eat and be fed by this transforming, resurrecting power. We find ourselves scurrying around following the Savior, trying to keep up, trying, by our mere presence, to glean the wisdom and worth of the season without getting messy in the process. But more often than not, Christ does not transform us in this way, at least not in the long-haul. Christ has very little interest in hearing our sob stories again and again or having us trail along, trying to parse out the mundane meaning of our day-to-day, because Christ is about transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, of engaging us in the hard and often messy work of transformation.
It happens when we feed the poor or heal the sick, it happens when we listen to the lonely and comfort the dying, it happens when we visit the prisoner and pray for the struggling, and it happens when we bite our tongues of selfish words, and keep our path from selfish ways and die to ourselves for the sake of our friends, our families and even complete strangers. It happens when we take on the passion of Christ and learn to walk the way of the cross each and every day, to take the pieces of us that are ordinary and trample them into the extraordinary. It happens when we decide to stop tiptoeing around the border of Christ's work, roll-up our pant legs and step in.
From his first acts of public ministry to the final footwashing, Christ was getting dirty doing the hard work of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary morning and noon and night. The lord of the harvest, the lord of the labor and the lord of the rich reward beckons us to become a part of that service. To descend into the winepress and to arise transformed by the work. Christ longs for us to surrender ourselves to the work of the church, not because we are martyrs who thrive on discomforting ourselves, but because we are Christians, followers of Christ, and that is where Christ is leading us.
We know that Christ led a full life, we know that he had friends he held as dear as family, we know that he suffered for the Lord, and ultimately received the reward for his labors and is seated at the right hand of the Father in glory, and yet, we are still reluctant to follow in his footsteps and engage in the work he started, not because we doubt who he was, but because we are unwilling to risk the discomfort of change for the reward of transformation. We are too scared to inconvenience ourselves with the poor to receive the redemption it would bring, and we are too greedy to give up our own personal vices of hatred, of excess, of secret sin in exchange for the life altering transformation we might find. And because we live in this fear and lazily wait in the shadows for Christ to leave the vineyard, we remain unchanged—morning and noon and night.
We are content to lean sagely over the savior, allowing Christ to do the real work, gleaning anecdotal stories of service and sacrifice to continue rubber-stamping our sorry secluded and sepulchered lives, instead of joining Christ on the trampling floor and staining ourselves with work. Lord save us from the complacency of self that keeps us ordinary, save us from the complacency of the poor that keeps us unchanged and save us from the complacency of your sacrifice that keeps you in the grave all these many years.
May we join Christ where the grapes are grown, may we learn to take up the hard task of changing the ordinary into extraordinary, may we learn to daily tread grapes into wine—morning and noon and night.
