This chapter examines the meaning of physical suffering in the work of William Alabaster and John Donne. I will look in particular at how their poetry represents the suffering of Christ, and the possible human ways of engaging with that suffering. In their concern with Christ's Passion, these poets also explore the nature and meaning of human suffering : in their poetry human and divine pain interact. In the work of both writers, moreover, the meaning of pain is linked to issues of poetic form and expression : the question of whether humans can comprehend or share in the pains of Christ elicits a reflection on the possibilities and limitations of verse. In their exploration of the Passion, Alabaster and Donne were both participating in and transforming a long tradition of Passion poetry in English that stretches back to the famous eighth-century ‘Dream of the Rood’. Before discussing the work of these two early modern poets, therefore, I will outline some of the tropes and characteristics of this tradition that are important for the argument of this chapter.

The ‘Dream of the Rood’ records a vision of a speaking tree that tells the speaker how it was felled to carry a criminal, but was instead climbed by a young warrior who was then nailed to it. Although the poem intimates from the start that the warrior is Christ and the rood the cross, they are not explicitly identified until line 56 : ‘Crīst wæs on rōde’ (‘Christ was on the cross’).