At the Gym

“At the Gym” relies heavily on comparisons of the weightlifters to Christian figures and the act of lifting weights to Christian rituals. Because the poem relies on Christian theology to elevate the weightlifters, it is hard to read “At the Gym” as a secular poem, even if the weightlifters celebrate their physical lives rather than their spiritual ones.

The emphasis placed on the weightlifters’ bodies reinforces their Christ-like position. Many Christian denominations, particular those related to Catholicism, understand the body as essential to spiritual practice. This is perhaps most clearly represented in the act of communion, where church goers eat bread that symbolizes Christ’s body and drink wine that symbolizes Christ’s blood. Relics, or sanctified objects (usually preserved pieces of saints’ bodies), are another way bodies plays a pivotal role in spiritual practice.

The Shroud of Turin, the cloth that is said to have covered Christ’s body after he died, is one of the most historically celebrated relics. Though the article was later found to be a medieval forgery, Christ’s body was nonetheless likely covered by a similar shroud upon his death. Doty’s speaker relies on the idea of the Shroud to make the aforementioned connections between Christ and the weightlifters explicit. The sweat stain, in the third stanza, is called a “shroud-stain, negative / flashed onto the vinyl” (Lines 12-13), directly alluding to the image of Christ believed to be imprinted on the Shroud of Turin.

But unlike Christ’s shroud image, the weight bench’s sweat stain is not the product of one particular person. Rather, every weightlifter who sweats on the bench contributes to the stain. Together, they “sweat the mark / of [their] presence onto the cloth” (Lines 31-32). Though the weightlifters are connected to Christ and are presented as having a Christ-like nimbus, the speaker only arrives at that connection through his study of the sweat stain.

Though most Christian doctrines regard the soul more highly than the body, Christians believe the human body is a creation in God’s image and, therefore, worthy of reverence. This worth extends not only to Christ’s body, but to all human bodies. Despite this reverence for the body, the denial of bodily needs, through martyrdom or asceticism, is a staple of Christian religious practice. The poem’s complex navigation of religion and the body reflects the church’s own complicated engagement with this same relationship.

Vanity, one of the cardinal sins and the only one with which Doty explicitly engages, is excessive pride in one's appearance. Vanity is self-directed, however, and “At the Gym” takes care not to show the pride of an individual; instead, it goes “beneath [the group’s] vanity” (Line 29) to discover something more fundamental. Similar to Christian traditions, the poem is more a celebration of human embodiment and how those bodies, at their best, reflect the divine. In fact, Renaissance paintings of St. Sebastian often showed him bare-chested and with a well-defined musculature as a way of celebrating God’s complex creation. These paintings, in the 20th century, have made Sebastian a sort of unofficial patron saint of the gay community.