The Burning Babe

“The Burning Babe” describes a religious vision experienced by the poem’s speaker. The first lines of the poem take readers from the world of the real into allegory. The speaker is introduced through the first-person pronoun “I” (Line 1), and would at the time of the poem’s writing have been understood to be Southwell himself, or at least a literary version of him. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is in a position many of his readers would be familiar with: outside “in the snow” on a “hoary winter’s night” (Line 1). It is so cold that the speaker is “shivering” (Line 1). The first line is full of naturalistic description, which allows readers to put themselves into the speaker’s place. It is unclear why he is not indoors getting warm, but his vulnerability to the elements allows him to experience something sublime. In the second line of the poem, we leave reality and enter an otherworldly, hallucinatory world: All of a sudden, the speaker is “Surpris’d” to be overcome with “sudden heat” (Line 2). The description is alarming—warmth amidst freezing cold is a symptom of hypothermia—but the heat which the speaker feels is psychological, causing his “heart to glow” (Line 2). The situation makes the speaker “fearful” (Line 3); he soon discovers that the source of the heat is “A pretty Babe” (Line 4). However, this is not any child, but an angelic, other-worldly vision: The baby floats in midair and is on fire.

The speaker is eager to capture as much sensory detail about his vision as possible, in the same way that he earlier described the cold night. What he sees is the stuff of nightmares: an infant “scorched with excessive heat” (Line 5), word choice that leads readers to imagine the child with sear marks over his body. Because of the burns and excessive heat, the Babe cries “floods of tears” (Line 5). This viscerally upsetting image counteracts the poem’s earlier assertion that the baby is floating—the ethereal magic that levitates it is nothing compared to imagining a screaming baby lit on fire. Southwell is purposefully trying to horrify his readers, in much the same way that depictions of the crucifixion fixated on Jesus’ gruesome wounds—the idea is for readers to feel that their sins are actively inflicting this kind of torment on this helpless, innocent child.

The Babe’s burning and crying appears is an endless cycle: The child cries “his floods” of tears to try to “quench his flames” (Line 6). Yet, these flames “with his tears were fed” (Line 6). The more the flames burn, the more the child cries. The more the child cries, the more the flames burn. This means that the only remedy to the child’s suffering is external—the Babe is unable to help itself out of this situation. As readers learn that the Babe is a version of Jesus, they understand that relieving his pain is something only they can do by living exemplary lives free of sin and misbehavior. The child’s tears are in response to mankind’s inability to follow the teachings of Jesus as Jesuits understood them; the endless fire is the suffering Jesus underwent on the Cross to redeem mankind.

The poem here veers away from whatever elements of realism the vision contained, as the newborn suddenly addresses the speaker in complete sentences. Now, readers are no longer expected to grimace at a scene of horror, but be struck by the pathos of the child’s words. The Babe laments that he is “but newly born” yet already suffering in such “fiery heats” (Line 7). The child also bemoans the fact that no individuals “approach” to “warm their hearts” or “feel [the child’s] fire” (Line 8). The child has much to offer, but no takers step forward. This piece of the allegory is of a piece with Southwell’s Jesuit philosophy of evangelization: He wonders why so few people accept the kind of Christianity he would like to spread.

The Babe goes into further detail, describing to the speaker the origins of his flames and their warmth. The process is basically a kind of foundry, as the selfless suffering of Jesus for his people fuels the warmth and the fires of his “Love” (Line 10) that burn away the combined sins of mortals: He is literally the “furnace” that produces the flames/heat in his “faultless breast” (Line 9)—flames that are fueled by the “wounding thorns” (Line 9) of sinners. This word choice is not accidental—thorns are an allusion to the mocking crown of thorns placed on Jesus Christ’s head before his crucifixion. The allegory continues, as Southwell explains the symbolism of the other features of the infant furnace: “Sighs” rise into the air as “smoke,” a sort of positive release, while “shame and scorns” are reduced to “ashes,” diminished to near nothingness (Line 10). The Love coming from the child is strong enough to overcome the shameful actions of the people he continually sacrifices himself for.

But the child is not alone: With him in the allegory are the personification of “Justice,” who provides “fuel” for the fire, and “Mercy” (also personified through capitalization), who “blows the coals” (Line 11). Both Justice and Mercy are therefore prime components in perpetuating the fire of “Love.” They are the essential workers who fan the flames. Here, Southwell finally directly spells out how to read his allegory: In the infant’s bodily furnace the “metal” of “men’s defiled souls” is “wrought” “to their good” (Lines 12-13). Furnaces transform ore into metal by burning away useless minerals, which is exactly what the Babe is doing—purging impurities from dirty souls to rework them into something better.

The Babe suffers in order to save mankind from an afterlife of torment. Not only is the child willing to remain consumed by flames for the good of man, but he also will “melt into a bath” to “wash them in my blood” (Line 14). This reference to washing sinners in blood is specific to Christianity, which holds that Christians are saved from eternal damnation by the blood Jesus shed during his crucifixion. The child clarifies that the men will be washed in “my blood,” which even more directly specifies that this child is the infant form of Jesus Christ. The Babe expresses absolute selflessness, willing to sacrifice himself for others just as Jesus did.

After expressing all of this to the poem’s speaker, the vision of the child vanishes, leaving the speaker back in the realm of the real where he started the poem. His experience of the sublime is over, and all that remains is to carry its message with him and spread it to others. As the vision dissipates, the speaker recalls that “it was Christmas day” (Line 16). This date carries even greater significance when paired with the vision of the burning child, since Christmas celebrates the birth of Christ.