Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal
This is the way it is. We see
three ages in one: the child Jesus
innocent of Jerusalem and Rome
- magically at home in joy -
that’s the year from which
our inner persistence has its force.
The second, Bergman shows us,
carries forward image after image
of anguish, of the Christ crossed
and sends up from open sores of the plague
(shown as wounds upon His corpse)
from lacerations in the course of love
(the crown of whose kingdom tears the flesh)
...There is so much suffering!
What possibly protects us
from the emptiness, the forsaken cry,
the utter dependence, the vertigo?
Why do so many come to loves edge
only to be stranded there?
The second face of Christ, his
evil, his Other, emaciated, pain and sin.
Christ, what a contagion!
What a stink it spreads round
our age! It’s our age!
and the rage of the storm is abroad.
The malignant stupidity of statesmen rules.
The old riders thru the forests race
shouting: the wind! the wind!
Now the black horror cometh again.
And I’ll throw myself down
as the clown does in Bergman’s Seventh Seal
to cower as if asleep with his wife and child,
hid in the caravan under the storm.
Let the Angel of Wrath pass over.
Let the end come.
War, stupidity and fear are powerful.
We are only children. To bed! to bed!
To play safe!
To throw ourselves down
helplessly, into happiness,
into an age of our own, into
our own days.
There where the Pestilence roars,
where the empty riders of the horror go.
Robert Duncan, "Ingmar Bergman's Seventh Seal" from The Opening of the Field. Copyright © 1960 by Robert Duncan. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.