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Notes on a Poem

• (1) He addresses Pilate as Lord, as you or I would the Man on the Cross. I play on the idea that the natural end of semi-atheistical humanism is State- worship. The poem is by implication also anti-militant – the centurion is prepared to crucify Christ as the ordinary modern soldier would be prepared to shoot Him, as a member of a firing squad, because it is his duty.
• (2) I try to make the point that the Crucifixion was an ordinary event (the Romans often executed their criminals that way), different not because of the manner of execution but because of who was being executed.
• (3) Some people to whom I have shown the poem have objected to my making Christ negroid (‘that low broad Nubian forehead’). I do it partly just to counteract the opposite tendency of making Him look like a rather ineffectual bearded Englishman in a toga. Actually, of course, we don’t know what He looked like. But mainly I did it as a hard-hitting symbol of the fact that He represented all colours and nationalities equally. One could I think justify it on the grounds that Mary was descended from Ruth, who was a Moabite by extraction.
• (4) The temple hangers-on – for the centurion, a Greek, the disciples would be just ‘temple hangers-on’.
• (5) The centurion has had a shock but doesn’t know the cause of it, and is busily attributing it to the earthquake as any average NZer would attribute his discomfort rising from the state of his conscience to the weather or the quality of the beer. He just knows that the earthquake has shaken his cosmology as well as the ground, and he is running away from this powerful Mystery.
• (6) He is no fool. ‘Not the torture: that’s the way we live’ . . . is a pointer to an attitude which accepts the frequent presence of physical and (though he would not use the term) spiritual agony. His earthly paradise indicated early in the poem is rest after battle with a keg of wine and a cushy wound.

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