Summary
The speaker begins by describing her husband's hands. His hands are soft and feminine, and his nails resemble shells from the Sea of Galilee. These hands are lazy, clapping to demand that others come and feed him grapes. When these pale soft hands touch the speaker, she winces. She is homesick for Rome, and longs to be elsewhere, or with a different person. When a person from the city of Nazareth arrives in Jerusalem, where the speaker is, she and her maid put on disguises and go to watch him out of sheer boredom. A crowd has gathered to witness the scene, and the speaker trips and grabs a donkey's bridle. When she looks up, she is making eye contact with the Nazarene, who is staring intently at her. His eyes enchant the speaker, but he soon disappears through the city gates with his disciples.
Analysis
This poem attempts to engage on an intimate, interior level with figures and situations who are, for many readers, extremely familiar—the characters of the biblical New Testament. These include Jesus himself, directly prior to and during his execution, as well as the character of Pontius Pilate, the Roman official who oversees and allows Jesus to be crucified in the biblical narrative. Duffy recasts this familiar narrative through a feminist lens by taking as her speaker, not one of the major figures of Christianity, but instead a largely ignored woman with a minor role in traditional narratives about the life and death of Jesus. By lending complexity and a voice to the figure of Pontius Pilate's wife, the poem asks readers to reconsider who is worthy of focus in narratives of all kinds. The speaker is revealed to have almost no agency: it is immediately clear that she can do little about the fact that she detests her husband, misses her home, and is generally bored and unhappy. However, Duffy gives her a measure of control simply by bringing her perspective to the fore.
Despite Duffy's radical premise, in which the Bible itself is subject to reimagining and critique, the poem's subject matter presents an inherent challenge. How, after all, can a poet hope to make a story that is already so influential and familiar feel new, vivid, and surprising? One of Duffy's strategies is to focus on physical minutiae. By making the body central to this work, Duffy can engage with her characters' specific sensory experiences, helping to maneuver around any distance created by the passage of time and the formality of religion.
One of the ways in which Duffy emphasizes the physical is through sex. The speaker sees Jesus as an object not solely of religious awe or moral admiration, but also of lust. The speaker's attraction to Jesus reiterates the physicality of both characters. This also serves to make Jesus's execution seem more brutal and less abstracted, since he has been established so thoroughly as a physical, concrete being. The speaker's desire also helps reiterate some of the poem's feminist themes, since it is clear that she has generally lived in a state of sexual repression, largely because she finds her husband unappealing. Her sexual awakening is prompted by an encounter with Jesus—another social outcast, existing to an extent outside of gender roles. Only by encountering someone outside the restrictive environment of marriage is the speaker able to grapple with the question of sex.
The second of the major ways in which Duffy emphasizes the physical is through the symbolism of hands. Pilate's hands are soft as a result of his relatively luxurious life. Because of his powerful position, the speaker's husband uses his hands for very little, except to command that others bring him food. However, Duffy does not only make use of the hands to convey biographical detail. Instead, the softness of Pilate's hands helps to communicate the weakness of his personality, the problem of which will come to a head later in the poem. In fact, Pilate's hands are described in conspicuously feminine terms, with the speaker referring to them as "a woman's" and "softer than mine." This suggests that the speaker's marriage disproves stereotypes about the hardiness of men and the frailty of women. Though she is a sturdier, more vigorous person than her husband, the speaker is forced to live in accordance with gender norms that restrict and bore her.
