The Flesh and the Spirit

The conflict between flesh and spirit that the poem dramatizes has a long history in Christian thought. It goes back, just to give one example, to St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, which contains the following, one of a number of verses that essentially say the same thing:  “Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life (Gal 6:8, New International Version). 

Lines 1-8

The poem is divided into three unequal sections. The first eight lines provide the setup for what follows. The first-person speaker looks back to some moments when she was in a “secret place” (Line 1). This likely refers to being wrapped up in her own thoughts and feelings.  She also says she was close to “Lacrim flood” (Line 2); Lacrim is from the Latin word lacrima, meaning “tear.” The phrase suggests that she was in emotional distress and was close to tears. The reason for her unhappiness is conveyed in the following lines. She was listening to two “sisters” who were carrying on a debate. The sisters are metaphorical and here anthropomorphized expressions of two aspects of the speaker’s being: flesh and spirit. Flesh focused on “worldly wealth and vanity” (Line 6).