Supernatural Love by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
"Supernatural Love" by Gjertrud Schnackenberg is a lyric poem that intertwines narrative elements with meditative themes on the nature of divine and human love. The poem presents a scene in which a young girl interacts with her father in his study, engaging in cross-stitching while he researches word origins. This setting establishes a framework through which the poem explores the connections between the everyday and the sacred, particularly through the motif of carnations, which the girl affectionately refers to as "Christ's flowers." As the father discovers the etymology of "carnation," linking it to flesh and nails, the girl inadvertently injures herself with her needle, creating a poignant moment that resonates with themes of sacrifice and affection.
Structured in nineteen three-line stanzas of iambic pentameter, the poem employs a terza rima rhyme scheme, echoing the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The imagery throughout conveys a rich tapestry of meanings related to love, suffering, and spiritual connection, drawing parallels between the child’s innocent experiences and deeper theological concepts. Schnackenberg’s use of language and formal poetic devices invites readers to reflect on the intertwining of familial love and divine love, ultimately suggesting that these forms of love share profound similarities. Through this exploration, "Supernatural Love" becomes a contemplation of intimacy, pain, and the transcendent nature of care and compassion.
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Supernatural Love by Gjertrud Schnackenberg
First published: 1982; collected in The Lamplit Answer, 1985
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
Like many lyric poems, Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s “Supernatural Love” contains a narrative element, a sort of dramatic situation that provides the framework for this meditation on the nature of supernatural love. At the end of this brief story of a young child and her father, the reader is invited to see the similarities between divine love and human love, similarities which the poem’s ambiguous title suggests from the beginning.
The poem opens as the narrator visualizes herself as a four-year-old child as she and her father work in his study. She is cross-stitching a sampler text while her father looks up word origins in the dictionary. The intertwining of the needlework, the etymologies, and the text of the sampler create the thematic web of the poem. The poem hints that carnations are present in the room. In any event, the narrator has apparently said that she calls carnations “Christ’s flowers,” although she can give no reason why. Curiosity has led her father to look up “carnation” in the dictionary. As he does so, the child notes how his eyes look through the magnifying glass he holds. In return, she peers at him through the eye of the needle and then returns to work on the word “beloved.” Later it becomes clear that her sampler has a religious motto and that “beloved” is one part of it.
From the dictionary, the father learns that the root of “carnation” is the Latin word carn, meaning “flesh,” perhaps because the flowers are commonly pink or red. Since the child cannot explain the source of her version of the name, the father goes on, noting the dictionary’s information that carnations are a variety of clove. When he looks up “clove,” he learns that the word has its roots in the French word clou, meaning “nail.” At about that moment, the child accidently stabs herself with her needle, running it into her finger clear to the bone. When she cries out in pain, her father gently touches the wound, just as earlier he had gently touched the words on the page.
In addition to these actions, Schnackenberg records the words of the sampler’s motto, “Thy blood so dearly bought,” and two other sentences, the origins of which are not entirely clear. One is “Child, it’s me,” which the child hears in the squeak of her scissors; the other is punctuated as an isolated sentence in quotation marks in the poem: “’The obligation due to every thing/ That’s smaller than the universe.’” In the context of the rest of the poem’s references, the first of these sentences may come as Christ addresses the little girl. The second is treated as if it is part of the dictionary’s entry and must be read as a commentary on the word “carnation.”
Forms and Devices
“Supernatural Love” is written in nineteen three-line stanzas of iambic pentameter. The three rhyming words of each stanza share a single rhyme sound. The three-line stanza (called terza rima when it rhymes aba, bcb, and so on) was most notably used by the medieval poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) in his long narrative poem The Divine Comedy, in which he used it to honor the doctrine of the Trinity—the Christian doctrine of the essential unity of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Schnackenberg, as a poet who frequently uses formal structures, would be well aware of the traditions of this verse form. In this poem, the triplets harmonize with the poem’s theme of supernatural love, love which in Christian doctrine was expressed by God’s appearing in human flesh on earth in the person of Jesus.
In the poem, this theme emerges from a network of images concerning the carnations, their roots (both real roots and etymologies), flesh, blood, and nails. The “iron-fresh” scent of the flowers floats up to the child narrator, a scent she calls “drifted, bitter, secret ecstasy.” In a context which has already united the flowers with the idea of Christ, this reference to iron and bitterness inevitably suggests the crucifixion, a reference which is reinforced when the father’s dictionary identifies cloves with a word for “nail.” Significantly, the father reads the definition twice, “as if he hasn’t understood,” just as the child, who cannot yet read, does not understand the text she is cross-stitching. Moreover, the dictionary’s reference to cloves as a spice also suggests the spices with which Jesus’s body was prepared for burial. The very X’s of the child’s cross-stitching use the Greek letter chi, the first letter of the Greek word for Christ and a traditional abbreviation of Christ’s name. This union of images is what makes the narrator say, “The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail.” The pun on “blossom” is one of several puns in the poem, including the “cross” stitching of the child’s needle work and the “roots” of both words and flowers.
As the child twists the threads of her work “like stems,” she accidently jabs herself. She has been working the phrase “Thy blood so dearly bought,” an explanation of Christian understanding of the meaning of the crucifixion—Christ’s blood was the high price paid for human salvation. Now the blood being shed is the child’s; it reminds her of the threads she has been working with, and she calls for her father using the intimate “Daddy daddy,” which is undoubtedly intended to recall for the reader Jesus’s use of a similar word (Abba) in addressing his heavenly father. In response, her father gently touches her injury, just as before he gently touched the dictionary’s page. Now the italicized “Child, it’s me,” which earlier seemed to emerge from the flowers and the child’s scissors, sounds like a reassurance both from her father and from Christ himself; it is the sort of thing a loving parent might say to an injured child.