All maried men desire to have good wifes,
but few give good example by their lives.
They are owr head; they wodd have us thir heles.
This makes the good wife kick--the good man relesº.
ºreels,
reacts with astonishment
When god brought Eve to Adam for a bride,
the text sayes she was taeneº from out mans side:
ºtaken
A simbole of that side, whose sacred bloud
flowed for his spowse, The Churches
savinge good.*
This is a misterie, perhaps too deepe
for blockish Adam that was falen a sleepe.
"A simbole . . . sauinge good.
The Church is traditionally understood as the "spowse" of Christ.
During his crucifixion, one of the soldiers stabbed his side, and blood
(and clear fluid) poured out. That was later understood as a symbol not
only of the crucifixion but also of the wine (and water) of Holy
Communion (the Mass or Last Supper). Both the crucifixion and the Holy
Communion represent acts of "saving good" for the Church. In the poem,
"a simbole of that [Christ's] side" can stand for Eve (whom God made
from Adam's rib, his side], the blood that flowed from Christ's side in
the crucifixion, and (by implication), Holy Communion. All function as
good acts of salvation for the Church or "the Churches savinge good."
The poem appears in the commonplace book of Anne Lady Southwell, called
the Southwell/Sibthorpe Commonplace book because both the Southwell and
Sibthorpe families contributed to it. Two
copies of the book survive, one held by the British Library (London) and one by the Folger Shakespeare Library
(Washington DC), the BL MS perhaps being a draft, with the Folger, a
later, much revised fair copy. (A third manuscript, now lost, is
mentioned in a
nineteenth-century bookseller's catalog; some speculate that it may
have been the
final version.) Southwell's Commonplace was published in 1997 as The
Southwell-Sibthorpe
Commonplace Book: Folger Ms. V. B. 198 , ed. by Jean Klene. I've
added some punctuation to clarify sense and have regularized i/j u/v;
otherwise, I have not changed the
spelling. The Folger version is filled with stops (periods) that defy
understanding (mine, anyway); see the University of Warwick site on Anne
Lady Southwell for the original punctuation as well as extensive
description of the two MSS and biographical information on Southwell
and her Calvinist piety.