[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Jan—
I was struck by the heavily marked dimeter. It made me think of a martyr in chains being led to the arena to be fed to the lions. Ironically, the lugubriousness of the meter is at odds with the speaker’s almost cheerful anticipation of his immolation.

The repeated line, “Come pain with me,” reminded me of the Sinatra song, “Come fly with me” or Marlowe’s passionate shepherd who begins, “Come live with me and be my love.” Is the speaker proposing a masochistic tryst?

If we are following the speaker’s embrace of martyrdom, I wonder if the order of the stanzas might work better in reverse order. Step one is the acceptance of the narrative that makes pain a ticket to heaven. Step two is the self-infliction of the martyrdom, and step three is the reward and beatification.

I’m pretty sure that you are offering the speaker as an example of the type of hair-shirt-wearing, self-flagellating Christian who thinks that misery is necessary for salvation, and that we readers are supposed to reject his pathological theology. The repeated “beaten breast” recalls the mea culpa of the Confiteor, and implies that the speaker is inflicting his martyrdom on himself. It occurs to me that if you wanted to expand on this, you might treat the poem as a dramatic monologue and add a fourth stanza in which the speaker reacts to Christ’s judgment of him on the Last Day.

One quibble is with “hollow chains.” Wouldn’t hollow chains be fragile and easily escaped from? I wonder if you might have had the sound of hollow chains clanking in mind, or did you intend for “hollow” to modify “victimhood” as a transferred epithet? This suggests that the speaker knows that the virtue and sanctity he hopes to purchase with his suffering is hollow and bogus. The “but not in truth” reinforces my conclusion that he, like Chaucer’s Pardoner, is fully aware of his own lack of real holiness. He is really fascinating as a character. Nice work!