With Sir Thomas Browne
With Sir Thomas Browne - meaning Summary
Prayer Against Self-erasure
The poem is a brief, intimate supplication in which the speaker asks God not for physical protection but to be defended from himself. Citing echoes of Montaigne and Browne, he worries about losing changeable identity to stony permanence or oblivion. The plea centers on resisting an appetite for fixity and the corrosive weight of expectation, seeking preservation of selfhood rather than shelter from external violence.
Read Complete AnalysesDefend me, Lord. (That I’m calling you implicates No One. It’s only a word from the drill the disengaged can use, and this evening of dread, I write it.) Defend me from me. They have also said this, Montaigne and Browne and a Spaniard I don’t know; something stays in me amid all this gold that my darkening eyes still decipher. Defend me, Lord, from an impatient appetite for becoming marble or oblivion; defend me from being what I have been, the one I have been irreparably. Not from the sword or the blood-stained lance but, oh, protect me from expectation.
Translated from the Spanish by Evelyn Hooven
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