I Am A Priest Of God - Analysis

A self-appointment that already sounds tired

The poem begins with a proclamation that feels both bold and oddly exposed: I am a priest of God, followed immediately by the deflating image of a man walking with my pockets in my hand. That posture suggests emptiness, a refusal or inability to hold onto anything, even the ordinary possessions that might anchor a person in daily life. From the start, the speaker claims a sacred identity while presenting himself as someone unmoored and a little ashamed. The tone is plainspoken, even casual, but the plainness keeps tipping into confession.

Belief as a performance the speaker cannot quite manage

When the speaker says, Sometimes I am bad and sometimes very good, the moral vocabulary is blunt, almost childish, as if he is measuring himself against a simple checklist. The line I believe that I believe is where the poem really tightens: it turns belief into a secondhand state, not faith but the idea of faith. He adds everything I should, making religion sound like compliance. The tension here is sharp: the speaker wants the authority of priesthood, but he describes his inner life as an imitation of conviction, a practiced stance rather than something possessed.

The priesthood he wants is also a name you give him

The poem’s most intimate moment is not a prayer, but an erotic scene: he likes to hear you say, while you dance with your head rolling upon a silver tray, that he is a priest of God. The silver tray echoes both ritual and display: it can suggest communion vessels, but it also suggests a performer presented for consumption. What the speaker craves is not simply to be a priest, but to be declared one by someone else, in a moment that mixes worship, seduction, and spectacle. The holy title becomes part of a private theater, and that blending gives the poem its uneasy charge.

A life of appetites that still insists on sanctity

Midway through, the speaker looks back and claims he thought I was doing other things, but underneath all of it he was a priest of God. Then he piles up a résumé of excess and restraint: he loved a thousand women, yet never told the same lie twice. Even the virtue is crooked; it is a discipline applied to deception. He accuses Christ directly: Christ you are selfish, but counters with I shared my bread and rice. The poem refuses to let any single moral verdict stick. He can be generous and blasphemous in the same breath, as if priesthood means carrying contradiction rather than resolving it.

A public voice, a private vacancy, and the year that will not let him off

The later lines move from private confession to public performance: he hears my voice tell the crowd that he is alone and a priest of God. That pairing makes his holiness sound like a brand of loneliness, a role that isolates him even as it gives him a platform. The phrase making me so empty returns us to the pockets-in-hand image, but now the emptiness is spiritual and enduring. The sudden timestamp even now in 1966 grounds the doubt in lived time, suggesting this is not a passing mood but a continuing crisis. The poem’s turn arrives in its last admission: I am not sure he is what he keeps claiming to be.

The hardest possibility: the title is both true and unbearable

The poem’s central claim is that the speaker’s priesthood, if it exists at all, is not a stable rank but a painful condition: a life spent trying to reconcile desire, performance, generosity, accusation, and belief that only half-believes. The repeated line I am a priest of God starts as assertion, becomes something he wants to hear from a dancer, becomes a story he tells about his own past, and ends as a question that hollows him out. If he is a priest, it may be precisely because he cannot rest in certainty. And if he is not, the poem implies, then the hunger to be named sacred is itself the most revealing confession.