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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2021
What clouds the midday sun? Too weak to shine:
Nightfall at noontide. Tell me, waning moon
Your starry train attending, why you set,
Drinking sea water, with your course half-run?
No, now I see your strength is failing you:
Seeing the gibbet where Zion's daughters weep,
Drowning in tears upon the parching hill,
Hearing the sacred death-cry ‘All is paid.’
My God, atoning, may I speak a word?
Your ransom ransoms not, unless you kill
And tear me from myself, the sinews break
Of my insensate soul, that it fulfil
Its duty. May I learn my goods, my house
My body and my time, to hang upon your Cross.
20 MS dated 1 January 1645 (Huygens 1974, pp. 66-67). 7 In place of the usual Biblical ‘’Tis volmaeckt’ (it is consummated) Huygens writes ‘Tis voldaen’ (‘it is paid for’ as well as ‘it is fully done’); the further connotations of ‘voldoen’ (‘satisfy, make satisfaction for’) are present in the sestet of the sonnet, in a way which ‘ransom’ in the translation cannot convey in full.
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