Summary
The night before Jesus is to be tried, the speaker has a dream in which he touches her with his hands. These hands are rough and tan. Partway through the dream, the speaker begins to feel pain, and realizes that nails have been driven through Jesus's hands. She wakes up feeling both sexually aroused and frightened. When she wakes up, she hurriedly jots a note to her husband asking that he let Jesus live. Then she dresses and rushes to the site of Jesus's trial, where he wears a crown of thorns. Meanwhile, the crowd is cheering on Barabbas: in the Bible, Barabbas is tried at the same time as Jesus, but is pardoned by the audience while Jesus is executed. The speaker's husband sees her, but refuses to look at her.
Instead, he washes his hands, and then drags Jesus up to the area known as the "Place of Skulls," where executions are held. The speaker does not describe the ensuing scene, but says only that her maid knows what happened next. She then wonders out loud whether Jesus was really God, responding to her own question by saying that he clearly was not. Her husband, however, believed him to be.
Analysis
In this latter part of the poem, the parallels between the speaker and Jesus himself become especially apparent. Both characters are powerless within their society, subject to the whims of the people and systems around them. For the speaker, marriage and gender norms are the primary mechanisms of this disempowerment. For Jesus, these mechanisms are instead the legal system and the mob justice animating it. But for both Jesus and the speaker, Pilate is the closest representative of these systems—himself relatively harmless, but willing to enact cruelty on behalf of Rome or on behalf of the institution of marriage, simply because it allows him to maintain his position.
In the poem's second half, the symbolic significance of hands is deepened and expanded upon. Whereas previously Pilate's hands have been described as soft and weak, they are now contrasted with Jesus's hands, which are rough and brown. This suggests that Jesus has led a life of physical labor, in contrast to Pilate's life of ease and luxury. Meanwhile, at the moment of Jesus's trial, Pilate washes his hands. This is a reference to to a biblical scene, in which Pilate announces that he "washes his hands" of Jesus's blood. In other words, Pilate allows Jesus to be executed despite his knowledge that this is unjust. At the same time, he tries to absolve himself of guilt. Duffy juxtaposes Pilate's concern over the metaphorical cleanliness of his hands with the physical harm done to the hands in crucifixion. Pilate is willing to subject Jesus's hands to very literal violence and pain, prioritizing the state of his own hands (and conscience) over the life of another person.
The speaker does not describe the execution she witnesses, explaining simply that her maid witnessed what she witnessed and knows "the rest." This moment tells us that the speaker is too distressed by what she has seen to even describe it directly. At the same time, it serves to remind readers of the relationship that has most consistently helped the speaker. Her maid, the only other woman who appears in the poem, provides support and companionship. This line therefore orients the readers back towards some of the poem's core feminist themes, even hinting that the maid herself likely has a perspective even more lost to history than that of the speaker.
