The Burning Babe

“The Burning Babe” describes a religious vision experienced by the poem’s speaker. The first lines of the poem take readers from the world of the real into allegory. The speaker is introduced through the first-person pronoun “I” (Line 1), and would at the time of the poem’s writing have been understood to be Southwell himself, or at least a literary version of him. At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is in a position many of his readers would be familiar with: outside “in the snow” on a “hoary winter’s night” (Line 1). It is so cold that the speaker is “shivering” (Line 1). The first line is full of naturalistic description, which allows readers to put themselves into the speaker’s place. It is unclear why he is not indoors getting warm, but his vulnerability to the elements allows him to experience something sublime. In the second line of the poem, we leave reality and enter an otherworldly, hallucinatory world: All of a sudden, the speaker is “Surpris’d” to be overcome with “sudden heat” (Line 2). The description is alarming—warmth amidst freezing cold is a symptom of hypothermia—but the heat which the speaker feels is psychological, causing his “heart to glow” (Line 2).