The Crucifixion - Alice Meynell

Oh, man's capacity

For spiritual sorrow, corporal pain!

Who has explored the deepmost of that sea,

With heavy links of a far-fathoming chain?

That melancholy lead,

Let down in guilty and in innocent hold,

Yea into childish hands deliverèd,

Leaves the sequestered floor unreached, untold.

One only has explored

The deepmost; but He did not die of it.

Not yet, not yet He died. Man's human Lord

Touched the extreme; it is not infinite.

But over the abyss

Of God's capacity for woe He stayed

One hesitating hour; what gulf was this?

Forsaken He went down, and was afraid.