Our sins ‘red’ or ‘black’

Not long before his death in 1631, the Anglican poet and cleric John Donne (1572–1631) penned a series of what he called ‘Holy Sonnets’.

In the fourth of them he employed the metaphors of treason and theft to express his fear of facing the judgement of God:

Oh my black Soul now thou art summoned 
By sicknesse, death’s herald, and champion;
Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turne to whence he is fled,
Or like a thiefe, which till death’s doome be read,
Wisheth himselfe delivered from prison;
But damn’d and hal’d to execution,
Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned.