Won't You Celebrate With Me

Praise as Theology

The poem “won’t you celebrate with me” begins with an invitation and ends with a statement of fact: “every day / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” The celebration the poem invites is not the celebration of a life free from danger but the celebration of a life that has survived danger — the praise of a person who has been in the fire and not been consumed.

This is the theology of the Psalms of praise: not the praise of a person who has nothing to complain about, but the praise of a person who has everything to complain about and praises anyway, because the God who has sustained her through the danger is worth praising more than the danger is worth lamenting.

What the Biblical Poems Reveal

Clifton’s poems on Biblical figures — Mary, Lucifer, God, the Virgin — approach their subjects from angles that conventional piety would not recognize but that the Biblical text, read carefully, actually supports. Her Lucifer is not a cartoon villain but a creature whose pride is a form of genuine love distorted; her Mary is not a passive vessel but a woman who chose something at enormous cost.

What these poems reveal is a theological imagination that has read the Bible closely enough to find in it the human complexity that devotional tradition sometimes suppresses. Clifton does not domesticate the Biblical figures; she renders them as the full human beings they were, and in doing so makes them available to readers who have been alienated by their conventionalization.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict in which the seed of the woman survives the serpent’s work not by being protected from it but by enduring it and emerging. Clifton’s poetry is the record of that endurance rendered in specific, embodied, feminine terms: the body that has borne children and cancer, the mind that has sustained losses that should have been fatal, the spirit that has praised through conditions that would have justified despair.

Her invitation — “won’t you celebrate with me” — is the invitation of the seed of the woman to join in the praise that survival makes possible. It is not triumphalism; it is something harder and more honest: the praise of a woman who has been in the fire, who bears the marks of it, and who praises the God who brought her through it.

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