Easter

The day has come, and it's time to wish a happy Easter to all who browse here.
The painting is Edward Burne-Jones's The Morning of the Resurrection, completed in 1886. An unusually muted treatment of a subject more often depicted in triumphant terms, it shows a slightly hunched Jesus standing at the edge of the composition, his head turned away from the viewer to engage with the terrified Mary Magdalen, whose figure and gesture dominate the picture. Mary is flanked by two symmetrical angels, both looking full of trepidation.  A dubious, even reluctant resurrection?
  I know I've been posting a lot of R.S. Thomas lately, but how could I not on Easter Sunday? Here is his take (one of his takes) on the resurrected Christ...

Suddenly

As I had always known
he would come, unannounced,
remarkable merely for the absence
of clamour. So truth must appear
to the thinker; so, at a stage
of the experiment, the answer
must quietly emerge. I looked
at him, not with the eye
only, but with the whole
of my being, overflowing with
him as a chalice would
with the sea. Yet was he
no more there than before,
his area occupied
by the unhaloed presences.
You could put your hand
in him without consciousness
of his wounds. The gamblers
at the foot of the unnoticed
cross went on with
their dicing; yet the invisible
garment for which they played
was no longer at stake, but worn
by him in this risen existence.