Corresponding Author:  

Graham McCaffrey, RN PhD 

Email: gpmccaff@ucalgary.ca 

Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 

ISSN: 1927-4416 

July 18, 2022 

©The Author(s) 2022 

DOI: 10.11575/jah.v2022i2022.75702 

 

 

 

Lot’s Wife:  

An Exploration of Nursing and Calls, 

Guided by Two Poems 

 

 
 

 

 

 

Graham McCaffrey 

 
 

Abstract 
 

The article is a discussion on the theme of “the call” that formed the basis for Dr. Ted George's 

series of presentations at the Canadian Hermeneutic Institute (CHI) in 2021. It takes up two 

poems, both entitled “Lot's Wife,” that are interpreted from the point of view of nurses who have 

to make decisions routinely in response to the demands of patients in actual settings of practice. 

The poems, by Anna Akhmatova and Wislawa Szymborska, treat the theme in contrasting ways 

that allows for a series of interpretive reflections, first considering a two-sided contrast between 

external regulation and anguish, and secondly a diverse array of “calls” to decision and action. A 

version of the article was first presented at CHI 2021. 

 

 

Keywords 
 

Poetry, nursing, call, hermeneutics 

 

“Philosophy reads supreme poetry and is read by it. Both intuit common ground, that originating 

art and music of thought which inform our sense of the meaning of the world (der Weltsinn)” 

George Steiner (Steiner, 2011, p. 101). 

 

Note on Method 

 

This article was first written as a presentation for the Canadian Hermeneutic Institute in 2021. Dr. 

Ted George, who was the visiting scholar for that year’s Institute, chose the theme of “the call,” 



McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2022 Article 10    2 

arguing that the world calls out to us and compels us to respond, and that how we respond to any 

given call is a hermeneutic practice. My paper was of course written in anticipation of Dr. 

George’s discussion, addressing his topic and the question posed in the call for abstracts, “how 

do we know what we are supposed to do”? I took up the topic in relation to nursing, since that is 

my profession though the following discussion is not, I hope, confined to nursing too inflexibly. 

It is not about nursing as a vocation, a call-of-calls that brings a person into a profession, a 

discipline, and a working life, but a lower-key attempt to discuss the question of what we are 

supposed to do once the vocational leap has been taken, what we are supposed to do day-to-day 

and moment-to-moment in instances of practice that join up over time into a career. For my 

method, or way into the question, I looked for inspiration in poems in the belief that great poetry 

gets under the skin of life yet leaves open the maximum space for interpretation and 

reinterpretation. 

 

 

Lot’s Wife 

 

My discussion is based on two poems, both entitled “Lot’s Wife,” which I argue provide rich 

material to consider nursing practice and what calls us, what orients us to what we are supposed 

to do. Lot’s wife of course is that famous character from the Old Testament who was turned into 

a pillar of salt. According to Genesis, Lot gave hospitality to “two angels” whom he protected 

from the citizens of Sodom. They then reveal to Lot that their actual mission is to destroy the city 

entirely, and they are offering Lot and his family an escape pass, provided they do not look back: 

Genesis 19:17 “look not behind thee.” And so they flee the city, “But his wife looked back from 

behind him, and she became a pillar of salt” (Genesis 19:26). As the book of Genesis tells it, the 

story seems to be a straightforward instructional narrative of God’s righteous judgement, His 

immense power, the rewards of faith and obedience, and the price of disobedience. Lot’s wife is 

a cipher, she is never named, and her only role is to suffer her idiosyncratic fate. Genesis offers 

no clue as to her motivation for looking back, which is where our two poems come in, both 

imaginatively putting us as readers into the experience of Lot’s Wife. I will discuss them in the 

order in which they were written, the first by the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova from 1924 and 

the second by the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska from 1975.  

 

Akhmatova: Pravednik and Anguish 

 

Akhmatova’s poem is short, four stanzas of four lines each.1 It opens with Lot, not named but 

identified as “the righteous man” following God’s messenger away from the doomed city. Then 

“anguish spoke” to his wife and the second stanza is the voice of anguish telling her she can still 

look at the city she is leaving, with its memories, its imprint on her past and her identity. The 

third stanza describes what happens to her when she does look back; intense pain, then 

immobility. The last stanza, in the voice of the poet, asks “Who will weep for this woman? / Isn’t 

her death the least significant?” and answers in the first person that “my heart will never forget.” 

 

There are three calls going on in the poem. It is in the form of a call and response, though the 

expected order is reversed. In the final stanza, Akhmatova asks, “Who will weep for this 

woman?” - a call she has already answered by writing the poem we are reading. The other two 

calls are first, the call that has happened before the poem starts, that of God’s messenger to Lot 



McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2022 Article 10    3 

to flee the city and not look back, then, second, the call of anguish that forms part of the poem. 

The poem begins with Lot. As readers, we are joining a story already in progress, the first word 

is “And.” Lot is in the process of following the divine call, delivered via the two angels. He 

knows what he is supposed to do because God gave him clear instructions. That is the first call. 

Then in line three, Akhmatova introduces another kind of call, of “anguish [that] spoke loudly to 

his wife.” It is the contrast between these two kinds of call that provides hermeneutic 

generativity. For the first kind of call, I will use the Russian word in the poem for the phrase 

“righteous man” in the first line. In Russian it is a single word, pravednik which Hemschemeyer 

translated as “righteous man” (variant translations have the same or “just man”). I am using it for 

its defamiliarizing effect (if you are not a Russian speaker) and to allow it to take on multiple 

senses. Outside of its place in the poem itself, pravednik is used here not to denote a type of 

person, but as a vector for a certain type of call, that I will argue might appear in various guises, 

some of which appear in the world of nursing.   

 

The call of the pravednik is unarguable. It has power and authority; it is righteous and it is right. 

How do we understand what we are supposed to do? Well, we do as we are told, we go where the 

pravednik tells us to go. The call of anguish, by contrast, is woefully subjective. It is felt before it 

is understood. It is affective, emotional. It is at the mercy of the senses, of the body, of memory - 

things you saw, things you did, people you loved. The call of anguish speaks through 

attachments, connections, and relationships. It arises from a rich, personal world of people and 

things, a lifeworld in phenomenological language. How does Lot’s wife then understand that at 

this moment, she is supposed to look back, in spite of the fact that in doing so she is arguing with 

the unarguable, discounting righteousness, and courting annihilation? Understanding here is a 

felt understanding, an inner call, that is fully present in an embodied, temporal sense of self that 

is part of a world, bound to it. The pravednik obeys the order not to look back, because the 

pravednik is following another kind of call that is transcendent, self-sufficient, and not entangled 

in the world.  

 

Nurses, I suggest, are being called constantly both by pravedniks and by anguish. Most of the 

time the call of the pravednik is heard through institutional abstractions such as policies, 

contracts, or legislation: all those instruments that tell us unequivocally what we are supposed to 

do or not supposed to do. Here is my reason for using the unfamiliar word because the call of the 

pravednik appears in so many guises, as externalized abstract forces and internalized as a 

disposition or inclination within people. Where it may be embodied in the figure of a righteous 

man (or woman), in modern life they are likely to be someone channelling institutional authority 

through status and prestige. The call of anguish on the other hand, arises out of enmeshment in 

the world, of a concrete and contingent situation of unique, embodied appeal. (The actual content 

of course may not be anguish as such, defined as severe bodily or mental pain, but since one of 

its Latin root means narrow, tight (Shorter Oxford Dictionary, 1993), perhaps we could think of 

being in a tight spot, being constrained, and needing help to open out).  

 

In Genesis, and in the poem, it is one or the other - pravednik or anguish, and to choose the latter 

is the end. However, when it comes to nursing, there is not the same finality. Although the two 

kinds of call can be differentiated, in practice they emerge together and are both taken up, in 

interchange with each other. Nurses do know what they are supposed to do because nursing is a 

regulated profession that has precisely defined legal limits and permissions, and because they are 



McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2022 Article 10    4 

bound by employment contracts and registration requirements. Policies tell them how to carry 

out procedures properly, software programs (the pravednik in the machine, so to speak) tell them 

what to measure and record, what medications to give when, and so on. There is no path of 

nursing as a socially sanctioned professional activity other than following the pravednik. At the 

same time, nursing cannot be abstracted and reduced to the sum of its network of rules and 

regulations, it always inescapably occurs in the lifeworld, in a flesh and blood, felt, spoken, 

embodied, and enacted mesh of moments that manifests between particular people in particular 

places. All of this is in the second verse of the poem, where the call of anguish is deeply personal 

and deeply meaningful for Lot’s wife. I do not think these are experienced as two separate calls 

in reality, but as an embodied response that includes cognitive and affective mobilization.  

 

Returning to the poem, however, there is no doubt where the power lies, and the pathos of the 

final stanza lies in the fact that Akhmatova places herself on the side of the powerless, “the least 

significant.” Although I argue for a dialogue between the two calls that does not happen in the 

poem, it does not mean that it is a dialogue on equal terms or that power is not still in play. There 

are consequences and disincentives to the backward glance, and advantages to sticking with the 

pravednik. Going back to the nursing context, this is evident in the reach of managerial 

regulation in hospitals, or in the prestige of quantitative research in academia. Looking back 

simply makes no sense to the pravednik of scientific progress, when evidence over five years old 

is worthless, and all that matters are outcomes, which lie in the future, and improved outcomes 

which lie further in the future. Nursing is a directed, purposeful activity, which does have to do 

with making things better, in the future, equipped with scientific knowledge of ways to do so, but 

nursing is at the same time a dialogue with the present – presenting - anguish, which comes from 

somewhere, somewhere behind us, in the past; nursing has to look back, heeding the call of 

anguish.   

 

Szymborska: A Cacophony of Calls 

 

I am now going to turn to the second poem entitled “Lot’s Wife,” by the Polish poet Wisława 

Szymborska, which offers up another angle from which to consider the call, and what we are 

supposed to do.2 Szymborska also brings us what was going on for Lot’s wife, she brings her 

alive, but unlike Akhmatova’s version, there is no simple alternative call to that of obedience, to 

God and to husband. Instead, Szymborska slyly presents a raft of possible reasons for the look 

back: “carelessly, while tying my sandal strap…from the disobedience of the meek…the futility 

of wandering…in shame…in anger…” They vary from the tragic, of despair and weariness, to 

the defiant - she spells out the self-righteousness that so often accompanies righteousness - from 

the vengeful to the merely accidental. She leaves us with an ambiguous ending, “It’s not 

inconceivable…”, “It’s possible…” None of the reasons she proposes in the poem are 

inconceivable, they are all very human, in many cases to the point of being humdrum. Much 

nursing practice is like this, we naturally recall moments when anguish calls, acute suffering, but 

often what call us to do the next thing is unremarkable. 

 

In Szymborska’s poem the locus of the call is different. For Akhmatova, anguish speaks, it calls, 

and she shows us how Lot’s wife responded. Does anguish call from within Lot’s wife? 

Presumably, but Akhmatova externalizes the call. In Szymborska’s poem we have direct access 

to the first-person and everything takes place in the moment before Lot’s wife is turned to a 



McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2022 Article 10    5 

pillar of salt. Quite where she is speaking from is anyone’s guess, but what she reports is a whole 

series of inner calls. It becomes more explicit that the call of anguish (and this is now very 

unsteadily standing in for a whole carnival of motivations) is moving from inside to out, unlike 

the call of the pravednik that comes unequivocally from without. If the call of anguish is 

emotional, the linguistic root of emotion is the Latin emovere, to move out (Online Etymology 

Dictionary, n.d.). Szymborska gives us the manifold of inner call but in response to external 

events. Outward call is turned around into a response that is also a call from within. Call is 

“modified in the guts of the living” in Auden’s phrase (Auden, 1940/1991, p. 247). We know 

what we are supposed to do when the call is not only heard, but digested and re-called as inner 

decision. 

 

But if Akhmatova’s version of Lot’s wife gives us two contrasting calls, either of which we can 

take as telling us what we are supposed to do, Szymborska’s version states the dilemma a bit 

differently. She shows us all kinds of things that might call out to us, some principled, some 

emotional, some trivial, some accidental but at the end of the poem we are not really any the 

wiser as to which call Lot’s wife responded to, nor are we any closer to working out what we are 

supposed to do. The message might be something like this; you are going to have all kinds of 

things coming at you, enjoining a response, and yet which one, or which ones you respond to and 

how, well, that you are going to have to decide when the time comes. We are back to square one. 

We need criteria, but in the light of everything Szymborska has shown us, just following the 

back of the self-righteous husband’s neck seems like a poor option and an easy surrender of the 

difficulty of having to choose. Szymborska’s call is anguish + x, where x is actually x,y, z and 

beyond. We have to exercise discernment but as soon as we do that, we invoke some kind of 

measure of rightness, of judgment about what we are supposed to do. Re-enter the pravednik, but 

now we are going to take its righteous voice into account, not merely follow it 

unquestioningly. Szymborska’s poem does not have the moral clarity of Akhmatova’s. It does 

not set out the problem so clearly, the problem of the bipolar pull between pravednik and anguish, 

but it is more acute in its depiction of actual decisional polyvalence3.  

 

How Do We Understand What We are Supposed to Do? 

 

As a nurse, deciding to heed either the unipolar call of the pravednik or of anguish is a mistake. I 

am not sure one even could since it is always a question of the mixture between the two. Too 

much pravednik may lead to forms of bureaucratic or scientific alienation, depending on the 

context. On the other hand, too much anguish can lapse into antinomianism, when someone 

claims to be a self-dependent fount of compassion, which will result either in entropy, because 

the calls of anguish are too many and too relentless to be able to do anything at all, or to 

becoming yet another kind of pravednik. Paradoxically, in terms of the antinomy I have been 

presenting, it is possible to become a pravednik for anguish, to insist upon the primacy of one’s 

own feeling of justice or compassion at the expense of others, to allow anguish to set into 

moralism. For example, when I see in the nursing literature that “compassion is the essence of 

nursing,” I hear the call of pravednik speaking, because it is a singular moral claim, it brooks no 

alternative, no backward glances.  

 

If Akhmatova’s poem lends us the thought of pravednik and anguish, as elements themselves in 

exchange with each other, as ingredients of the call, then Szymborska’s suggests the fragmented, 



McCaffrey  Journal of Applied Hermeneutics 2022 Article 10    6 

multiple, constant arising of calls in practice. These may be proximal or distant, urgent or mild, 

obvious or subtle, but they are of the stuff of nursing practice, calling constantly to the next 

action. In my analysis, there is one part of the story I have rather obviously ignored - the pillar of 

salt. In Akhmatova’s poem it is the dramatic hinge, in Szymborska’s it never quite happens but 

we know it is about to. For my purposes, it doesn’t fit - there is no sudden end, no stasis. I have 

not been considering the call as it is in the story as a biographical singular moment, but as a 

structure of call and response that keeps on happening. Nurses are in the moment of decision 

which is repeated but differently each time.  

 

References 

 

Akhmatova, A. (1973). Lot’s wife. (S. Kunitz & M. Hayward, Trans.). Poets.org. 

https://poets.org/poem/lots-wife  

 

Akhmatova, A. (1994). The complete poems of Anna Akhmatova: Updated and expanded edition. 

(J. Hemschemeyer, Trans.). Canongate Press. 

 

Auden, W.H. (1991). W.H. Auden: Collected poems. Vintage Books. 

 

Online Etymology Dictionary. (n.d.). Emotion. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=emotion  

 

Shorter Oxford Dictionary. (1993). Anguish. Oxford University Press. 

 

Steiner, G. (2011). The poetry of thought from Hellenism to Celan. New Directions.  

 

Szymborska, W. (2016). Map: Collected and last poems. (C. Cavanagh & S. Barańczak, 

Trans.). Mariner Books. 

 

Szymborska, W. (2016). Lot’s wife. (C. Cavanagh & S. Barańczak, 

Trans.). PoemHunter.com: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lot-s-wife-2/ 

 

 
1 I have not given the whole poem due to copyright restrictions. All quotations are from Judith Hemschemeyer’s 
translation (Akhmatova, 1994, pp. 273-4). You can find the whole poem online, in a translation by Stanley Kunitz 

and Max Hayward at https://poets.org/poem/lots-wife (see references).  

 
2 Here again, I have not given the whole text. I have used the translation by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław 

Barańczak (Szymborska, 2016, pp. 203-4). You can find this version online at: 

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lot-s-wife-2/ (see references). 

 
3 The contrast is partly explicable by when they were written. Akhmatova was writing in the immediate aftermath of 
the Bolshevik revolution and civil war. Looking back to what had been lost in the revolution could already be deadly. 

Her husband Nikolai Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks on trumped up charges of conspiracy in 1921. 

Symborska wrote her poem in 1970s Poland, where Communist rule had been locked in for thirty years. The stakes 

were not as high, but people had learned strategies of day-to-day accommodation under an oppressive state, what to 

say or not to say, what to do or not to do.  

https://poets.org/poem/lots-wife
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=emotion
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lot-s-wife-2/
https://poets.org/poem/lots-wife
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lot-s-wife-2/