An Epistle containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician.
Karshish, the picker-up of learning’s crumbs,
The not-incurious in God’s handiwork
(This man’s-flesh he hath admirably made,
Blown like a bubble, kneaded like a paste,
To coop up and keep down on earth a space
That puff of vapor from his mouth, man’s soul)
--To Abib, all-sagacious in our art,
Breeder in me of what poor skill I boast,
Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks
Befall the flesh through too much stress and strain, {10}
Whereby the wily vapor fain would slip
Back and rejoin its source before the term,--
And aptest in contrivance (under God)
To baffle it by deftly stopping such:--
The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home
Sends greeting (health and knowledge, fame with peace)
Three samples of true snake-stone--rarer still,
One of the other sort, the melon-shaped
(But fitter, pounded fine, for charms than drugs),
And writeth now the twenty-second time. {20}
My journeyings were brought to Jericho:
Thus I resume. Who, studious in our art,
Shall count a little labor unrepaid?
I have shed sweat enough, left flesh and bone
On many a flinty furlong of this land.
Also, the country-side is all on fire
With rumors of a marching hitherward:
Some say Vespasian cometh, some, his son.
A black lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;
Lust of my blood inflamed his yellow balls: {30}
I cried and threw my staff, and he was gone.
Twice have the robbers stripped and beaten me,
And once a town declared me for a spy;
But at the end, I reach Jerusalem,
Since this poor covert where I pass the night,
This Bethany, lies scarce the distance thence
A man with plague-sores at the third degree
Runs till he drops down dead. Thou laughest here!
‘Sooth, it elates me, thus reposed and safe,
To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip, {40}
And share with thee whatever Jewry yields.
A viscid choler is observable
In tertians, I was nearly bold to say;
And falling-sickness hath a happier cure
Than our school wots of: there’s a spider here
Weaves no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
Sprinkled with mottles on an ash-gray back;
Take five and drop them. . .but who knows his mind,
The Syrian runagate I trust this to?
His service payeth me a sublimate {50}
Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye.
Best wait: I reach Jerusalem at morn,
There set in order my experiences,
Gather what most deserves, and give thee all--
Or I might add, Judaea’s gum-tragacanth
Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained,
Cracks ‘twixt the pestle and the porphyry,
In fine exceeds our produce. Scalp-disease
Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy:
Thou hadst admired one sort I gained at Zoar-- {60}
But zeal outruns discretion. Here I end.
Yet stay! my Syrian blinketh gratefully,
Protesteth his devotion is my price--
Suppose I write what harms not, though he steal?
I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush,
What set me off a-writing first of all.
An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang!
For, be it this town’s barrenness,--or else
The Man had something in the look of him,--
His case has struck me far more than ‘tis worth. {70}
So, pardon if--(lest presently I lose,
In the great press of novelty at hand,
The care and pains this somehow stole from me)
I bid thee take the thing while fresh in mind,
Almost in sight--for, wilt thou have the truth?
The very man is gone from me but now,
Whose ailment is the subject of discourse.
Thus then, and let thy better wit help all!
‘Tis but a case of mania: subinduced
By epilepsy, at the turning-point {80}
Of trance prolonged unduly some three days;
When, by the exhibition of some drug
Or spell, exorcization, stroke of art
Unknown to me and which ‘twere well to know,
The evil thing, out-breaking, all at once,
Left the man whole and sound of body indeed,--
But, flinging (so to speak) life’s gates too wide,
Making a clear house of it too suddenly,
The first conceit that entered might inscribe
Whatever it was minded on the wall {90}
So plainly at that vantage, as it were
(First come, first served), that nothing subsequent
Attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls
The just-returned and new-established soul
Hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart
That henceforth she will read or these or none.
And first--the man’s own firm conviction rests
That he was dead (in fact they buried him)
--That he was dead and then restored to life
By a Nazarene physician of his tribe: {100}
--‘Sayeth, the same bade “Rise”, and he did rise.
“Such cases are diurnal”, thou wilt cry.
Not so this figment!--not, that such a fume,
Instead of giving way to time and health,
Should eat itself into the life of life,
As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones, and all!
For see, how he takes up the after-life.
The man--it is one Lazarus a Jew,
Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age,
The body’s habit wholly laudable, {110}
As much, indeed, beyond the common health
As he were made and put aside to show.
Think, could we penetrate by any drug
And bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh,
And bring it clear and fair, by three days’ sleep!
Whence has the man the balm that brightens all?
This grown man eyes the world now like a child.
Some elders of his tribe, I should premise,
Led in their friend, obedient as a sheep,
To bear my inquisition. While they spoke, {120}
Now sharply, now with sorrow,--told the case,--
He listened not except I spoke to him,
But folded his two hands and let them talk,
Watching the flies that buzzed: and yet no fool.
And that’s a sample how his years must go.
Look if a beggar, in fixed middle-life,
Should find a treasure,--can he use the same
With straitened habits and with tastes starved small,
And take at once to his impoverished brain
The sudden element that changes things, {130}
That sets the undreamed-of rapture at his hand,
And puts the cheap old joy in the scorned dust?
Is he not such an one as moves to mirth--
Warily parsimonious, when no need,
Wasteful as drunkenness at undue times?
All prudent counsel as to what befits
The golden mean, is lost on such an one:
The man’s fantastic will is the man’s law.
So here--we call the treasure knowledge, say,
Increased beyond the fleshly faculty-- {140}
Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth,
Earth forced on a soul’s use while seeing heaven:
The man is witless of the size, the sum,
The value in proportion of all things,
Or whether it be little or be much.
Discourse to him of prodigious armaments
Assembled to besiege his city now,
And of the passing of a mule with gourds--
‘Tis one! Then take it on the other side,
Speak of some trifling fact,--he will gaze rapt {150}
With stupor at its very littleness
(Far as I see), as if in that indeed
He caught prodigious import, whole results;
And so will turn to us the by-standers
In ever the same stupor (note this point),
That we, too, see not with his opened eyes.
Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play,
Preposterously, at cross purposes.
Should his child sicken unto death,--why, look
For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness, {160}
Or pretermission of the daily craft!
While a word, gesture, glance from that same child
At play or in the school or laid asleep,
Will startle him to an agony of fear,
Exasperation, just as like. Demand
The reason why--“‘tis but a word,” object--
“A gesture”--he regards thee as our lord
Who lived there in the pyramid alone,
Looked at us (does thou mind?) when, being young,
We both would unadvisedly recite {170}
Some charm’s beginning, from that book of his,
Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst
All into stars, as suns grown old are wont.
Thou and the child have each a veil alike
Thrown o’er your heads, from under which ye both
Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match
Over a mine of Greek fire, did ye know!
He holds on firmly to some thread of life--
(It is the life to lead perforcedly)
Which runs across some vast, distracting orb {180}
Of glory on either side that meagre thread,
Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet--
The spiritual life around the earthly life:
The law of that is known to him as this,
His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.
So is the man perplext with impulses
Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,
Proclaiming what is right and wrong across,
And not along, this black thread through the blaze--
“It should be” balked by “here it cannot be”. {190}
And oft the man’s soul springs into his face
As if he saw again and heard again
His sage that bade him “Rise”, and he did rise.
Something, a word, a tick o’ the blood within
Admonishes: then back he sinks at once
To ashes, who was very fire before,
In sedulous recurrence to his trade
Whereby he earneth him the daily bread;
And studiously the humbler for that pride,
Professedly the faultier that he knows {200}
God’s secret, while he holds the thread of life.
Indeed the especial marking of the man
Is prone submission to the heavenly will--
Seeing it, what it is, and why it is.
‘Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last
For that same death which must restore his being
To equilibrium, body loosening soul
Divorced even now by premature full growth:
He will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live
So long as God please, and just how God please. {210}
He even seeketh not to please God more
(Which meaneth, otherwise) than as God please.
Hence, I perceive not he affects to preach
The doctrine of his sect whate’er it be,
Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do:
How can he give his neighbor the real ground,
His own conviction? Ardent as he is--
Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old
“Be it as God please” re-assureth him.
I probed the sore as thy disciple should: {220}
“How, beast,” said I, “this stolid carelessness
Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march
To stamp out like a little spark thy town,
Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?”
He merely looked with his large eyes on me.
The man is apathetic, you deduce?
Contrariwise, he loves both old and young,
Able and weak, affects the very brutes
And birds--how say I? flowers of the field--
As a wise workman recognizes tools {230}
In a master’s workshop, loving what they make.
Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb:
Only impatient, let him do his best,
At ignorance and carelessness and sin--
An indignation which is promptly curbed:
As when in certain travel I have feigned
To be an ignoramus in our art
According to some preconceived design,
And happed to hear the land’s practitioners
Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance, {240}
Prattle fantastically on disease,
Its cause and cure--and I must hold my peace!
Thou wilt object--Why have I not ere this
Sought out the sage himself, the Nazarene
Who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source,
Conferring with the frankness that befits?
Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech
Perished in a tumult many years ago,
Accused,--our learning’s fate,--of wizardry,
Rebellion, to the setting up a rule {250}
And creed prodigious as described to me.
His death, which happened when the earthquake fell
(Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss
To occult learning in our lord the sage
Who lived there in the pyramid alone),
Was wrought by the mad people--that’s their wont!
On vain recourse, as I conjecture it,
To his tried virtue, for miraculous help--
How could he stop the earthquake? That’s their way!
The other imputations must be lies: {260}
But take one, though I loath to give it thee,
In mere respect for any good man’s fame.
(And after all, our patient Lazarus
Is stark mad; should we count on what he says?
Perhaps not: though in writing to a leech
‘Tis well to keep back nothing of a case.)
This man so cured regards the curer, then,
As--God forgive me! who but God himself,
Creator and sustainer of the world,
That came and dwelt in flesh on it a while! {270}
--‘Sayeth that such an one was born and lived,
Taught, healed the sick, broke bread at his own house,
Then died, with Lazarus by, for aught I know,
And yet was. . .what I said nor choose repeat,
And must have so avouched himself, in fact,
In hearing of this very Lazarus
Who saith--but why all this of what he saith?
Why write of trivial matters, things of price
Calling at every moment for remark?
I noticed on the margin of a pool {280}
Blue-flowering borage, the Aleppo sort,
Aboundeth, very nitrous. It is strange!
Thy pardon for this long and tedious case,
Which, now that I review it, needs must seem
Unduly dwelt on, prolixly set forth!
Nor I myself discern in what is writ
Good cause for the peculiar interest
And awe indeed this man has touched me with.
Perhaps the journey’s end, the weariness
Had wrought upon me first. I met him thus: {290}
I crossed a ridge of short sharp broken hills
Like an old lion’s cheek teeth. Out there came
A moon made like a face with certain spots
Multiform, manifold, and menacing:
Then a wind rose behind me. So we met
In this old sleepy town at unaware,
The man and I. I send thee what is writ.
Regard it as a chance, a matter risked
To this ambiguous Syrian: he may lose,
Or steal, or give it thee with equal good. {300}
Jerusalem’s repose shall make amends
For time this letter wastes, thy time and mine;
Till when, once more thy pardon and farewell!
The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too--
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, “O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor may’st conceive of mine:
But love I gave thee, with myself to love, {310}
And thou must love me who have died for thee!”
The madman saith He said so: it is strange.
--
1. Karshish. . .To Abib. {that is, phrase finishes on line 7.}
17. snake-stone: a certain kind of stone supposed to be efficacious
when placed upon the bite of a snake, in absorbing or charming away
the poison.
21. My journeyings were brought to Jericho: i.e., in his last letter.
28. Vespasian: T. Flavius Sabinus Vespasianus, Roman emperor,
A.D. 70-79; sent by Nero in 66 to conduct the war against the Jews;
when proclaimed emperor, left his son Titus to continue the war.
24-33. his ardent scientific interest has caused him
to brave all dangers.
49. The Syrian runagate: perhaps I’m writing for nothing
in trusting my letter to him.
60. Thou hadst: wouldst have.
Zoar: one of the “cities of the plain”, S. E. of the Dead Sea
(Gen. 19:22).
65-78. Though he’s deeply impressed with the subject, he approaches it
with extreme diffidence, writing to the “all-sagacious” Abib.
82. exhibition: used in its medical sense of administering a remedy.
103. fume: vaporish fancy.
106. As saffron tingeth: Chaucer uses “saffron” metaphorically
as a verb:--
“And in Latyn I speke a wordes fewe,
To saffron with my predicacioun,
And for to stire men to devocioun.”--‘The Pardoner’s Prologue’.
113. Think, could WE penetrate by any drug.
141, 142. “Browning has drawn the portraiture of one to whom
the eternal is sensibly present, whose spirit has gained prematurely
absolute predominance: . . .and the result is. . .a being
‘Professedly the faultier that he knows God’s secret,
while he holds the thread of life’ (vv. 200, 201). Lazarus therefore,
while he moves in the world, has lost all sense of proportion
in things about him, all measure of and faculty of dealing with that
which sways his fellows. He has no power or will to win them
to his faith, but he simply stands among men as a patient witness
of the overwhelming reality of the divine: a witness whose authority
is confessed, even against his inclination, by the student of nature,
who turns again and again to the phenomenon which he affects
to disparage.
“In this crucial example Browning shows how the exclusive dominance
of the spirit destroys the fulness of human life, its uses and powers,
while it leaves a passive life, crowned with an unearthly beauty.
On the other hand, he shows in his study of Cleon that
the richest results of earth in art and speculation,
and pleasure and power, are unable to remove from life the desolation
of final gloom. . . . The contrast is of the deepest significance.
The Jewish peasant endures earth, being in possession of heaven:
the Greek poet, in possession of earth, feels that heaven,
some future state,
‘Unlimited in capability
For joy, as this is in desire for joy’,
is a necessity for man; but no,
‘Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!’
But we must not pause to follow out the contrast into details.
It is enough to see broadly that flesh and spirit each claim recognition
in connection with their proper spheres, in order that the present life
may bear its true result.”--Rev. Prof. Westcott on
‘Browning’s View of Life’ (‘B. Soc. Papers’, IV., pp. 401, 402).
166. object: offer in opposition; see v. 243.
167. our lord: some sage under whom they had learned; see v. 254.
174. Thou and the child have: i.e., for him, Lazarus.
177. Greek fire: see Gibbon, chap. 52. {a flammable liquid,
kept so secret that its exact constitution is still unknown.}
281. Aleppo: a city of Syria; the blue-flowering borage was supposed
to possess valuable medicinal virtues and exhilarating qualities.
301. Jerusalem’s repose shall make amends: he will avail himself of it
to write a better letter than this one.
A Martyr’s Epitaph.
(From ‘Easter Day’.)
I was born sickly, poor, and mean,
A slave: no misery could screen
The holders of the pearl of price
From Caesar’s envy; therefore twice
I fought with beasts, and three times saw
My children suffer by his law;
At last my own release was earned:
I was some time in being burned,
But at the close a Hand came through
The fire above my head, and drew {10}
My soul to Christ, whom now I see.
Sergius, a brother, writes for me
This testimony on the wall--
For me, I have forgot it all.
Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.
1.
Gr-r-r--there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
What? your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims--
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
2.
At the meal we sit together:
‘Salve tibi!’ I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year:
‘Not a plenteous cork-crop: scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What’s the Latin name for “parsley”?’
What’s the Greek name for Swine’s Snout?
3.
Whew! We’ll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf!
With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere ‘tis fit to touch our chaps--
Marked with L. for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
4.
SAINT, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the Convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horse-hairs,
--Can’t I see his dead eye glow,
Bright as ‘twere a Barbary corsair’s?
(That is, if he’d let it show!)
5.
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu’s praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange-pulp--
In three sips the Arian frustrate;
While he drains his at one gulp.
--
St. 5. the Arian: a follower of Arius (died 336 A.D.), who denied
that the Son was co-essential and co-eternal with the Father.
6.
Oh, those melons? If he’s able
We’re to have a feast! so nice!
One goes to the Abbot’s table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange!--And I, too, at such trouble,
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!
7.
There’s a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
One sure, if another fails:
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?
--
St. 7. text in Galatians: chap. 5, vv. 19-21, where are enumerated
“the works of the flesh”. There are seventeen named;
he uses twenty-nine indefinitely; it’s common in French
to use trente-six (36) for any pretty big number.
If I trip him: What if I; and so in next stanza.
a Manichee: a follower of Mani, who aimed to unite Parseeism,
or Parsism, with Christianity.
8.
Or, my scrofulous French novel
On gray paper with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe:
If I double down its pages
At the woful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in’t?
9.
Or, there’s Satan!--one might venture
Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he’d miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine. . .
‘St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratia
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r--you swine!
--
St. 9. Hy, Zy, Hine: represent the sound of the vesper bell.
Holy-Cross Day.
On which the Jews were forced to attend an Annual Christian Sermon in Rome.
--
* “By a bull of Gregory XIII. in the year 1584, all Jews above the age
of twelve years were compelled to listen every week to a sermon
from a Christian priest; usually an exposition of some passages
of the Old Testament, and especially those relating to the Messiah,
from the Christian point of view. This burden is not yet wholly removed
from them; and to this day, several times in the course of a year,
a Jewish congregation is gathered together in the church of S. Angelo
in Pescheria, and constrained to listen to a homily from a Dominican friar,
to whom, unless his zeal have eaten up his good feelings
and his good taste, the ceremony must be as painful as to his hearers.
In the same spirit of vulgar persecution, there is upon the gable
of a church, opposite one of the gates of the Ghetto, a fresco painting
of the Crucifixion, and, underneath, an inscription in Hebrew and Latin,
from the 2d and 3d verses of the 65th chapter of Isaiah--
‘I have spread out my hands all the day unto a rebellious people,
which walketh in a way that was not good, after their own thoughts;
a people that provoketh me to anger continually to my face.’”
--George S. Hillard’s Six Months in Italy. (1853.)
--
{"Now was come about Holy-Cross Day, and now must my lord preach
his first sermon to the Jews: as it was of old cared for
in the merciful bowels of the Church, that, so to speak, a crumb,
at least, from her conspicuous table here in Rome, should be,
though but once yearly, cast to the famishing dogs,
under-trampled and bespitten-upon beneath the feet of the guests.
And a moving sight in truth, this, of so many of the besotted
blind restif and ready-to-perish Hebrews! now maternally brought
--nay (for He saith, ‘Compel them to come in’), haled, as it were,
by the head and hair, and against their obstinate hearts,
to partake of the heavenly grace. What awakening, what striving
with tears, what working of a yeasty conscience! Nor was my lord
wanting to himself on so apt an occasion; witness the abundance
of conversions which did incontinently reward him: though not to my lord
be altogether the glory.”--Diary by the Bishop’s Secretary, 1600.}
What the Jews really said, on thus being driven to church,
was rather to this effect:--
1.
Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!
Blessedest Thursday’s the fat of the week.
Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough,
Stinking and savory, smug and gruff,
Take the church-road, for the bell’s due chime
Gives us the summons--‘tis sermon-time!
2.
Boh, here’s Barnabas! Job, that’s you?
Up stumps Solomon--bustling too?
Shame, man! greedy beyond your years
To handsel the bishop’s shaving-shears?
Fair play’s a jewel! Leave friends in the lurch?
Stand on a line ere you start for the church!
3.
Higgledy piggledy, packed we lie,
Rats in a hamper, swine in a sty,
Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve,
Worms in a carcass, fleas in a sleeve.
Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs
And buzz for the bishop--here he comes.
4.
Bow, wow, wow--a bone for the dog!
I liken his Grace to an acorned hog.
What, a boy at his side, with the bloom of a lass,
To help and handle my lord’s hour-glass!
Didst ever behold so lithe a chine?
His cheek hath laps like a fresh-singed swine.
5.
Aaron’s asleep--shove hip to haunch,
Or somebody deal him a dig in the paunch!
Look at the purse with the tassel and knob,
And the gown with the angel and thingumbob!
What’s he at, quotha? reading his text!
Now you’ve his curtsey--and what comes next?
6.
See to our converts--you doomed black dozen--
No stealing away--nor cog nor cozen!
You five, that were thieves, deserve it fairly;
You seven, that were beggars, will live less sparely;
You took your turn and dipped in the hat,
Got fortune--and fortune gets you; mind that!
7.
Give your first groan--compunction’s at work;
And soft! from a Jew you mount to a Turk.
Lo, Micah,--the selfsame beard on chin
He was four times already converted in!
Here’s a knife, clip quick--it’s a sign of grace--
Or he ruins us all with his hanging-face.
8.
Whom now is the bishop a-leering at?
I know a point where his text falls pat.
I’ll tell him to-morrow, a word just now
Went to my heart and made me vow
To meddle no more with the worst of trades:
Let somebody else play his serenades!
9.
Groan all together now, whee--hee--hee!
It’s a-work, it’s a-work, ah, woe is me!
It began, when a herd of us, picked and placed,
Were spurred through the Corso, stripped to the waist;
Jew brutes, with sweat and blood well spent
To usher in worthily Christian Lent.
10.
It grew, when the hangman entered our bounds,
Yelled, pricked us out to his church like hounds:
It got to a pitch, when the hand indeed
Which gutted my purse, would throttle my creed:
And it overflows, when, to even the odd,
Men I helped to their sins, help me to their God.
11.
But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock,
And the rest sit silent and count the clock,
Since forced to muse the appointed time
On these precious facts and truths sublime,--
Let us fitly employ it, under our breath,
In saying Ben Ezra’s Song of Death.
12.
For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died,
Called sons and sons’ sons to his side,
And spoke, “This world has been harsh and strange;
Something is wrong: there needeth a change.
But what, or where? at the last or first?
In one point only we sinned, at worst.
--
St. 12. Rabbi Ben Ezra: see biographical sketch subjoined to
the Argument of the Monologue entitled ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’.
13.
“The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet,
And again in his border see Israel set.
When Judah beholds Jerusalem,
The stranger-seed shall be joined to them:
To Jacob’s house shall the Gentiles cleave,
So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.
14.
“Ay, the children of the chosen race
Shall carry and bring them to their place:
In the land of the Lord shall lead the same,
Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame,
When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o’er
The oppressor triumph for evermore!
15.
“God spoke, and gave us the word to keep:
Bade never fold the hands nor sleep
‘Mid a faithless world,--at watch and ward,
Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.
By his servant Moses the watch was set:
Though near upon cock-crow, we keep it yet.
16.
“Thou! if thou wast he, who at mid-watch came,
By the starlight, naming a dubious name!
And if, too heavy with sleep--too rash
With fear--O thou, if that martyr-gash
Fell on thee coming to take thine own,
And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne--
17.
“Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.
But, the Judgment over, join sides with us!
Thine too is the cause! and not more thine
Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine,
Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed,
Who maintain thee in word, and defy thee in deed!
18.
“We withstood Christ then? Be mindful how
At least we withstand Barabbas now!
Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
To have called these--Christians, had we dared!
Let defiance to them pay mistrust of thee,
And Rome make amends for Calvary!
19.
“By the torture, prolonged from age to age,
By the infamy, Israel’s heritage,
By the Ghetto’s plague, by the garb’s disgrace,
By the badge of shame, by the felon’s place,
By the branding-tool, the bloody whip,
And the summons to Christian fellowship,--
--
St. 19. Ghetto: the Jews’ quarter in Rome, Venice, and other cities.
The name is supposed to be derived from the Hebrew ‘ghet’,
meaning division, separation, divorce.
20.
“We boast our proof that at least the Jew
Would wrest Christ’s name from the Devil’s crew.
Thy face took never so deep a shade
But we fought them in it, God our aid!
A trophy to bear, as we march, thy band
South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!”
{The late Pope abolished this bad business of the sermon.--R. B.}
--
The late Pope: Gregory XVI.
Saul.
1.
Said Abner, “At last thou art come! Ere I tell, ere thou speak,
Kiss my cheek, wish me well!” Then I wished it, and did kiss his cheek.
And he, “Since the King, O my friend, for thy countenance sent,
Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his tent
Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth yet,
Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water be wet.
For out of the black mid-tent’s silence, a space of three days,
Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer nor of praise,
To betoken that Saul and the spirit have ended their strife,
And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back upon life. {10}
2.
“Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved! God’s child with his dew
On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living and blue
Just broken to twine round thy harp-strings, as if no wild heat
Were now raging to torture the desert!”
3.
Then I, as was meet,
Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose on my feet,
And ran o’er the sand burnt to powder. The tent was unlooped;
I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I stooped;
Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered and gone,
That extends to the second enclosure, I groped my way on {20}
Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more I prayed,
And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid
But spoke, “Here is David, thy servant!” And no voice replied.
At the first I saw naught but the blackness; but soon I descried
A something more black than the blackness--the vast, the upright
Main prop which sustains the pavilion: and slow into sight
Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all.
Then a sunbeam, that burst through the tent-roof, showed Saul.
4.
He stood as erect as that tent-prop, both arms stretched out wide
On the great cross-support in the centre, that goes to each side; {30}
He relaxed not a muscle, but hung there as, caught in his pangs
And waiting his change, the king serpent all heavily hangs,
Far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance come
With the spring-time,--so agonized Saul, drear and stark, blind and dumb.
5.
Then I tuned my harp,--took off the lilies we twine round its chords
Lest they snap ‘neath the stress of the noontide--those sunbeams
like swords!
And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one after one,
So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done.
They are white, and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they have fed
Where the long grasses stifle the water within the stream’s bed; {40}
And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows star
Into eve and the blue far above us,--so blue and so far!
6.
--Then the tune, for which quails on the cornland will each leave his mate
To fly after the player; then, what makes the crickets elate
Till for boldness they fight one another: and then, what has weight
To set the quick jerboa a-musing outside his sand house--
There are none such as he for a wonder, half bird and half mouse!
God made all the creatures and gave them our love and our fear,
To give sign, we and they are his children, one family here.
7.
Then I played the help-tune of our reapers, their wine-song, when hand {50}
Grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, and great hearts expand
And grow one in the sense of this world’s life.--And then, the last song
When the dead man is praised on his journey--“Bear, bear him along
With his few faults shut up like dead flowerets! Are balm seeds not here
To console us? The land has none left such as he on the bier.
Oh, would we might keep thee, my brother!”--And then, the glad chant
Of the marriage,--first go the young maidens, next, she whom we vaunt
As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling.--And then, the great march
Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an arch
Naught can break; who shall harm them, our friends?--Then,
the chorus intoned {60}
As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned.
But I stopped here: for here in the darkness Saul groaned.
8.
And I paused, held my breath in such silence, and listened apart;
And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered: and sparkles ‘gan dart
From the jewels that woke in his turban at once with a start
All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart.
So the head: but the body still moved not, still hung there erect.
And I bent once again to my playing, pursued it unchecked,
As I sang,--
9.
“Oh, our manhood’s prime vigor! No spirit feels waste,
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. {70}
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock,
The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock
Of the plunge in a pool’s living water, the hunt of the bear,
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair.
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine,
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of wine,
And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well.
How good is man’s life, the mere living! how fit to employ
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy! {80}
Hast thou loved the white locks of thy father, whose sword thou didst guard
When he trusted thee forth with the armies, for glorious reward?
Didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held up as men sung
The low song of the nearly departed, and hear her faint tongue
Joining in while it could to the witness, ‘Let one more attest,
I have lived, seen God’s hand through a lifetime, and all was for best!’
Then they sung through their tears in strong triumph, not much,
but the rest.
And thy brothers, the help and the contest, the working whence grew
Such result as, from seething grape-bundles, the spirit strained true:
And the friends of thy boyhood--that boyhood of wonder and hope, {90}
Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the eye’s scope,--
Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch; a people is thine;
And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head combine!
On one head, all the beauty and strength, love and rage (like the throe
That, a-work in the rock, helps its labor and lets the gold go)
High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crowning them,--all
Brought to blaze on the head of one creature--King Saul!”
10.
And lo, with that leap of my spirit,--heart, hand, harp, and voice,
Each lifting Saul’s name out of sorrow, each bidding rejoice
Saul’s fame in the light it was made for--as when, dare I say, {100}
The Lord’s army, in rapture of service, strains through its array,
And upsoareth the cherubim-chariot--“Saul!” cried I, and stopped,
And waited the thing that should follow. Then Saul, who hung propped
By the tent’s cross-support in the centre, was struck by his name.
Have ye seen when Spring’s arrowy summons goes right to the aim,
And some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held (he alone,
While the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a broad bust of stone
A year’s snow bound about for a breastplate,--leaves grasp of the sheet?
Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to his feet,
And there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, your mountain of old, {110}
With his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages untold--
Yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow and scar
Of his head thrust ‘twixt you and the tempest--all hail, there they are!
--Now again to be softened with verdure, again hold the nest
Of the dove, tempt the goat and its young to the green on his crest
For their food in the ardors of summer. One long shudder thrilled
All the tent till the very air tingled, then sank and was stilled
At the King’s self left standing before me, released and aware.
What was gone, what remained? All to traverse ‘twixt hope and despair.
Death was past, life not come: so he waited. Awhile his right hand {120}
Held the brow, helped the eyes, left too vacant, forthwith to remand
To their place what new objects should enter: ‘twas Saul as before.
I looked up and dared gaze at those eyes, nor was hurt any more
Than by slow pallid sunsets in autumn, ye watch from the shore,
At their sad level gaze o’er the ocean--a sun’s slow decline
Over hills which, resolved in stern silence, o’erlap and intwine
Base with base to knit strength more intensely: so, arm folded arm
O’er the chest whose slow heavings subsided.
11.
What spell or what charm
(For, a while there was trouble within me), what next should I urge
To sustain him where song had restored him?--Song filled to the verge {130}
His cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that it yields
Of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty: beyond, on what fields,
Glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the eye
And bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup they put by?
He saith, “It is good”; still he drinks not: he lets me praise life,
Gives assent, yet would die for his own part.
12.
Then fancies grew rife
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep
Fed in silence--above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep;
And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie
‘Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip ‘twixt the hill and the sky. {140}
And I laughed--“Since my days are ordained to be passed with my flocks,
Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks,
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know!
Schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage that gains,
And the prudence that keeps what men strive for.” And now these old trains
Of vague thought came again; I grew surer; so, once more the string
Of my harp made response to my spirit, as thus--
13.
“Yea, my King,”
I began--“thou dost well in rejecting mere comforts that spring
From the mere mortal life held in common by man and by brute: {150}
In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it bears fruit.
Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree,--how its stem trembled first
Till it passed the kid’s lip, the stag’s antler; then safely outburst
The fan-branches all round; and thou mindest when these too, in turn
Broke a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect: yet more was to learn,
E’en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. Our dates shall we slight,
When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care for the plight
Of the palm’s self whose slow growth produced them? Not so! stem and branch
Shall decay, nor be known in their place, while the palm-wine shall stanch
Every wound of man’s spirit in winter. I pour thee such wine. {160}
Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for! the spirit be thine!
By the spirit, when age shall o’ercome thee, thou still shalt enjoy
More indeed, than at first when, inconscious, the life of a boy.
Crush that life, and behold its wine running! Each deed thou hast done
Dies, revives, goes to work in the world; until e’en as the sun
Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface,
Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace
The results of his past summer-prime,--so, each ray of thy will,
Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill
Thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too give forth {170}
A like cheer to their sons: who in turn, fill the South and the North
With the radiance thy deed was the germ of. Carouse in the past!
But the license of age has its limit; thou diest at last.
As the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose at her height,
So with man--so his power and his beauty forever take flight.
No! Again a long draught of my soul-wine! Look forth o’er the years!
Thou hast done now with eyes for the actual; begin with the seer’s!
Is Saul dead? In the depth of the vale make his tomb--bid arise
A gray mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built to the skies,
Let it mark where the great First King slumbers: whose fame would ye know?
Up above see the rock’s naked face, where the record shall go {181}
In great characters cut by the scribe,--Such was Saul, so he did;
With the sages directing the work, by the populace chid,--
For not half, they’ll affirm, is comprised there! Which fault to amend,
In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they shall spend
(See, in tablets ‘tis level before them) their praise, and record
With the gold of the graver, Saul’s story,--the statesman’s great word
Side by side with the poet’s sweet comment. The river’s a-wave
With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when prophet-winds rave:
So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their part {190}
In thy being! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that thou art!”
14.
And behold while I sang. . .but O Thou who didst grant me, that day,
And, before it, not seldom hast granted thy help to essay,
Carry on and complete an adventure,--my shield and my sword
In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was my word,--
Still be with me, who then at the summit of human endeavor
And scaling the highest, man’s thought could, gazed hopeless as ever
On the new stretch of heaven above me--till, mighty to save,
Just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance--God’s throne from
man’s grave!
Let me tell out my tale to its ending--my voice to my heart {200}
Which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night I took part,
As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with my sheep!
And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep,
For I wake in the gray dewy covert, while Hebron upheaves
The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, and Kidron retrieves
Slow the damage of yesterday’s sunshine.
15.
I say then,--my song
While I sang thus, assuring the monarch, and, ever more strong,
Made a proffer of good to console him--he slowly resumed
His old motions and habitudes kingly. The right hand replumed
His black locks to their wonted composure, adjusted the swathes {210}
Of his turban, and see--the huge sweat that his countenance bathes,
He wipes off with the robe; and he girds now his loins as of yore,
And feels slow for the armlets of price, with the clasp set before.
He is Saul, ye remember in glory,--ere error had bent
The broad brow from the daily communion; and still, though much spent
Be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, God did choose,
To receive what a man may waste, desecrate, never quite lose.
So sank he along by the tent-prop, till, stayed by the pile
Of his armor and war-cloak and garments, he leaned there awhile,
And sat out my singing,--one arm round the tent-prop, to raise {220}
His bent head, and the other hung slack--till I touched on the praise
I foresaw from all men in all time, to the man patient there;
And thus ended, the harp falling forward. Then first I was ‘ware
That he sat, as I say, with my head just above his vast knees
Which were thrust out on each side around me, like oak-roots which please
To encircle a lamb when it slumbers. I looked up to know
If the best I could do had brought solace: he spoke not, but slow
Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with care
Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow: through my hair
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, with kind power--
All my face back, intent to peruse it, as men do a flower. {231}
Thus held he me there with his great eyes that scrutinized mine--
And oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where was the sign?
I yearned--“Could I help thee, my father, inventing a bliss,
I would add, to that life of the past, both the future and this;
I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence,
As this moment,--had love but the warrant, love’s heart to dispense!”
16.
Then the truth came upon me. No harp more--no song more! outbroke--
17.
“I have gone the whole round of creation: I saw and I spoke;
I, a work of God’s hand for that purpose, received in my brain {240}
And pronounced on the rest of his handwork--returned him again
His creation’s approval or censure: I spoke as I saw.
I report, as a man may of God’s work--all’s love, yet all’s law.
Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each faculty tasked
To perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dewdrop was asked.
Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom laid bare.
Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the Infinite Care!
Do I task any faculty highest, to image success?
I but open my eyes,--and perfection, no more and no less,
In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God {250}
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.
And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew
(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too)
The submission of man’s nothing-perfect to God’s all-complete,
As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet.
Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity known,
I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my own.
There’s a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink,
I am fain to keep still in abeyance (I laugh as I think),
Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst {260}
E’en the Giver in one gift.--Behold, I could love if I durst!
But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o’ertake
God’s own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for love’s sake.
--What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small,
Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appal?
In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all?
Do I find love so full in my nature, God’s ultimate gift,
That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here the parts shift?
Here, the creature surpass the creator,--the end, what began?
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, {270}
And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can?
Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much less power,
To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvellous dower
Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a soul,
Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the whole?
And doth it not enter my mind (as my warm tears attest)
These good things being given, to go on, and give one more, the best?
Ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the height
This perfection,--succeed, with life’s dayspring, death’s minute of night?
Interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul, the mistake, {280}
Saul, the failure, the ruin he seems now,--and bid him awake
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find himself set
Clear and safe in new light and new life,--a new harmony yet
To be run and continued, and ended--who knows?--or endure!
The man taught enough by life’s dream, of the rest to make sure;
By the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified bliss,
And the next world’s reward and repose, by the struggles in this.
18.
“I believe it! ‘Tis thou, God, that givest, ‘tis I who receive:
In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe.
All’s one gift: thou canst grant it moreover, as prompt to my prayer, {290}
As I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms to the air.
From thy will, stream the worlds, life and nature, thy dread Sabaoth:
I will?--the mere atoms despise me! Why am I not loth
To look that, even that in the face too? Why is it I dare
Think but lightly of such impuissance? What stops my despair?
This;--‘tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do!
See the King--I would help him, but cannot, the wishes fall through.
Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich,
To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would--knowing which,
I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now! {300}
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou--so wilt thou!
So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown--
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down
One spot for the creature to stand in! It is by no breath,
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with death!
As thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved
Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being beloved!
He who did most, shall bear most; the strongest shall stand the most weak.
‘Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek
In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be {310}
A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me,
Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!”
19.
I know not too well how I found my way home in the night.
There were witnesses, cohorts about me, to left and to right,
Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware:
I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strugglingly there,
As a runner beset by the populace famished for news--
Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed with her crews;
And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and shot {320}
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge: but I fainted not,
For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, suppressed
All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy behest,
Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to rest.
Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from earth--
Not so much, but I saw it die out in the day’s tender birth;
In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the hills;
In the shuddering forests’ held breath; in the sudden wind-thrills;
In the startled wild beasts that bore oft, each with eye sidling still
Though averted with wonder and dread; in the birds stiff and chill {330}
That rose heavily as I approached them, made stupid with awe:
E’en the serpent that slid away silent--he felt the new law.
The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by the flowers;
The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved the vine-bowers:
And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent and low,
With their obstinate, all but hushed voices--“E’en so, it is so!”
--
320 et seq.: see note to St. 37, 38, of ‘By the Fireside’.
A Death in the Desert.
{Supposed of Pamphylax the Antiochene:
It is a parchment, of my rolls the fifth,
Hath three skins glued together, is all Greek
And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu:
Lies second in the surnamed Chosen Chest, {5}
Stained and conserved with juice of terebinth,
Covered with cloth of hair, and lettered Xi,
From Xanthus, my wife’s uncle, now at peace:
Mu and Epsilon stand for my own name.
I may not write it, but I make a cross {10}
To show I wait His coming, with the rest,
And leave off here: beginneth Pamphylax.}
--
1-12. The bracketed prefatory lines, explanatory of the parchment
on which are recorded the last hours and last talk of St. John
with his devoted attendants, purport to have been written by one
who was at the time the owner of the parchment. It appears
to have come into his possession through his wife, a niece of
the Xanthus who, with Pamphylax of Antioch, the supposed author
of the narrative (he having told it on the eve of his martyrdom
to a certain Phoebas, v. 653), and two others, is represented therein
as waiting on the dying apostle, and who afterwards “escaped to Rome,
was burned, and could not write the chronicle.” (vv. 56, 57.)
4. And goeth from Epsilon down to Mu: the reference is
to some numbering on the parchment.
6. terebinth: the turpentine tree.
--
I said, “If one should wet his lips with wine,
And slip the broadest plantain-leaf we find,
Or else the lappet of a linen robe, {15}
Into the water-vessel, lay it right,
And cool his forehead just above the eyes,
The while a brother, kneeling either side,
Should chafe each hand and try to make it warm,--
He is not so far gone but he might speak.” {20}
This did not happen in the outer cave,
Nor in the secret chamber of the rock,
Where, sixty days since the decree was out,
We had him, bedded on a camel-skin,
And waited for his dying all the while; {25}
But in the midmost grotto: since noon’s light
Reached there a little, and we would not lose
The last of what might happen on his face.
--
23. the decree: of persecution of the Christians,
perhaps that under Domitian. The poet probably did not think
of any particular persecution.
--
I at the head, and Xanthus at the feet,
With Valens and the Boy, had lifted him, {30}
And brought him from the chamber in the depths,
And laid him in the light where we might see:
For certain smiles began about his mouth,
And his lids moved, presageful of the end.
Beyond, and half way up the mouth o’ the cave, {35}
The Bactrian convert, having his desire,
Kept watch, and made pretence to graze a goat
That gave us milk, on rags of various herb,
Plantain and quitch, the rocks’ shade keeps alive:
So that if any thief or soldier passed {40}
(Because the persecution was aware),
Yielding the goat up promptly with his life,
Such man might pass on, joyful at a prize,
Nor care to pry into the cool o’ the cave.
Outside was all noon and the burning blue. {45}
--
36. the Bactrian convert: in vv. 649, 650, he is spoken of as
“but a wild childish man, and could not write nor speak,
but only loved.” Bactria was a kingdom in Central Asia;
the modern name is Balkh {a district in northern Afghanistan as of 1995}.
having his desire: as a new convert, the simple man was eager to serve,
even unto death.
41. aware: on the lookout; exercising a strict espionage.
--
“Here is wine”, answered Xanthus,--dropped a drop;
I stooped and placed the lap of cloth aright,
Then chafed his right hand, and the Boy his left:
But Valens had bethought him, and produced
And broke a ball of nard, and made perfume. {50}
Only, he did--not so much wake, as--turn
And smile a little, as a sleeper does
If any dear one call him, touch his face--
And smiles and loves, but will not be disturbed.
Then Xanthus said a prayer, but still he slept: {55}
It is the Xanthus that escaped to Rome,
Was burned, and could not write the chronicle.
Then the Boy sprang up from his knees, and ran,
Stung by the splendor of a sudden thought,
And fetched the seventh plate of graven lead {60}
Out of the secret chamber, found a place,
Pressing with finger on the deeper dints,
And spoke, as ‘twere his mouth proclaiming first,
“I am the Resurrection and the Life.”
--
60. the seventh plate of graven lead: one of the plates on which
John’s Gospel was graven. It contained, it appears, the 11th chapter,
in which Jesus says to Martha, 25th verse, “I am the Resurrection
and the Life.” The Boy uttered the words with such expression
as ‘twere HIS mouth first proclaiming them.
--
Whereat he opened his eyes wide at once, {65}
And sat up of himself, and looked at us;
And thenceforth nobody pronounced a word:
Only, outside, the Bactrian cried his cry
Like the lone desert-bird that wears the ruff,
As signal we were safe, from time to time. {70}
--
69. the lone desert-bird: the ruff may possibly be referred to.
See Webster, s.v.
--
First he said, “If a man declared to me,
This my son Valens, this my other son,
Were James and Peter,--nay, declared as well
This lad was very John,--I could believe!
--Could, for a moment, doubtlessly believe: {75}
So is myself withdrawn into my depths,
The soul retreated from the perished brain
Whence it was wont to feel and use the world
Through these dull members, done with long ago.
Yet I myself remain; I feel myself: {80}
And there is nothing lost. Let be, awhile!”
--
76. withdrawn into my depths: into the depths of his absolute being,
of the “what Is”; see the doctrine of the trinal unity of man
which follows.
--
{This is the doctrine he was wont to teach,
How divers persons witness in each man,
Three souls which make up one soul: first, to wit,
A soul of each and all the bodily parts, {85}
Seated therein, which works, and is what Does,
And has the use of earth, and ends the man
Downward; but, tending upward for advice,
Grows into, and again is grown into
By the next soul, which, seated in the brain, {90}
Useth the first with its collected use,
And feeleth, thinketh, willeth,--is what Knows:
Which, duly tending upward in its turn,
Grows into, and again is grown into
By the last soul, that uses both the first, {95}
Subsisting whether they assist or no,
And, constituting man’s self, is what Is--
And leans upon the former, makes it play,
As that played off the first: and, tending up,
Holds, is upheld by, God, and ends the man {100}
Upward in that dread point of intercourse,
Nor needs a place, for it returns to Him.
What Does, what Knows, what Is; three souls, one man.
I give the glossa of Theotypas.}
--
82-104. The supposed narrator, Pamphylax, gives in these
bracketed verses, on the authority of an imagined Theotypas,
a doctrine John was wont to teach, of the trinal unity of man--
the third “person” of which unity, “what Is”, being man’s essential,
absolute nature. The dying John is represented as having won his way
to the Kingdom of the “what Is”, the Kingdom of eternal truth
within himself. In Luke 17:20-21, we read: “And when he was
demanded of the Pharisees, when the Kingdom of God should come,
he answered them and said, The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation:
neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for, behold,
the Kingdom of God is within you.” In harmony with which,
Paracelsus is made to say, in Browning’s poem, “Truth is within ourselves;
. . . there is an inmost centre in us all, where truth abides in fulness”;
etc. See pp. 24 and 25 of this volume. {In this etext, see Chapter I,
‘The Spiritual Ebb and Flow, etc.’, of the Introduction.
Excerpt is shortly before the poem ‘Popularity’.} “Life,
you’ve granted me, develops from within. But INNERMOST OF THE INMOST,
MOST INTERIOR OF THE INTERNE, GOD CLAIMS HIS OWN,
DIVINE HUMANITY RENEWING NATURE” (Mrs. Browning’s ‘Aurora Leigh’).
Mrs. M. G. Glazebrook, in her paper on ‘A Death in the Desert’,
read at the 48th meeting of the Browning Society, Feb. 25th, 1887,
paraphrases these lines: “The first and lowest {soul} is that
which has to do with earth and corporeal things, the animal soul,
which receives primary sensations and is the immediate cause of action
--‘what Does’. The second is the intellect, and has its seat
in the brain: it is superior to the first, but dependent on it,
since it receives as material the actual experience which
the animal soul supplies; it is the feeling, thinking, willing soul
--‘what Knows’. The third, and highest, is the spirit of man,
the very principle of life, the divine element in man linking him
to God, which is self-subsistent and therefore independent of
sensation and knowledge, but nevertheless makes use of them,
and gives them existence and energy--‘what Is’.”
--
And then, “A stick, once fire from end to end; {105}
Now, ashes save the tip that holds a spark!
Yet, blow the spark, it runs back, spreads itself
A little where the fire was: thus I urge
The soul that served me, till it task once more
What ashes of my brain have kept their shape, {110}
And these make effort on the last o’ the flesh,
Trying to taste again the truth of things”--
(He smiled)--“their very superficial truth;
As that ye are my sons, that it is long
Since James and Peter had release by death, {115}
And I am only he, your brother John,
Who saw and heard, and could remember all.
Remember all! It is not much to say.
What if the truth broke on me from above
As once and oft-times? Such might hap again: {120}
Doubtlessly He might stand in presence here,
With head wool-white, eyes, flame, and feet like brass,
The sword and the seven stars, as I have seen--
I who now shudder only and surmise
‘How did your brother bear that sight and live?’ {125}
--
113. superficial truth: phenomenal, relative truth;
that which is arrived at through the senses, and belongs to the domain
of the “what Knows”. Essential, absolute truth can be known only
through a response thereto of the essential, the absolute,
the “what Is”, in man’s nature. John has attained to a measure
of absolute truth, and smiles on reverting to the very superficial
truth of things.
121-123. See The Revelation of St. John, chap. 1.
125. your brother: he means himself, of course.
--
“If I live yet, it is for good, more love
Through me to men: be naught but ashes here
That keep awhile my semblance, who was John,--
Still, when they scatter, there is left on earth
No one alive who knew (consider this!) {130}
--Saw with his eyes and handled with his hands
That which was from the first, the Word of Life.
How will it be when none more saith ‘I saw’?
“Such ever was love’s way: to rise, it stoops.
Since I, whom Christ’s mouth taught, was bidden teach, {135}
I went, for many years, about the world,
Saying, ‘It was so; so I heard and saw’,
Speaking as the case asked: and men believed.
Afterward came the message to myself
In Patmos isle; I was not bidden teach. {140}
But simply listen, take a book and write,
Nor set down other than the given word.
With nothing left to my arbitrament
To choose or change: I wrote, and men believed.
Then, for my time grew brief, no message more, {145}
No call to write again, I found a way,
And, reasoning from my knowledge, merely taught
Men should, for love’s sake, in love’s strength, believe;
Or I would pen a letter to a friend,
And urge the same as friend, nor less nor more: {150}
Friends said I reasoned rightly, and believed.
But at the last, why, I seemed left alive
Like a sea-jelly weak on Patmos strand,
To tell dry sea-beach gazers how I fared
When there was mid-sea, and the mighty things; {155}
Left to repeat, ‘I saw, I heard, I knew’,
And go all over the old ground again,
With Antichrist already in the world,
And many Antichrists, who answered prompt
‘Am I not Jasper as thyself art John? {160}
Nay, young, whereas through age thou mayest forget:
Wherefore, explain, or how shall we believe?’
I never thought to call down fire on such,
Or, as in wonderful and early days,
Pick up the scorpion, tread the serpent dumb; {165}
But patient stated much of the Lord’s life
Forgotten or misdelivered, and let it work:
Since much that at the first, in deed and word,
Lay simply and sufficiently exposed,
Had grown (or else my soul was grown to match, {170}
Fed through such years, familiar with such light,
Guarded and guided still to see and speak)
Of new significance and fresh result;
What first were guessed as points, I now knew stars,
And named them in the Gospel I have writ. {175}
For men said, ‘It is getting long ago:
Where is the promise of His coming?’--asked
These young ones in their strength, as loth to wait,
Of me who, when their sires were born, was old.
I, for I loved them, answered, joyfully, {180}
Since I was there, and helpful in my age;
And, in the main, I think such men believed.
Finally, thus endeavoring, I fell sick.
Ye brought me here, and I supposed the end,
And went to sleep with one thought that, at least, {185}
Though the whole earth should lie in wickedness,
We had the truth, might leave the rest to God.
Yet now I wake in such decrepitude
As I had slidden down and fallen afar,
Past even the presence of my former self, {190}
Grasping the while for stay at facts which snap,
Till I am found away from my own world,
Feeling for foot-hold through a blank profound,
Along with unborn people in strange lands,
Who say--I hear said or conceive they say-- {195}
‘Was John at all, and did he say he saw?
Assure us, ere we ask what he might see!’
--
156. I saw, I heard, I knew: expressions which occur throughout
John’s Revelation.
188-197. The poet provides, in these lines, for the prophetic character
of John’s discourse, its solution of the difficulties destined to beset
Christianity in the future, and especially of those which have been
raised in our own times. The historical bulwarks which the Strausses
and the Renans have endeavored to destroy, Christianity,
in its essential, absolute character, its adaptiveness to
spiritual vitality, and the wants of the soul, can do without.
Indeed, there will be much gained when the historical character
of Christianity is generally disregarded. Its impregnable fortress,
namely, the Personality, Jesus Christ, will remain, and mankind
will forever seek and find refuge in it. Arthur Symons,
in his ‘Introduction to the Study of Browning’, remarks: . . ."it is as
a piece of ratiocination--suffused, indeed, with imagination--
that the poem seems to have its raison d’etre. The bearing of
this argument on contemporary theories, may to some appear a merit,
to others a blemish. To make the dying John refute Strauss or Renan,
handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill,
is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous. But I can see
no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of Patmos
a prophetic insight into the future--no real inconsequence
in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last breath
in the defence of Christian truth against a foreseen scepticism.”
--
“And how shall I assure them? Can they share
--They, who have flesh, a veil of youth and strength
About each spirit, that needs must bide its time, {200}
Living and learning still as years assist
Which wear the thickness thin, and let man see--
With me who hardly am withheld at all,
But shudderingly, scarce a shred between,
Lie bare to the universal prick of light? {205}
Is it for nothing we grow old and weak,
We whom God loves? When pain ends, gain ends too.
To me, that story--ay, that Life and Death
Of which I wrote ‘it was’--to me, it is;
--Is, here and now: I apprehend naught else. {210}
Is not God now i’ the world His power first made?
Is not His love at issue still with sin,
Visibly when a wrong is done on earth?
Love, wrong, and pain, what see I else around?
Yea, and the Resurrection and Uprise {215}
To the right hand of the throne--what is it beside,
When such truth, breaking bounds, o’erfloods my soul,
And, as I saw the sin and death, even so
See I the need yet transiency of both,
The good and glory consummated thence? {220}
I saw the Power; I see the Love, once weak,
Resume the Power: and in this word ‘I see’,
Lo, there is recognized the Spirit of both
That moving o’er the spirit of man, unblinds
His eye and bids him look. These are, I see; {225}
But ye, the children, His beloved ones too,
Ye need,--as I should use an optic glass
I wondered at erewhile, somewhere i’ the world,
It had been given a crafty smith to make;
A tube, he turned on objects brought too close, {230}
Lying confusedly insubordinate
For the unassisted eye to master once:
Look through his tube, at distance now they lay,
Become succinct, distinct, so small, so clear!
Just thus, ye needs must apprehend what truth {235}
I see, reduced to plain historic fact,
Diminished into clearness, proved a point
And far away: ye would withdraw your sense
From out eternity, strain it upon time,
Then stand before that fact, that Life and Death, {240}
Stay there at gaze, till it dispart, dispread,
As though a star should open out, all sides,
Grow the world on you, as it is my world.
--
202. “Oh, not alone when life flows still do truth and power emerge,
but also when strange chance ruffles its current; in unused conjuncture,
when sickness breaks the body--hunger, watching, excess, or languor--
oftenest death’s approach--peril, deep joy, or woe.”
--Browning’s ‘Paracelsus’.
“The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made.
Stronger by weakness, wiser men become,
As they draw near to their eternal home.
Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view,
That stand upon the threshold of the new.”--Edmund Waller.
“Drawing near her death, she sent most pious thoughts as harbingers
to heaven; and her soul saw a glimpse of happiness through the chinks
of her sickness-broken body.” Fuller’s ‘Holy and Profane State’,