ABBOT-- Not if it gives him strength
To do the work his spirit bids him do,
To wrestle with the dark and with the bright,
To wrestle better than he did before.
And shake the fruit down of that prophesy.
Who knows what God behind the horizon holds
For Oswald till the dawning of that day?
I somehow feel the dream is, as it were,
The warp to which the prophesy is woof,
And that beneath the hills unseen a loom
Rocks as it weaves in dogs and storm and deer
And underneath the meaning of it all.
But I was speaking of the witch's son.
This pebble here I take up in my hand.
I turn it, yet I always see one side.
The other side is toward the underworld,
And though I turned it till the Judgment Day,
That side would still be round there. Bid it grow,
Swell to a bowlder's, now the chapel's size,
And now a globe's. And let us hold it thus.
Above us, on our palms. Like Atlas now
I stand supporting it. (_Pointing as though under the globe._)
Down here I see
A little night following a little day
About a water-drop, a grain of sand,
A point in which my spirit lives and moves. (_Reaching up and around._)
How do I know that up here are not worlds
Lit with Gods' providence and bathed with soul?
What is my thought that it should scale these zones
And take my law of good and evil there
And recreate that life to what I know?
Is my eye God's, that it should see all things?
From what far mountains come the grains of gold
That sparkle in the river of my soul?
Ranges of being and tall peaks of thought
May hold up here a brighter metal still,
Some burning thing would dry my river bed.
The dreams that vein the dark sky of our sleep,
As lightnings vein the night and then are gone,
Whence come they and whither go they, that they leave
Vast expectation and the vacant eye?
And out beyond the chalice of our sleep
That cases round my dew-drop soul, who knows
What oceans roar with life beyond our life,
And spray with stars the dark rocks of the void?
How do I know what creatures come and go
Beyond my little line of night and day,
Doing the will of the Eternal Mind?
I am not Benedict to say, "This is He,
And this is not."
LOUIS-- Not even of the dwarf?
ABBOT--God is the author of the book we see
Whose pages are the mountains and the stars.
Though He may sit aloof, his soul pervades
Each word and letter. Prowling in the spring,
The mountain lion feels Him in her paws,
And the wild creatures of the caves are His.
LOUIS--Was He in Oswald's fall?
ABBOT-- 'Tis past my thought
How He should not be;--in his rising, too.
If God is with me when I climb a hill,
When I descend do I leave God somewhere
Upon the top? If only he ascends,
How came he in the valley, then, at first?
Only the ignorant halve the universe
And thresh events and say, "The _wheat_ is God's,"
Piecing their small minds out with nothingness.
The chaff too served its purpose in its time
And while it served its purpose it was good
And like the wheat it drew its strength from God.
Having served its end, is wheat itself not chaff?
If Oswald's fall is evil in our minds,
It is because we do not see its place.
But where my knowledge ends, does God end, too?
Our brother tumbling from the bluff that night
Into the gorge, but tumbled, as it were,
Off of God's fingers into his great palm.
Ascent and descent are in one straight line.
I see no angle in the universe,
A break in things, a point where God begins
And Satan ends. If, in this strange event,
The people see a movement of the sky
And stand amazed, I stand even more amazed
At what I see than they at seraphim.
For what I see is darkness giving light,
An earth-born thing showing capacity
For deeds divine, and busy in the dark
Not with its own low nature but with God.
I grapple with it and my light goes out.
I feel as though I walked in a strong wind
Along a reed, with only faith for eyes.
Reason calls it to me with a blind man's voice.
That helplessness should bring an angel down,
Is that as wonderful as that it should bring
A devil up to do an angel's work?
What _we_ see, Louis, is the miracle.
What _they_ see, while it jars our sense of things,
Falls nicely into the mental harmony.
LOUIS--Good becomes evil having served its end.
How Benedict would rage should he hear this.
ABBOT--Each mind takes of the light what it can hold.
LOUIS--You know that day in the scriptorium,
When you were reading the Symposium,
What he said, do you remember?
ABBOT-- Yes, I do.