Trying these problems as a lock,
Clarel upon the further marge
Caught sight of Vine. Upon a rock
Low couchant there, and dumb as that,
Bent on the wave Vine moveless sat.
The student after pause drew near:
Then, as in presence which though mute
Did not repel, without salute
He joined him.
Unto these, by chance
In ruminating slow advance
Came Rolfe, and lingered.
At Vine’s feet
A branchless tree lay lodged ashore,
One end immersed. Of form complete—
Half fossilized—could this have been,
In ages back, a palm-shaft green?
Yes, long detained in depths which store
A bitter virtue, there it lay,
Washed up to sight—free from decay
But dead.
And now in slouched return
From random prowlings, brief sojourn
As chance might prompt, the Jew they espy
Coasting inquisitive the shore
And frequent stooping. Ranging nigh,
In hirsute hand a flint he bore—
A flint, or stone, of smooth dull gloom:
“A jewel? not asphaltum—no:
Observe it, pray. Methinks in show
’Tis like the flagging round that Tomb
Ye celebrate.”
Rolfe, glancing, said,
“I err, or ’twas from Siddim’s bed
Or quarry here, those floor-stones came:
’Tis Stone-of-Moses called, they vouch;
The Arabs know it by that name.”
“Moses? who’s Moses?” Into pouch
The lump he slipped; while wistful here
Clarel in silence challenged Vine;
But not responsive was Vine’s cheer,
Discharged of every meaning sign.
With motive, Rolfe the talk renewed:
“Yes, here it was the cities stood
That sank in reprobation. See,
The scene and record well agree.”
“Tut, tut—tut, tut. Of aqueous force,
Vent igneous, a shake or so,
One here perceives the sign—of course;
All’s mere geology, you know.”
“Nay, how should one know that?”
“By sight,
Touch, taste—all senses in assent
Of common sense their parliament.
Judge now; this lake, with outlet none
And into which five streams discharge
From south; which east and west is shown
Walled in by Alps along the marge;
North, in this lake, the waters end
Of Jordan—end here, or dilate
Rather, and so evaporate
From surface. But do you attend?”
“Most teachably.”
“Well, now: assume
This lake was formed, even as they tell,
Then first when the Five Cities fell;
Where, I demand, ere yet that doom,
Where emptied Jordan?”
“Who can say?
Not I.”
“No, none. A point I make:
Coeval are the stream and lake!
I say no more.”
As came that close
A hideous hee-haw horrible rose,
Rebounded in unearthly sort
From shore to shore, as if retort
From all the damned in Sodom’s Sea
Out brayed at him. “Just God, what’s that?”
“The ass,” breathed Vine, with tropic eye
Freakishly impish, nor less shy;
Then, distant as before, he sat.
Anew Rolfe turned toward Margoth then;
“May not these levels high and low
Have undergone derangement when
The cities met their overthrow?
Or say there was a lake at first—
A supposition not reversed
By Writ—a lake enlarged through doom
Which overtook the cities? Come!”—
The Jew, recovering from decline
Arising from late asinine
Applause, replied hereto in way
Eliciting from Rolfe—“Delay:
What knowest thou? or what know I?
Suspect you may ere yet you die
Or afterward perchance may learn,
That Moses’ God is no mere Pam
With painted clubs, but true I AM.”
“Hog-Latin,” was the quick return;
“Plague on that ass!” for here again
Brake in the pestilent refrain.
Meanwhile, as if in a dissent
Not bordering their element,
Vine kept his place, aloof in air.
They could but part and leave him there;
The Hebrew railing as they went—
“Of all the dolorous dull men!
He’s like a poor nun’s pining hen.
And me too: should I let it pass?
Ass? did he say it was the ass?”
Hereat, timed like the clerk’s Amen
Yet once more did the hee-haw free
Come in with new alacrity.
Vine tarried; and with fitful hand
Took bits of dead drift from the sand
And flung them to the wave, as one
Whose race of thought long since was run—
For whom the spots enlarge that blot the golden sun.
34. MORTMAIN REAPPEARS
While now at poise the wings of shade
Outstretched overhang each ridge and glade,
Mortmain descends from Judah’s hight
Through sally-port of minor glens:
Against the background of black dens
Blacker the figure glooms enhanced.
Relieved from anxious fears, the group
In friendliness would have advanced
To greet, but shrank or fell adroop.
Like Hecla ice inveined with marl
And frozen cinders showed his face
Rigid and darkened. Shunning parle
He seated him aloof in place,
Hands clasped about the knees drawn up
As round the cask the binding hoop—
Condensed in self, or like a seer
Unconscious of each object near,
While yet, informed, the nerve may reach
Like wire under wave to furthest beach.
By what brook Cherith had he been,
Watching it shrivel from the scene—
Or voice aerial had heard,
That now he murmured the wild word;
“But, hectored by the impious years,
What god invoke, for leave to unveil
That gulf whither tend these modern fears,
And deeps over which men crowd the sail?”
Up, as possessed, he rose anon,
And crying to the beach went down:
“Repent! repent in every land
Or hell’s hot kingdom is at hand!
Yea, yea,
In pause of the artillery’s boom,
While now the armed world holds its own,
The comet peers, the star dips down;
Flicker the lamps in Syria’s tomb,
While Anti-Christ and Atheist set
On Anarch the red coronet!”
“Mad John,” sighed Rolfe, “dost there betray
The dire Vox Claman
s of our day?”
“Why heed him?” Derwent breathed: “alas!
Let him alone, and it will pass.—
What would he now?” Before the bay
Low bowed he there, with hand addressed
To scoop. “Unhappy, hadst thou best?”
Djalea it was; then calling low
Unto a Bethlehemite whose brow
Was wrinkled like the bat’s shrunk hide—
“Your salt-song, Beltha: warn and chide.”
“Would ye know what bitter drink
They gave to Christ upon the Tree?
Sip the wave that laps the brink
Of Siddim: taste, and God keep ye!
It drains the hills where alum’s hid—
Drains the rock-salt’s ancient bed;
Hither unto basin fall
The torrents from the steeps of gall—
Here is Hades’ water-shed.
Sinner, would ye that your soul
Bitter were and like the pool?
Sip the Sodom waters dead;
But never from thy heart shall haste
The Marah—yea, the after-taste.”
He closed.—Arrested as he stooped,
Did Mortmain his pale hand recall?
No; undeterred the wave he scooped,
And tried it—madly tried the gall.
35. PRELUSIVE
In Piranesi’s rarer prints,
Interiors measurelessly strange,
Where the distrustful thought may range
Misgiving still—what mean the hints?
Stairs upon stairs which dim ascend
In series from plunged Bastiles drear—
Pit under pit; long tier on tier
Of shadowed galleries which impend
Over cloisters, cloisters without end;
The hight, the depth—the far, the near;
Ring-bolts to pillars in vaulted lanes,
And dragging Rhadamanthine chains;
These less of wizard influence lend
Than some allusive chambers closed.
Those wards of hush are not disposed
In gibe of goblin fantasy—
Grimace—unclean diablery:
Thy wings, Imagination, span
Ideal truth in fable’s seat:
The thing implied is one with man,
His penetralia of retreat—
The heart, with labyrinths replete:
In freaks of intimation see
Paul’s “mystery of iniquity:”
Involved indeed, a blur of dream;
As, awed by scruple and restricted
In first design, or interdicted
By fate and warnings as might seem;
The inventor miraged all the maze,
Obscured it with prudential haze;
Nor less, if subject unto question,
The egg left, egg of the suggestion.
Dwell on those etchings in the night,
Those touches bitten in the steel
By aqua-fortis, till ye feel
The Pauline text in gray of light;
Turn hither then and read aright.
For ye who green or gray retain
Childhood’s illusion, or but feign;
As bride and suit let pass a bier—
So pass the coming canto here.
36. SODOM
Full night. The moon has yet to rise;
The air oppresses, and the skies
Reveal beyond the lake afar
One solitary tawny star—
Complexioned so by vapors dim,
Whereof some hang above the brim
And nearer waters of the lake,
Whose bubbling air-beads mount and break
As charged with breath of things alive.
In talk about the Cities Five
Engulfed, on beach they linger late.
And he, the quaffer of the brine,
Puckered with that heart-wizening wine
Of bitterness, among them sate
Upon a camel’s skull, late dragged
From forth the wave, the eye-pits slagged
With crusted salt.—“What star is yon?”
And pointed to that single one
Befogged above the sea afar.
“It might be Mars, so red it shines,”
One answered; “duskily it pines
In this strange mist.”—“It is the star
Called Wormwood. Some hearts die in thrall
Of waters which yon star makes gall;”
And, lapsing, turned, and made review
Of what that wickedness might be
Which down on these ill precincts drew
The flood, the fire; put forth new plea,
Which not with Writ might disagree;
Urged that those malefactors stood
Guilty of sins scarce scored as crimes
In any statute known, or code—
Nor now, nor in the former times:
Things hard to prove: decorum’s wile,
Malice discreet, judicious guile;
Good done with ill intent—reversed:
Best deeds designed to serve the worst;
And hate which under life’s fair hue
Prowls like the shark in sunned Pacific blue.
He paused, and under stress did bow,
Lank hands enlocked across the brow.
“Nay, nay, thou sea,
’Twas not all carnal harlotry,
But sins refined, crimes of the spirit,
Helped earn that doom ye here inherit:
Doom well imposed, though sharp and dread,
In some god’s reign, some god long fled.—
Thou gaseous puff of mineral breath
Mephitical; thou swooning flaw
That fann’st me from this pond of death;
Wert thou that venomous small thing
Which tickled with the poisoned straw?
Thou, stronger, but who yet couldst start
Shrinking with sympathetic sting,
While willing the uncompunctious dart!
Ah, ghosts of Sodom, how ye thrill
About me in this peccant air,
Conjuring yet to spare, but spare!
Fie, fie, that didst in formal will
Plot piously the posthumous snare.
And thou, the mud-flow—evil mass
Of surest-footed sluggishness
Swamping the nobler breed—art there?
Moan, Burker of kind heart: all’s known
To Him; with thy connivers, moan.—
Sinners—expelled, transmuted souls
Blown in these airs, or whirled in shoals
Of gurgles which your gasps send up,
Or on this crater marge and cup
Slavered in slime, or puffed in stench—
Not ever on the tavern bench
Ye lolled. Few dicers here, few sots,
Few sluggards, and no idiots.
’Tis thou who servedst Mammon’s hate
Or greed through forms which holy are—
Black slaver steering by a star,
’Tis thou—and all like thee in state.
Who knew the world, yet varnished it;
Who traded on the coast of crime
Though landing not; who did outwit
Justice, his brother, and the time—
These, chiefly these, to doom submit.
But who the manifold may tell?
And sins there be inscrutable,
Unutterable.�
�
Ending there
He shrank, and like an osprey gray
Peered on the wave. His hollow stare
Marked then some smaller bubbles play
In cluster silvery like spray:
“Be these the beads on the wives’-wine,
Tofana-brew?—O fair Medea—
O soft man-eater, furry-fine:
Oh, be thou Jael, be thou Leah—
Unfathomably shallow!—No!
Nearer the core than man can go
Or Science get—nearer the slime
Of nature’s rudiments and lime
In chyle before the bone. Thee, thee,
In thee the filmy cell is spun—
The mould thou art of what men be:
Events are all in thee begun—
By thee, through thee!—Undo, undo,
Prithee, undo, and still renew
The fall forever!”
On his throne
He lapsed; and muffled came the moan
How multitudinous in sound,
From Sodom’s wave. He glanced around:
They all had left him, one by one.
Was it because he open threw
The inmost to the outward view?
Or did but pain at frenzied thought,
Prompt to avoid him, since but naught
In such case might remonstrance do?
But none there ventured idle plea,
Weak sneer, or fraudful levity.
Two spirits, hovering in remove,
Sad with inefficacious love,
Here sighed debate: “Ah, Zoima, say;
Be it far from me to impute a sin,
But may a sinless nature win
Those deeps he knows?”—“Sin shuns that way;
Sin acts the sin, but flees the thought
That sweeps the abyss that sin has wrought.
Innocent be the heart and true—
Howe’er it feed on bitter bread—
That, venturous through the Evil led,
Moves as along the ocean’s bed
Amid the dragon’s staring crew.”
37. OF TRADITIONS
Credit the Arab wizard lean,
And still at favoring hour are seen
(But not by Franks, whom doubts debar)
Through waves the cities overthrown:
Seboym and Segor, Aldemah,
With two whereof the foul renown
And syllables more widely reign.
Astarte, worshiped on the Plain
Ere Terah’s day, her vigil keeps
Devoted where her temple sleeps
Herman Melville- Complete Poems Page 40