by Lord Byron
Angel. Stern hast thou been and stubborn from the womb,
As the ground thou must henceforth till; but he
Thou slew’st was gentle as the flocks he tended.
Cain. After the fall too soon was I begotten;
Ere yet my mother’s mind subsided from
The Serpent, and my sire still mourned for Eden.
That which I am, I am; I did not seek
For life, nor did I make myself; but could I 510
With my own death redeem him from the dust —
And why not so? let him return to day,
And I lie ghastly! so shall be restored
By God the life to him he loved; and taken
From me a being I ne’er loved to bear.
Angel. Who shall heal murder? what is done, is done;
Go forth! fulfil thy days! and be thy deeds
Unlike the last![The Angel disappears.
Adah. He’s gone, let us go forth;
I hear our little Enoch cry within
Our bower.
Cain. Ah! little knows he what he weeps for! 520
And I who have shed blood cannot shed tears!
But the four rivers would not cleanse my soul.
Think’st thou my boy will bear to look on me?
Adah. If I thought that he would not, I would — —
Cain (interrupting her).No,
No more of threats: we have had too many of them:
Go to our children — I will follow thee.
Adah. I will not leave thee lonely with the dead —
Let us depart together.
Cain. Oh! thou dead
And everlasting witness! whose unsinking
Blood darkens earth and heaven! what thou now art 530
I know not! but if thou seest what I am,
I think thou wilt forgive him, whom his God
Can ne’er forgive, nor his own soul. — Farewell!
I must not, dare not touch what I have made thee.
I, who sprung from the same womb with thee, drained
The same breast, clasped thee often to my own,
In fondness brotherly and boyish, I
Can never meet thee more, nor even dare
To do that for thee, which thou shouldst have done
For me — compose thy limbs into their grave — 540
The first grave yet dug for mortality.
But who hath dug that grave? Oh, earth! Oh, earth!
For all the fruits thou hast rendered to me, I
Give thee back this. — Now for the wilderness!
[Adah stoops down and kisses the body of Abel.
Adah. A dreary, and an early doom, my brother,
Has been thy lot! Of all who mourn for thee,
I alone must not weep. My office is
Henceforth to dry up tears, and not to shed them;
But yet of all who mourn, none mourn like me,
Not only for thyself, but him who slew thee. 550
Now, Cain! I will divide thy burden with thee.
Cain. Eastward from Eden will we take our way;
‘Tis the most desolate, and suits my steps.
Adah. Lead! thou shalt be my guide, and may our God
Be thine! Now let us carry forth our children.
Cain. And he who lieth there was childless! I
Have dried the fountain of a gentle race,
Which might have graced his recent marriage couch,
And might have tempered this stern blood of mine,
Uniting with our children Abel’s offspring! 560
O Abel!
Adah. Peace be with him!
Cain. But with me! — —
[Exeunt.
HEAVEN AND EARTH
A MYSTERY.
Founded on the Following Passage in Genesis, Chap. vi. 1, 2.
“And it came to pass … that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.”
“And woman wailing for her demon lover.”
Coleridge [Kubla Khan, line 16]
INTRODUCTION
Heaven and Earth was begun at Ravenna October 9,1821. “It occupied about fourteen days” (Medwin’s Conversations, 1824, p. 231), and was forwarded to Murray, November 9, 1821. “You will find it,” wrote Byron (Letters, 1901, v. 474), “pious enough, I trust — at least some of the Chorus might have been written by Sternhold and Hopkins themselves for that, and perhaps for the melody.” It was on “a scriptural subject” — ”less speculative than Cain, and very pious” (Letters, 1901, v. 475; vi. 31). It was to be published, he insists, at the same time, and, if possible, in the same volume with the “others” (Sardanapalus, etc.), and would serve, so he seems to have reflected (“The moment he reflects, he is a child,” said Goethe), as an antidote to the audacities, or, as some would have it, the impieties of Cain!
He reckoned without his publisher, who understood the temper of the public and of the Government, and was naturally loth to awaken any more “reasonable doubts” in the mind of the Chancellor with regard to whether a “scriptural drama” was irreverent or profane. The new “Mystery” was revised by Gifford and printed, but withheld from month to month, till, at length, “the fire kindled,” and, on the last day of October, 1821, Byron instructed John Hunt to “obtain from Mr. Murray Werner: a Drama, and another dramatic poem called Heaven and Earth.” It was published in the second number of The Liberal (pp. 165-206), January 1, 1823.
The same subject, the unequal union of angelic lovers with the daughters of men, had taken Moore’s fancy a year before Byron had begun to “dramatize the Old Testament.” He had designed a long poem, but having discovered that Byron was at work on the same theme, he resolved to restrict himself to the production of an “episode,” to “give himself the chance of … an heliacal rising,” before he was outshone by the advent of a greater luminary. Thanks to Murray’s scruples, and the “translation” of MSS. to Hunt, the “episode” took the lead of the “Mystery” by eight days. The Loves of the Angels (see Memoirs, etc., 1853, iv. 28) was published December 23, 1822. None the less, lyric and drama were destined to run in double harness. Critics found it convenient to review the two poems in the same article, and were at pains to draw a series of more or less pointed and pungent comparisons between the unwilling though not unwitting rivals.
Wilson, in Blackwood, writes, “The first [the Loves, etc.] is all glitter and point like a piece of Derbyshire spar, and the other is dark and massy like a block of marble…. Moore writes with a crow-quill, ... Byron writes with an eagle’s plume;” while Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh, likens Moore to “an aurora borealis” and Byron to “an eruption of Mount Vesuvius”!
There is, indeed, apart from the subject, nothing in common between Moore’s tender and alluring lyric and Byron’s gloomy and tumultuous rhapsody, while contrast is to be sought rather in the poets than in their poems. The Loves of the Angels is the finished composition of an accomplished designer of Amoretti, one of the best of his kind, Heaven and Earth is the rough and unpromising sketch thrown off by a great master.
Both the one and the other have passed out of the ken of readers of poetry, but, on the whole, the Loves of the Angels has suffered the greater injustice. It is opined that there may be possibilities in a half-forgotten work of Byron, but it is taken for granted that nothing worthy of attention is to be found in Moore. At the time, however, Moore scored a success, and Byron hardly escaped a failure. It is to be noted that within a month of publication (January 18, 1823) Moore was at work upon a revise for a fifth edition — consulting D’Herbelot “for the project of turning the poor ‘Angels’ into Turks,” and so “getting rid of that connection with the Scriptures,” which, so the Longmans feared, would “in the long run be a drag on the popularity of the poem” (Memoirs, etc., 1853, iv. 41). It was no wonder that Murray was “timorous” with regard to Byron and his “scriptural dram
as,” when the Longmans started at the shadow of a scriptural allusion.
Byron, in his innocence, had taken for his motto the verse in Genesis (ch. vi. 2), which records the intermarriage of the “sons of God” with the “daughters of men.” In Heaven and Earth the angels are angels, members, though erring members, of Jehovah’s “thundering choir,” and the daughters of men are the descendants of Cain. The question had come up for debate owing to the recent appearance of a translation of the Book of Enoch (by Richard Laurence, LL.D., Oxford, 1821); and Moore, by way of safeguarding himself against any suspicion of theological irregularity, is careful to assure his readers (“Preface” to Loves of the Angels, 1823, p. viii. and note, pp. 125-127) that the “sons of God” were the descendants of Seth, and not beings of a supernatural order, as a mis-translation by the LXX., assisted by Philo and the “rhapsodical fictions of the Book of Enoch” had induced the ignorant or the profane to suppose. Nothing is so dangerous as innocence, and a little more of that empeiria of which Goethe accused him, would have saved Byron from straying from the path of orthodoxy.
It is impossible to say for certain whether Laurence’s translation of the whole of the Book of Enoch had come under Byron’s notice before he planned his new “Mystery,” but it is plain that he was, at any rate, familiar with the well-known fragment, “Concerning the ‘Watchers’“ [Περὶ των Ἐγρηγόρων], which is preserved in the Chronographia of Georgius Syncellus, and was first printed by J. J. Scaliger in Thes. temp. Euseb. in 1606. In the prophecy of the Deluge to which he alludes (vide post, ), the names of the delinquent seraphs (Semjâzâ and Azâzêl), and of the archangelic monitor Raphael, are to be found in the fragment. The germ of Heaven and Earth is not in the Book of Genesis, but in the Book of Enoch.
Medwin, who prints (Conversations, 1824, pp. 234-238) what purports to be the prose sketch of a Second Part of Heaven and Earth (he says that Byron compared it to Coleridge’s promised conclusion of Christabel — ”that, and nothing more!”), detects two other strains in the composition of the “Mystery,” an echo of Goethe’s Faust and a “movement” which recalls the Eumenides of Æschylus. Byron told Murray that his fourth tragedy was “more lyrical and Greek” than he at first intended, and there is no doubt that with the Prometheus Vinctus he was familiar, if not at first hand, at least through the medium of Shelley’s rendering. But apart from the “Greek choruses,” which “Shelley made such a fuss about,” Byron was acquainted with, and was not untouched by, the metrical peculiarities of the Curse of Kehama, and might have traced a kinship between his “angels” and Southey’s “Glendoveers,” to say nothing of their collaterals, the “glumms” and “gawreys” of Peter Wilkins (see notes to Southey’s Curse of Kehama, Canto VI., Poetical Works, 1838, viii. 231-233).
Goethe was interested in Heaven and Earth. “He preferred it,” says Crabb Robinson (Diary, 1869, ii. 434), “to all the other serious poems of Byron…. ‘A bishop,’ he exclaimed, though it sounded almost like satire, ‘might have written it.’ Goethe must have been thinking of a German bishop!” (For his daughter-in-law’s translation of the speeches of Anah and Aholibamah with their seraph-lovers, see Goethe-Jahrbuch, 1899, pp. 18-21 [Letters, 1901, v. Appendix II. p. 518].)
Heaven and Earth was reviewed by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review, February, 1823, vol. 38, pp. 42-48; by Wilson in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, January, 1823, vol. xiii. pp. 71, 72; and in the New Monthly Magazine, N.S., 1823, vol. 7, pp. 353-358.
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
ANGELS.
Samiasa.
Azaziel.
Raphael, the Archangel.
MEN.
Noah and his Sons.
Irad.
Japhet.
WOMEN.
Anah.
Aholibamah.
Chorus of Spirits of the Earth. — Chorus of Mortals.
HEAVEN AND EARTH
PART I
Scene I. — A woody and mountainous district near Mount Ararat. — Time, midnight.
Enter Anah and Aholibamah.
Anah. Our father sleeps: it is the hour when they
Who love us are accustomed to descend
Through the deep clouds o’er rocky Ararat: —
How my heart beats!
Aho. Let us proceed upon
Our invocation.
Anah. But the stars are hidden.
I tremble.
Aho. So do I, but not with fear
Of aught save their delay.
Anah. My sister, though
I love Azaziel more than — — oh, too much!
What was I going to say? my heart grows impious.
Aho. And where is the impiety of loving 10
Celestial natures?
Anah. But, Aholibamah,
I love our God less since his angel loved me:
This cannot be of good; and though I know not
That I do wrong, I feel a thousand fears
Which are not ominous of right.
Aho. Then wed thee
Unto some son of clay, and toil and spin!
There’s Japhet loves thee well, hath loved thee long:
Marry, and bring forth dust!
Anah. I should have loved
Azaziel not less were he mortal; yet
I am glad he is not. I cannot outlive him. 20
And when I think that his immortal wings
Will one day hover o’er the sepulchre
Of the poor child of clay which so adored him,
As he adores the Highest, death becomes
Less terrible; but yet I pity him:
His grief will be of ages, or at least
Mine would be such for him, were I the Seraph,
And he the perishable.
Aho. Rather say,
That he will single forth some other daughter
Of earth, and love her as he once loved Anah. 30
Anah. And if it should be so, and she loved him,
Better thus than that he should weep for me.
Aho. If I thought thus of Samiasa’s love,
All Seraph as he is, I’d spurn him from me.
But to our invocation! — ’Tis the hour.
Anah.
Seraph!
From thy sphere!
Whatever star contain thy glory;
In the eternal depths of heaven
Albeit thou watchest with “the seven,” 40
Though through space infinite and hoary
Before thy bright wings worlds be driven,
Yet hear!
Oh! think of her who holds thee dear!
And though she nothing is to thee,
Yet think that thou art all to her.
Thou canst not tell, — and never be
Such pangs decreed to aught save me, —
The bitterness of tears.
Eternity is in thine years, 50
Unborn, undying beauty in thine eyes;
With me thou canst not sympathise,
Except in love, and there thou must
Acknowledge that more loving dust
Ne’er wept beneath the skies.
Thou walk’st thy many worlds, thou see’st
The face of him who made thee great,
As he hath made me of the least
Of those cast out from Eden’s gate:
Yet, Seraph dear! 60
Oh hear!
For thou hast loved me, and I would not die
Until I know what I must die in knowing,
That thou forget’st in thine eternity
Her whose heart Death could not keep from o’er-flowing
For thee, immortal essence as thou art!
Great is their love who love in sin and fear;
And such, I feel, are waging in my heart
A war unworthy: to an Adamite
Forgive, my Seraph! that such thoughts appear, 70
For sorrow is our element;
/>
Delight
An Eden kept afar from sight,
Though sometimes with our visions blent.
The hour is near
Which tells me we are not abandoned quite. —
Appear! Appear!
Seraph!
My own Azaziel! be but here,
And leave the stars to their own light! 80
Aho.
Samiasa!
Wheresoe’er
Thou rulest in the upper air —
Or warring with the spirits who may dare
Dispute with him
Who made all empires, empire; or recalling
Some wandering star, which shoots through the abyss,
Whose tenants dying, while their world is falling,
Share the dim destiny of clay in this;
Or joining with the inferior cherubim, 90
Thou deignest to partake their hymn —
Samiasa!
I call thee, I await thee, and I love thee.
Many may worship thee, that will I not:
If that thy spirit down to mine may move thee,
Descend and share my lot!
Though I be formed of clay,
And thou of beams
More bright than those of day
On Eden’s streams, 100
Thine immortality can not repay
With love more warm than mine
My love. There is a ray
In me, which, though forbidden yet to shine,
I feel was lighted at thy God’s and thine.
It may be hidden long: death and decay
Our mother Eve bequeathed us — but my heart
Defies it: though this life must pass away,
Is that a cause for thee and me to part?
Thou art immortal — so am I: I feel — 110
I feel my immortality o’ersweep
All pains, all tears, all fears, and peal,
Like the eternal thunders of the deep,
Into my ears this truth — ”Thou liv’st for ever!”
But if it be in joy
I know not, nor would know;
That secret rests with the Almighty giver,
Who folds in clouds the fonts of bliss and woe.
But thee and me he never can destroy;
Change us he may, but not o’erwhelm; we are 120
Of as eternal essence, and must war
With him if he will war with us; with thee
I can share all things, even immortal sorrow;
For thou hast ventured to share life with me,