Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Page 26
Hast thou an altar for this sacrifice?
O heaven! O vacant throne!
O crowned hierarchies that wear your crown
When His is put away!
Are ye unshamed that ye cannot dim
Your alien brightness to be liker him,
Assume a human passion, and down-lay
Your sweet secureness for congenial fears,
And teach your cloudless ever-burning eyes
The mystery of his tears?
Zerah. I am strong, I am strong.
Were I never to see my heaven again,
I would wheel to earth like the tempest rain
Which sweeps there with an exultant sound
To lose its life as it reaches the ground.
I am strong, I am strong.
Away from mine inward vision swim
The shining seats of my heavenly birth,
I see but his, I see but him —
The Maker’s steps on his cruel earth.
Will the bitter herbs of earth grow sweet
To me, as trodden by his feet?
Will the vexed, accurst humanity,
As worn by him, begin to be
A blessed, yea, a sacred thing
For love and awe and ministering?
I am strong, I am strong.
By our angel ken shall we survey
His loving smile through his woeful clay?
I am swift, I am strong,
The love is bearing me along.
Ador. One love is bearing us along.
SERAPHIM. PART THE SECOND.
Mid-air, above Judaea. ADOR and ZERAH are a little apart from the
visible Angelic Hosts.
Ador. Beloved! dost thou see? —
Zerah. Thee, — thee.
Thy burning eyes already are
Grown wild and mournful as a star
Whose occupation is for aye
To look upon the place of clay
Whereon thou lookest now.
The crown is fainting on thy brow
To the likeness of a cloud,
The forehead’s self a little bowed
From its aspect high and holy,
As it would in meekness meet
Some seraphic melancholy:
Thy very wings that lately flung
An outline clear, do flicker here
And wear to each a shadow hung,
Dropped across thy feet.
In these strange contrasting glooms
Stagnant with the scent of tombs,
Seraph faces, O my brother,
Show awfully to one another.
Ador. Dost thou see?
Zerah. Even so; I see
Our empyreal company,
Alone the memory of their brightness
Left in them, as in thee.
The circle upon circle, tier on tier,
Piling earth’s hemisphere
With heavenly infiniteness,
Above us and around,
Straining the whole horizon like a bow:
Their songful lips divorced from all sound,
A darkness gliding down their silvery glances, —
Bowing their steadfast solemn countenances
As if they heard God speak, and could not glow.
Ador. Look downward! dost thou see?
Zerah. And wouldst thou press that vision on my words?
Doth not earth speak enough
Of change and of undoing,
Without a seraph’s witness? Oceans rough
With tempest, pastoral swards
Displaced by fiery deserts, mountains ruing
The bolt fallen yesterday,
That shake their piny heads, as who would say
“We are too beautiful for our decay” —
Shall seraphs speak of these things? Let alone
Earth to her earthly moan!
Voice of all things. Is there no moan but hers?
Ador. Hearest thou the attestation
Of the roused universe
Like a desert-lion shaking
Dews of silence from its mane?
With an irrepressive passion
Uprising at once,
Rising up and forsaking
Its solemn state in the circle of suns,
To attest the pain
Of him who stands (O patience sweet!)
In his own hand-prints of creation,
With human feet?
Voice of all things. Is there no moan but ours?
Zerah. Forms, Spaces, Motions wide,
O meek, insensate things,
O congregated matters! who inherit,
Instead of vital powers,
Impulsions God-supplied;
Instead of influent spirit,
A clear informing beauty;
Instead of creature-duty,
Submission calm as rest.
Lights, without feet or wings,
In golden courses sliding!
Glooms, stagnantly subsiding,
Whose lustrous heart away was prest
Into the argent stars!
Ye crystal firmamental bars
That hold the skyey waters free
From tide or tempest’s ecstasy!
Airs universal! thunders lorn
That wait your lightnings in cloud-cave
Hewn out by the winds! O brave
And subtle elements! the Holy
Hath charged me by your voice with folly.[D]
Enough, the mystic arrow leaves its wound.
Return ye to your silences inborn,
Or to your inarticulated sound!
Ador. Zerah!
Zerah. Wilt thou rebuke?
God hath rebuked me, brother. I am weak.
Ador. Zerah, my brother Zerah! could I speak
Of thee, ‘twould be of love to thee.
Zerah. Thy look
Is fixed on earth, as mine upon thy face.
Where shall I seek His?
I have thrown
One look upon earth, but one,
Over the blue mountain-lines,
Over the forests of palms and pines,
Over the harvest-lands golden,
Over the valleys that fold in
The gardens and vines —
He is not there.
All these are unworthy
Those footsteps to bear,
Before which, bowing down
I would fain quench the stars of my crown
In the dark of the earthy.
Where shall I seek him?
No reply?
Hath language left thy lips, to place
Its vocal in thine eye?
Ador, Ador! are we come
To a double portent, that
Dumb matter grows articulate
And songful seraphs dumb?
Ador, Ador!
Ador. I constrain
The passion of my silence. None
Of those places gazed upon
Are gloomy enow to fit his pain.
Unto Him, whose forming word
Gave to Nature flower and sward.
She hath given back again,
For the myrtle — the thorn,
For the sylvan calm — the human scorn.
Still, still, reluctant seraph, gaze beneath!
There is a city ——
Zerah. Temple and tower,
Palace and purple would droop like a flower,
(Or a cloud at our breath)
If He neared in his state
The outermost gate.
Ador. Ah me, not so
In the state of a king did the victim go!
And THOU who hangest mute of speech
‘Twixt heaven and earth, with forehead yet
Stained by the bloody sweat,
God! man! Thou hast forgone thy throne in each.
Zerah. Thine eyes behold him?
Ador. Yea, below.
Track the gazing of mine eyes,
Naming God within thine hea
rt
That its weakness may depart
And the vision rise!
Seest thou yet, beloved?
Zerah. I see
Beyond the city, crosses three
And mortals three that hang thereon
‘Ghast and silent to the sun.
Round them blacken and welter and press
Staring multitudes whose father
Adam was, whose brows are dark
With his Cain’s corroded mark, —
Who curse with looks. Nay — let me rather
Turn unto the wilderness!
Ador. Turn not! God dwells with men.
Zerah. Above
He dwells with angels, and they love.
Can these love? With the living’s pride
They stare at those who die, who hang
In their sight and die. They bear the streak
Of the crosses’ shadow, black not wide,
To fall on their heads, as it swerves aside
When the victims’ pang
Makes the dry wood creak.
Ador. The cross — the cross!
Zerah. A woman kneels
The mid cross under,
With white lips asunder,
And motion on each.
They throb, as she feels,
With a spasm, not a speech;
And her lids, close as sleep,
Are less calm, for the eyes
Have made room there to weep
Drop on drop —
Ador. Weep? Weep blood,
All women, all men!
He sweated it, He,
For your pale womanhood
And base manhood. Agree
That these water-tears, then,
Are vain, mocking like laughter:
Weep blood! Shall the flood
Of salt curses, whose foam is the darkness, on roll
Forward, on from the strand of the storm-beaten years,
And back from the rocks of the horrid hereafter,
And up, in a coil, from the present’s wrath-spring,
Yea, down from the windows of heaven opening,
Deep calling to deep as they meet on His soul —
And men weep only tears?
Zerah. Little drops in the lapse!
And yet, Ador, perhaps
It is all that they can.
Tears! the lovingest man
Has no better bestowed
Upon man.
Ador. Nor on God.
Zerah. Do all-givers need gifts?
If the Giver said “Give,” the first motion would slay
Our Immortals, the echo would ruin away
The same worlds which he made. Why, what angel uplifts
Such a music, so clear,
It may seem in God’s ear
Worth more than a woman’s hoarse weeping? And thus,
Pity tender as tears, I above thee would speak,
Thou woman that weepest! weep unscorned of us!
I, the tearless and pure, am but loving and weak.
Ador. Speak low, my brother, low, — and not of love
Or human or angelic! Rather stand
Before the throne of that Supreme above,
In whose infinitude the secrecies
Of thine own being lie hid, and lift thine hand
Exultant, saying, “Lord God, I am wise!” —
Than utter here, “I love.”
Zerah. And yet thine eyes
Do utter it. They melt in tender light,
The tears of heaven.
Ador. Of heaven. Ah me!
Zerah. Ador!
Ador. Say on!
Zerah. The crucified are three.
Beloved, they are unlike.
Ador. Unlike.
Zerah. For one
Is as a man who has sinned and still
Doth wear the wicked will,
The hard malign life-energy,
Tossed outward, in the parting soul’s disdain,
On brow and lip that cannot change again.
Ador. And one —
Zerah. Has also sinned.
And yet (O marvel!) doth the Spirit-wind
Blow white those waters? Death upon his face
Is rather shine than shade,
A tender shine by looks beloved made:
He seemeth dying in a quiet place,
And less by iron wounds in hands and feet
Than heart-broke by new joy too sudden and sweet.
Ador. And ONE! —
Zerah. And ONE! —
Ador. Why dost thou pause?
Zerah. God! God!
Spirit of my spirit! who movest
Through seraph veins in burning deity
To light the quenchless pulses! —
Ador. But hast trod
The depths of love in thy peculiar nature,
And not in any thou hast made and lovest
In narrow seraph hearts! —
Zerah. Above, Creator!
Within, Upholder!
Ador. And below, below,
The creature’s and the upholden’s sacrifice!
Zerah. Why do I pause? —
Ador. There is a silentness
That answers thee enow,
That, like a brazen sound
Excluding others, doth ensheathe us round, —
Hear it. It is not from the visible skies
Though they are still,
Unconscious that their own dropped dews express
The light of heaven on every earthly hill.
It is not from the hills, though calm and bare
They, since their first creation,
Through midnight cloud or morning’s glittering air
Or the deep deluge blindness, toward the place
Whence thrilled the mystic word’s creative grace,
And whence again shall come
The word that uncreates,
Have lift their brows in voiceless expectation.
It is not from the places that entomb
Man’s dead, though common Silence there dilates
Her soul to grand proportions, worthily
To fill life’s vacant room.
Not there: not there.
Not yet within those chambers lieth He,
A dead one in his living world; his south
And west winds blowing over earth and sea,
And not a breath on that creating mouth.
But now, — a silence keeps
(Not death’s, nor sleep’s)
The lips whose whispered word
Might roll the thunders round reverberated.
Silent art thou, O my Lord,
Bowing down thy stricken head!
Fearest thou, a groan of thine
Would make the pulse of thy creation fail
As thine own pulse? — would rend the veil
Of visible things and let the flood
Of the unseen Light, the essential God,
Rush in to whelm the undivine?
Thy silence, to my thinking, is as dread.
Zerah. O silence!
Ador. Doth it say to thee — the NAME,
Slow-learning seraph?
Zerah. I have learnt.
Ador. The flame
Perishes in thine eyes.
Zerah. He opened his,
And looked. I cannot bear —
Ador. Their agony?
Zerah. Their love. God’s depth is in them. From his brows
White, terrible in meekness, didst thou see
The lifted eyes unclose?
He is God, seraph! Look no more on me,
O God — I am not God.
Ador. The loving is
Sublimed within them by the sorrowful.
In heaven we could sustain them.
Zerah. Heaven is dull,
Mine Ador, to man’s earth. The light that burns
In fluent, refluent motion
Along the crystal ocean;
The springing of the golden harps
between
The bowery wings, in fountains of sweet sound,
The winding, wandering music that returns
Upon itself, exultingly self-bound
In the great spheric round
Of everlasting praises;
The God-thoughts in our midst that intervene,
Visibly flashing from the supreme throne
Full in seraphic faces
Till each astonishes the other, grown
More beautiful with worship and delight —
My heaven! my home of heaven! my infinite
Heaven-choirs! what are ye to this dust and death,
This cloud, this cold, these tears, this failing breath,
Where God’s immortal love now issueth
In this MAN’S woe?
Ador. His eyes are very deep yet calm.
Zerah. No more
On me, Jehovah-man —
Ador. Calm-deep. They show
A passion which is tranquil. They are seeing
No earth, no heaven, no men that slay and curse,
No seraphs that adore;
Their gaze is on the invisible, the dread,
The things we cannot view or think or speak,
Because we are too happy, or too weak, —
The sea of ill, for which the universe,
With all its piled space, can find no shore,
With all its life, no living foot to tread.
But he, accomplished in Jehovah-being,
Sustains the gaze adown,
Conceives the vast despair,
And feels the billowy griefs come up to drown,
Nor fears, nor faints, nor fails, till all be finished.
Zerah. Thus, do I find Thee thus? My undiminished
And undiminishable God! — my God!
The echoes are still tremulous along
The heavenly mountains, of the latest song
Thy manifested glory swept abroad
In rushing past our lips: they echo aye
“Creator, thou art strong!
Creator, thou art blessed over all.”
By what new utterance shall I now recall,
Unteaching the heaven-echoes? Dare I say,
“Creator, thou art feebler than thy work!