Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Page 32
Love wronged, and virtue forfeit, and tears wept
Upon all, vainly! Alas, me! alas,
Who have undone myself, from all that best,
Fairest and sweetest, to this wretchedest
Saddest and most defiled — cast out, cast down —
What word metes absolute loss? let absolute loss
Suffice you for revenge. For I, who lived
Beneath the wings of angels yesterday,
Wander to-day beneath the roofless world:
I, reigning the earth’s empress yesterday,
Put off from me, to-day, your hate with prayers:
I, yesterday, who answered the Lord God,
Composed and glad as singing-birds the sun,
Might shriek now from our dismal desert, “God,”
And hear him make reply, “What is thy need,
Thou whom I cursed to-day?”
Adam. Eve!
Eve. I, at last,
Who yesterday was helpmate and delight
Unto mine Adam, am to-day the grief
And curse-mete for him. And, so, pity us,
Ye gentle Spirits, and pardon him and me,
And let some tender peace, made of our pain,
Grow up betwixt us, as a tree might grow,
With boughs on both sides! In the shade of which,
When presently ye shall behold us dead, —
For the poor sake of our humility,
Breathe out your pardon on our breathless lips,
And drop your twilight dews against our brows,
And stroking with mild airs our harmless hands
Left empty of all fruit, perceive your love
Distilling through your pity over us,
And suffer it, self-reconciled, to pass!
LUCIFER rises in the circle.
Lucifer. Who talks here of a complement of grief?
Of expiation wrought by loss and fall?
Of hate subduable to pity? Eve?
Take counsel from thy counsellor the snake,
And boast no more in grief, nor hope from pain,
My docile Eve! I teach you to despond
Who taught you disobedience. Look around: —
Earth spirits and phantasms hear you talk unmoved,
As if ye were red clay again and talked!
What are your words to them — your grief to them —
Your deaths, indeed, to them? Did the hand pause,
For their sake, in the plucking of the fruit,
That they should pause for you, in hating you?
Or will your grief or death, as did your sin,
Bring change upon their final doom? Behold,
Your grief is but your sin in the rebound,
And cannot expiate for it.
Adam. That is true.
Lucifer. Ay, that is true. The clay-king testifies
To the snake’s counsel, — hear him! — very true.
Earth Spirits. I wail, I wail!
Lucifer. And certes, that is true.
Ye wail, ye all wail. Peradventure I
Could wail among you. O thou universe,
That holdest sin and woe, — more room for wail!
Distant Starry Voice. Ah, ah, Heosphoros! Heosphoros!
Adam. Mark Lucifer! He changes awfully.
Eve. It seems as if he looked from grief to God
And could not see him. Wretched Lucifer!
Adam. How he stands — yet an angel!
Earth Spirits. We all wail!
Lucifer (after a pause). Dost thou remember, Adam, when the curse
Took us in Eden? On a mountain-peak
Half-sheathed in primal woods and glittering
In spasms of awful sunshine at that hour,
A lion couched, part raised upon his paws,
With his calm massive face turned full on thine,
And his mane listening. When the ended curse
Left silence in the world, right suddenly
He sprang up rampant and stood straight and stiff,
As if the new reality of death
Were dashed against his eyes, and roared so fierce,
(Such thick carnivorous passion in his throat
Tearing a passage through the wrath and fear)
And roared so wild, and smote from all the hills
Such fast keen echoes crumbling down the vales
Precipitately, — that the forest beasts,
One after one, did mutter a response
Of savage and of sorrowful complaint
Which trailed along the gorges. Then, at once,
He fell back, and rolled crashing from the height
Into the dusk of pines.
Adam. It might have been.
I heard the curse alone.
Earth Spirits. I wail, I wail!
Lucifer. That lion is the type of what I am.
And as he fixed thee with his full-faced hate,
And roared, O Adam, comprehending doom,
So, gazing on the face of the Unseen,
I cry out here between the Heavens and Earth
My conscience of this sin, this woe, this wrath,
Which damn me to this depth.
Earth Spirits. I wail, I wail!
Eve. I wail — O God!
Lucifer. I scorn you that ye wail,
Who use your petty griefs for pedestals
To stand on, beckoning pity from without,
And deal in pathos of antithesis
Of what ye were forsooth, and what ye are; —
I scorn you like an angel! Yet, one cry
I, too, would drive up like a column erect,
Marble to marble, from my heart to heaven,
A monument of anguish to transpierce
And overtop your vapoury complaints
Expressed from feeble woes.
Earth Spirits. I wail, I wail!
Lucifer. For, O ye heavens, ye are my witnesses,
That I, struck out from nature in a blot,
The outcast and the mildew of things good,
The leper of angels, the excepted dust
Under the common rain of daily gifts, —
I the snake, I the tempter, I the cursed, —
To whom the highest and the lowest alike
Say, Go from us — we have no need of thee, —
Was made by God like others. Good and fair,
He did create me! — ask him, if not fair!
Ask, if I caught not fair and silverly
His blessing for chief angels on my head
Until it grew there, a crown crystallized!
Ask, if he never called me by my name,
Lucifer — kindly said as “Gabriel” —
Lucifer — soft as “Michael!” while serene
I, standing in the glory of the lamps,
Answered “my Father,” innocent of shame
And of the sense of thunder. Ha! ye think,
White angels in your niches, — I repent,
And would tread down my own offences back
To service at the footstool? that’s read wrong!
I cry as the beast did, that I may cry —
Expansive, not appealing! Fallen so deep,
Against the sides of this prodigious pit
I cry — cry — dashing out the hands of wail
On each side, to meet anguish everywhere,
And to attest it in the ecstasy
And exaltation of a woe sustained
Because provoked and chosen.
Pass along
Your wilderness, vain mortals! Puny griefs
In transitory shapes, be henceforth dwarfed
To your own conscience, by the dread extremes
Of what I am and have been. If ye have fallen,
It is but a step’s fall, — the whole ground beneath
Strewn woolly soft with promise! if ye have sinned,
Your prayers tread high as angels! if ye have grieved,
Ye are too mortal to be
pitiable,
The power to die disproves the right to grieve.
Go to! ye call this ruin? I half-scorn
The ill I did you! Were ye wronged by me,
Hated and tempted and undone of me, —
Still, what’s your hurt to mine of doing hurt,
Of hating, tempting, and so ruining?
This sword’s hilt is the sharpest, and cuts through
The hand that wields it.
Go! I curse you all.
Hate one another — feebly — as ye can!
I would not certes cut you short in hate,
Far be it from me! hate on as ye can!
I breathe into your faces, spirits of earth,
As wintry blast may breathe on wintry leaves
And lifting up their brownness show beneath
The branches bare. Beseech you, spirits, give
To Eve who beggarly entreats your love
For her and Adam when they shall be dead,
An answer rather fitting to the sin
Than to the sorrow — as the heavens, I trow,
For justice’ sake gave theirs.
I curse you both,
Adam and Eve. Say grace as after meat,
After my curses! May your tears fall hot
On all the hissing scorns o’ the creatures here, —
And yet rejoice! Increase and multiply,
Ye in your generations, in all plagues,
Corruptions, melancholies, poverties,
And hideous forms of life and fears of death, —
The thought of death being always imminent,
Immoveable and dreadful in your life,
And deafly and dumbly insignificant
Of any hope beyond, — as death itself,
Whichever of you lieth dead the first,
Shall seem to the survivor — yet rejoice!
My curse catch at you strongly, body and soul,
And HE find no redemption — nor the wing
Of seraph move your way; and yet rejoice!
Rejoice, — because ye have not, set in you,
This hate which shall pursue you — this fire-hate
Which glares without, because it burns within —
Which kills from ashes — this potential hate,
Wherein I, angel, in antagonism
To God and his reflex beatitudes,
Moan ever, in the central universe,
With the great woe of striving against Love —
And gasp for space amid the Infinite,
And toss for rest amid the Desertness,
Self-orphaned by my will, and self-elect
To kingship of resistant agony
Toward the Good round me — hating good and love,
And willing to hate good and to hate love,
And willing to will on so evermore,
Scorning the past and damning the to-come —
Go and rejoice! I curse you.
[LUCIFER vanishes.
Earth Spirits.
And we scorn you! there’s no pardon
Which can lean to you aright.
When your bodies take the guerdon
Of the death-curse in our sight,
Then the bee that hummeth lowest shall transcend you:
Then ye shall not move an eyelid
Though the stars look down your eyes;
And the earth which ye defiled
Shall expose you to the skies, —
“Lo! these kings of ours, who sought to comprehend you.”
First Spirit.
And the elements shall boldly
All your dust to dust constrain.
Unresistedly and coldly
I will smite you with my rain.
From the slowest of my frosts is no receding.
Second Spirit.
And my little worm, appointed
To assume a royal part,
He shall reign, crowned and anointed,
O’er the noble human heart.
Give him counsel against losing of that Eden!
Adam. Do ye scorn us? Back your scorn
Toward your faces grey and lorn,
As the wind drives back the rain,
Thus I drive with passion-strife,
I who stand beneath God’s sun,
Made like God, and, though undone,
Not unmade for love and life.
Lo! ye utter threats in vain.
By my free will that chose sin,
By mine agony within
Round the passage of the fire,
By the pinings which disclose
That my native soul is higher
Than what it chose,
We are yet too high, O Spirits, for your disdain!
Eve. Nay, beloved! If these be low,
We confront them from no height.
We have stooped down to their level
By infecting them with evil,
And their scorn that meets our blow Scathes aright.
Amen. Let it be so.
Earth Spirits.
We shall triumph — triumph greatly
When ye lie beneath the sward.
There, our lily shall grow stately
Though ye answer not a word,
And her fragrance shall be scornful of your silence:
While your throne ascending calmly
We, in heirdom of your soul,
Flash the river, lift the palm-tree,
The dilated ocean roll,
By the thoughts that throbbed within you, round the islands.
Alp and torrent shall inherit
Your significance of will,
And the grandeur of your spirit
Shall our broad savannahs fill;
In our winds, your exultations shall be springing!
Even your parlance which inveigles,
By our rudeness shall be won.
Hearts poetic in our eagles
Shall beat up against the sun
And strike downward in articulate clear singing.
Your bold speeches our Behemoth
With his thunderous jaw shall wield.
Your high fancies shall our Mammoth
Breathe sublimely up the shield
Of Saint Michael at God’s throne, who waits to speed him:
Till the heavens’ smooth-grooved thunder
Spinning back, shall leave them clear,
And the angels, smiling wonder,
With dropt looks from sphere to sphere,
Shall cry “Ho, ye heirs of Adam! ye exceed him.”
Adam. Root out thine eyes, Sweet, from the dreary ground!
Beloved, we may be overcome by God,
But not by these.
Eve. By God, perhaps, in these.
Adam. I think, not so. Had God foredoomed despair
He had not spoken hope. He may destroy
Certes, but not deceive.
Eve. Behold this rose!
I plucked it in our bower of Paradise
This morning as I went forth, and my heart
Has beat against its petals all the day.
I thought it would be always red and full
As when I plucked it. Is it? — ye may see!
I cast it down to you that ye may see,
All of you! — count the petals lost of it,
And note the colours fainted! ye may see!
And I am as it is, who yesterday
Grew in the same place. O ye spirits of earth,
I almost, from my miserable heart,
Could here upbraid you for your cruel heart,
Which will not let me, down the slope of death,
Draw any of your pity after me,
Or lie still in the quiet of your looks,
As my flower, there, in mine.
[A bleak wind, quickened with indistinct Human Voices, spins around the
Earth-zodiac, filling the circle with its presence; and then, wailing
off into the East, carries the rose away with it. EVE falls upon
her
face. ADAM stands erect.
Adam. So, verily,
The last departs.
Eve. So Memory follows Hope,
And Life both. Love said to me, “Do not die,”
And I replied, “O Love, I will not die.
I exiled and I will not orphan Love.”
But now it is no choice of mine to die:
My heart throbs from me.
Adam. Call it straightway back!
Death’s consummation crowns completed life,
Or comes too early. Hope being set on thee
For others, if for others then for thee, —
For thee and me.
[The wind revolves from the East, and round again to the East, perfumed
by the Eden rose, and full of Voices which sweep out into articulation
as they pass.
Let thy soul shake its leaves
To feel the mystic wind — hark!
Eve. I hear life.
Infant Voices passing in the wind.
O we live, O we live —
And this life that we receive
Is a warm thing and a new,
Which we softly bud into
From the heart and from the brain, —
Something strange that overmuch is
Of the sound and of the sight,
Flowing round in trickling touches,
With a sorrow and delight, —
Yet is it all in vain?
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.
Youthful Voices passing.
O we live, O we live —
And this life that we achieve
Is a loud thing and a bold
Which with pulses manifold
Strikes the heart out full and fain —
Active doer, noble liver,
Strong to struggle, sure to conquer,
Though the vessel’s prow will quiver
At the lifting of the anchor:
Yet do we strive in vain?
Infant Voices passing.
Rock us softly,
Lest it be all in vain.
Poet Voices passing.
O we live, O we live —
And this life that we conceive
Is a clear thing and a fair,
Which we set in crystal air
That its beauty may be plain!
With a breathing and a flooding