Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series

by Robert Browning

To somehow make a shift and scramble through

  The world’s mud, careless if it splashed and spoiled,

  Provided they might so hold high, keep clean

  Their child’s soul, one soul white enough for three,

  And lift it to whatever star should stoop,

  What possible sphere of purer life than theirs

  Should come in aid of whiteness hard to save.

  I saw the star stoop, that they strained to touch,

  And did touch and depose their treasure on,

  As Guido Franceschini took away

  Pompilia to be his for evermore,

  While they sang “Now let us depart in peace,

  “Having beheld thy glory, Guido’s wife!”

  I saw the star supposed, but fog o’ the fen,

  Gilded star-fashion by a glint from hell;

  Having been heaved up, haled on its gross way,

  By hands unguessed before, invisible help

  From a dark brotherhood, and specially

  Two obscure goblin creatures, fox-faced this,

  Cat-clawed the other, called his next of kin

  By Guido the main monster, — cloaked and caped,

  Making as they were priests, to mock God more, —

  Abate Paul, Canon Girolamo.

  These who had rolled the starlike pest to Rome

  And stationed it to suck up and absorb

  The sweetness of Pompilia, rolled again

  That bloated bubble, with her soul inside,

  Back to Arezzo and a palace there —

  Or say, a fissure in the honest earth

  Whence long ago had curled the vapour first,

  Blown big by nether fires to appal day:

  It touched home, broke, and blasted far and wide.

  I saw the cheated couple find the cheat

  And guess what foul rite they were captured for, —

  Too fain to follow over hill and dale

  That child of theirs caught up thus in the cloud

  And carried by the Prince o’ the Power of the Air

  Whither he would, to wilderness or sea.

  I saw them, in the potency of fear,

  Break somehow through the satyr-family

  (For a grey mother with a monkey-mien,

  Mopping and mowing, was apparent too,

  As, confident of capture, all took hands

  And danced about the captives in a ring)

  — Saw them break through, breathe safe, at Rome again,

  Saved by the selfish instinct, losing so

  Their loved one left with haters. These I saw,

  In recrudescency of baffled hate,

  Prepare to wring the uttermost revenge

  From body and soul thus left them: all was sure,

  Fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced,

  The victim stripped and prostrate: what of God?

  The cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash,

  Quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i’ the dust the crew,

  As, in a glory of armour like Saint George,

  Out again sprang the young good beauteous priest

  Bearing away the lady in his arms,

  Saved for a splendid minute and no more.

  For, whom i’ the path did that priest come upon,

  He and the poor lost lady borne so brave,

  — Checking the song of praise in me, had else

  Swelled to the full for God’s will done on earth —

  Whom but a dusk misfeatured messenger,

  No other than the angel of this life,

  Whose care is lest men see too much at once.

  He made the sign, such God-glimpse must suffice,

  Nor prejudice the Prince o’ the Power of the Air,

  Whose ministration piles us overhead

  What we call, first, earth’s roof and, last, heaven’s floor,

  Now grate o’ the trap, then outlet of the cage:

  So took the lady, left the priest alone,

  And once more canopied the world with black.

  But through the blackness I saw Rome again,

  And where a solitary villa stood

  In a lone garden-quarter: it was eve,

  The second of the year, and oh so cold!

  Ever and anon there flittered through the air

  A snow-flake, and a scanty couch of snow

  Crusted the grass-walk and the garden-mould.

  All was grave, silent, sinister, — when, ha?

  Glimmeringly did a pack of were-wolves pad

  The snow, those flames were Guido’s eyes in front,

  And all five found and footed it, the track,

  To where a threshold-streak of warmth and light

  Betrayed the villa-door with life inside,

  While an inch outside were those blood-bright eyes,

  And black lips wrinkling o’er the flash of teeth,

  And tongues that lolled — Oh God that madest man!

  They parleyed in their language. Then one whined —

  That was the policy and master-stroke —

  Deep in his throat whispered what seemed a name —

  “Open to Caponsacchi!” Guido cried:

  “Gabriel!” cried Lucifer at Eden-gate.

  Wide as a heart, opened the door at once,

  Showing the joyous couple, and their child

  The two-weeks’ mother, to the wolves, the wolves

  To them. Close eyes! And when the corpses lay

  Stark-stretched, and those the wolves, their wolf-work done,

  Were safe-embosomed by the night again,

  I knew a necessary change in things;

  As when the worst watch of the night gives way,

  And there comes duly, to take cognisance,

  The scrutinising eye-point of some star —

  And who despairs of a new daybreak now?

  Lo, the first ray protruded on those five!

  It reached them, and each felon writhed transfixed.

  Awhile they palpitated on the spear

  Motionless over Tophet: stand or fall?

  “I say, the spear should fall — should stand, I say!”

  Cried the world come to judgment, granting grace

  Or dealing doom according to world’s wont,

  Those world’s-bystanders grouped on Rome’s cross-road

  At prick and summons of the primal curse

  Which bids man love as well as make a lie.

  There prattled they, discoursed the right and wrong,

  Turned wrong to right, proved wolves sheep and sheep wolves,

  So that you scarce distinguished fell from fleece;

  Till out spoke a great guardian of the fold,

  Stood up, put forth his hand that held the crook,

  And motioned that the arrested point decline:

  Horribly off, the wriggling dead-weight reeled,

  Rushed to the bottom and lay ruined there.

  Though still at the pit’s mouth, despite the smoke

  O’ the burning, tarriers turned again to talk

  And trim the balance, and detect at least

  A touch of wolf in what showed whitest sheep,

  A cross of sheep redeeming the whole wolf, —

  Vex truth a little longer: — less and less,

  Because years came and went, and more and more

  Brought new lies with them to be loved in turn.

  Till all at once the memory of the thing, —

  The fact that, wolves or sheep, such creatures were, —

  Which hitherto, however men supposed,

  Had somehow plain and pillar-like prevailed

  I’ the midst of them, indisputably fact,

  Granite, time’s tooth should grate against, not graze, —

  Why, this proved standstone, friable, fast to fly

  And give its grain away at wish o’ the wind.

  Ever and ever more diminutive,

  Base gone, shaft lost, only entablature,
<
br />   Dwindled into no bigger than a book,

  Lay of the column; and that little, left

  By the roadside ‘mid the ordure, shards, and weeds,

  Until I haply, wandering that way,

  Kicked it up, turned it over, and recognised,

  For all the crumblement, this abacus,

  This square old yellow book, — could calculate

  By this the lost proportions of the style.

  This was it from, my fancy with those facts,

  I used to tell the tale, turned gay to grave,

  But lacked a listener seldom; such alloy,

  Such substance of me interfused the gold

  Which, wrought into a shapely ring therewith,

  Hammered and filed, fingered and favoured, last

  Lay ready for the renovating wash

  O’ the water. “How much of the tale was true?”

  I disappeared; the book grew all in all;

  The lawyers’ pleadings swelled back to their size, —

  Doubled in two, the crease upon them yet,

  For more commodity of carriage, see! —

  And these are letters, veritable sheets

  That brought posthaste the news to Florence, writ

  At Rome the day Count Guido died, we find,

  To stay the craving of a client there,

  Who bound the same and so produced my book.

  Lovers of dead truth, did ye fare the worse?

  Lovers of live truth, found ye false my tale?

  Well, now; there’s nothing in nor out o’ the world

  Good except truth: yet this, the something else,

  What’s this then, which proves good yet seems untrue?

  This that I mixed with truth, motions of mine

  That quickened, made the inertness mallealable

  O’ the gold was not mine, — what’s your name for this?

  Are means to the end, themselves in part the end?

  Is fiction which makes fact alive, fact too?

  The somehow may be thishow.

  I find first

  Writ down for very A B C of fact,

  “In the beginning God made heaven and earth;”

  From which, no matter with what lisp, I spell

  And speak out a consequence — that man,

  Man, — as befits the made, the inferior thing, —

  Purposed, since made, to grow, not make in turn,

  Yet forced to try and make, else fail to grow, —

  Formed to rise, reach at, if not grasp and gain

  The good beyond him, — which attempt is growth, —

  Repeats God’s process in man’s due degree,

  Attaining man’s proportionate result, —

  Creates, no, but resuscitates, perhaps.

  Inalienable, the arch-prerogative

  Which turns thought, act — conceives, expresses too!

  No less, man, bounded, yearning to be free,

  May so project his surplusage of soul

  In search of body, so add self to self

  By owning what lay ownerless before, —

  So, find so fill full, so appropriate forms —

  That, although nothing which had never life

  Shall get life from him, be, not having been,

  Yet, something dead may get to live again,

  Something with too much life or not enough,

  Which, either way imperfect, ended once:

  An end whereat man’s impulse intervenes,

  Makes new beginning, starts the dead alive,

  Completes the incomplete and saves the thing.

  Man’s breath were vain to light a virgin wick, —

  Half-burned-out, all but quite-quenched wicks o’ the lamp

  Stationed for temple-service on this earth,

  These indeed let him breathe on and relume!

  For such man’s feat is, in the due degree,

  — Mimic creation, galvanism for life,

  But still a glory portioned in the scale.

  Why did the mage say, — feeling as we are wont

  For truth, and stopping midway short of truth,

  And resting on a lie, — ”I raise a ghost?”

  “Because,” he taught adepts, “man makes not man.

  “Yet by a special gift, an art of arts,

  “More insight and more outsight and much more

  “Will to use both of these than boast my mates,

  “I can detach from me, commission forth

  “Half of my soul; which in its pilgrimage

  “O’er old unwandered waste ways of the world,

  “May chance upon some fragment of a whole,

  “Rag of flesh, scrap of bone in dim disuse,

  “Smoking flax that fed fire once: prompt therein

  “I enter, spark-like, put old powers to play,

  “Push lines out to the limit, lead forth last

  “(By a moonrise through a ruin of a crypt)

  “What shall be mistily seen, murmuringly heard,

  “Mistakenly felt: then write my name with Faust’s!”

  Oh, Faust, why Faust? Was not Elisha once? —

  Who bade them lay his staff on a corpse-face.

  There was no voice, no hearing: he went in

  Therefore, and shut the door upon them twain,

  And prayed unto the Lord: and he went up

  And lay upon the corpse, dead on the couch,

  And put his mouth upon its mouth, his eyes

  Upon its eyes, his hands upon its hands,

  And stretched him on the flesh; the flesh waxed warm:

  And he returned, walked to and fro the house,

  And went up, stretched him on the flesh again,

  And the eyes opened. ‘Tis a credible feat

  With the right man and way.

  Enough of me!

  The Book! I turn its medicinable leaves

  In London now till, as in Florence erst,

  A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb,

  And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair,

  Letting me have my will again with these

  — How title I the dead alive once more?

  Count Guido Franceschini the Aretine,

  Descended of an ancient house, though poor,

  A beak-nosed bushy-bearded black-haired lord,

  Lean, pallid, low of stature yet robust,

  Fifty years old, — having four years ago

  Married Pompilia Comparini, young,

  Good, beautiful, at Rome, where she was born,

  And brought her to Arezzo, where they lived

  Unhappy lives, whatever curse the cause, —

  This husband, taking four accomplices,

  Followed this wife to Rome, where she was fled

  From their Arezzo to find peace again,

  In convoy, eight months earlier, of a priest,

  Aretine also, of still nobler birth,

  Giuseppe Caponsacchi, — and caught her there

  Quiet in a villa on a Christmas night,

  With only Pietro and Violante by,

  Both her putative parents; killed the three,

  Aged, they, seventy each, and she, seventeen,

  And, two weeks since, the mother of his babe

  First-born and heir to what the style was worth

  O’ the Guido who determined, dared and did

  This deed just as he purposed point by point.

  Then, bent upon escape, but hotly pressed,

  And captured with his co-mates that same night,

  He, brought to trial, stood on this defence —

  Injury to his honour caused the act;

  That since his wife was false (as manifest

  By flight from home in such companionship),

  Death, punishment deserved of the false wife

  And faithless parents who abetted her

  I’ the flight aforesaid, wronged nor God nor man.

  “Nor false she, nor yet faithless they,” re
plied

  The accuser; “cloaked and masked this murder glooms;

  “True was Pompilia, loyal too the pair;

  “Out of the man’s own heart this monster curled,

  “This crime coiled with connivancy at crime,

  “His victim’s breast, he tells you, hatched and reared;

  “Uncoil we and stretch stark the worm of hell!”

  A month the trial swayed this way and that

  Ere judgment settled down on Guido’s guilt;

  Then was the Pope, that good Twelfth Innocent,

  Appealed to: who well weighed what went before,

  Affirmed the guilt and gave the guilty doom.

  Let this old woe step on the stage again!

  Act itself o’er anew for men to judge,

  Not by the very sense and sight indeed —

  (Which take at best imperfect cognisance,

  Since, how heart moves brain, and how both move hand,

  What mortal ever in entirety saw?)

  — No dose of purer truth than man digests,

  But truth with falsehood, milk that feeds him now,

  Not strong meat he may get to bear some day —

  To-wit, by voices we call evidence,

  Uproar in the echo, live fact deadened down,

  Talked over, bruited abroad, whispered away,

  Yet helping us to all we seem to hear:

  For how else know we save by worth of word?

  Here are the voices presently shall sound

  In due succession. First, the world’s outcry

  Around the rush and ripple of any fact

  Fallen stonewise, plumb on the smooth face of things;

  The world’s guess, as it crowds the bank o’ the pool,

  At what were figure and substance, by their splash:

  Then, by vibrations in the general mind,

  At depth of deed already out of reach.

  This threefold murder of the day before, —

  Say, Half-Rome’s feel after the vanished truth;

  Honest enough, as the way is: all the same,

  Harbouring in the centre of its sense

  A hidden germ of failure, shy but sure,

  Should neutralise that honesty and leave

  That feel for truth at fault, as the way is too.

  Some prepossession such as starts amiss,

  By but a hair’s-breadth at the shoulder-blade,

  The arm o’ the feeler, dip he ne’er so brave;

  And so leads waveringly, lets fall wide

  O’the mark his finger meant to find, and fix

  Truth at the bottom, that deceptive speck.

  With this Half-Rome, — the source of swerving, call

  Over-belief in Guido’s right and wrong

  Rather than in Pompilia’s wrong and right:

  Who shall say how, who shall say why? ‘Tis there —

  The instinctive theorising whence a fact

  Looks to the eye as the eye likes the look.