Of the great world’s turmoil
Feeling thy countenance too still, — nor yell
Of demons sweeping past it to their prison.
The skies that turned to darkness with thy pain
Make now a summer’s day;
And on my changed ear that sabbath bell
Records how CHRIST IS RISEN.
III.
And I — ah! what am I
To counterfeit, with faculty earth-darkened,
Seraphic brows of light
And seraph language never used nor hearkened?
Ah me! what word that seraphs say, could come
From mouth so used to sighs, so soon to lie
Sighless, because then breathless, in the tomb?
IV.
Bright ministers of God and grace — of grace
Because of God! whether ye bow adown
In your own heaven, before the living face
Of him who died and deathless wears the crown,
Or whether at this hour ye haply are
Anear, around me, hiding in the night
Of this permitted ignorance your light,
This feebleness to spare, —
Forgive me, that mine earthly heart should dare
Shape images of unincarnate spirits
And lay upon their burning lips a thought
Cold with the weeping which mine earth inherits.
And though ye find in such hoarse music, wrought
To copy yours, a cadence all the while
Of sin and sorrow — only pitying smile!
Ye know to pity, well.
V.
I too may haply smile another day
At the far recollection of this lay,
When God may call me in your midst to dwell,
To hear your most sweet music’s miracle
And see your wondrous faces. May it be!
For his remembered sake, the Slain on rood,
Who rolled his earthly garment red in blood
(Treading the wine-press) that the weak, like me,
Before his heavenly throne should walk in white.
A DRAMA OF EXILE
PERSONS.
CHRIST, in a Vision.
ADAM.
EVE.
GABRIEL.
LUCIFER.
Angels, Eden Spirits, Earth Spirits, and Phantasms.
A DRAMA OF EXILE.
SCENE — The outer side of the gate of Eden shut fast with cloud, from
the depth of which revolves a sword of fire self-moved. ADAM and EVE are
seen, in the distance flying along the glare.
LUCIFER, alone.
Rejoice in the clefts of Gehenna,
My exiled, my host!
Earth has exiles as hopeless as when a
Heaven’s empire was lost.
Through the seams of her shaken foundations,
Smoke up in great joy!
With the smoke of your fierce exultations
Deform and destroy!
Smoke up with your lurid revenges,
And darken the face
Of the white heavens and taunt them with changes
From glory and grace.
We, in falling, while destiny strangles,
Pull down with us all.
Let them look to the rest of their angels!
Who’s safe from a fall?
HE saves not. Where’s Adam? Can pardon
Requicken that sod?
Unkinged is the King of the Garden,
The image of God.
Other exiles are cast out of Eden, —
More curse has been hurled:
Come up, O my locusts, and feed in
The green of the world!
Come up! we have conquered by evil;
Good reigns not alone:
I prevail now, and, angel or devil,
Inherit a throne.
[In sudden apparition a watch of innumerable Angels, rank above rank,
slopes up from around the gate to the zenith. The Angel GABRIEL
descends.
Lucifer. Hail, Gabriel, the keeper of the gate!
Now that the fruit is plucked, prince Gabriel,
I hold that Eden is impregnable
Under thy keeping.
Gabriel. Angel of the sin,
Such as thou standest, — pale in the drear light
Which rounds the rebel’s work with Maker’s wrath
Thou shalt be an Idea to all souls,
A monumental melancholy gloom
Seen down all ages, whence to mark despair
And measure out the distances from good.
Go from us straightway!
Lucifer. Wherefore?
Gabriel. Lucifer,
Thy last step in this place trod sorrow up.
Recoil before that sorrow, if not this sword.
Lucifer. Angels are in the world — wherefore not I?
Exiles are in the world — wherefore not I?
The cursed are in the world — wherefore not I?
Gabriel. Depart!
Lucifer. And where’s the logic of ‘depart’?
Our lady Eve had half been satisfied
To obey her Maker, if I had not learnt
To fix my postulate better. Dost thou dream
Of guarding some monopoly in heaven
Instead of earth? Why, I can dream with thee
To the length of thy wings.
Gabriel. I do not dream.
This is not heaven, even in a dream, nor earth,
As earth was once, first breathed among the stars,
Articulate glory from the mouth divine,
To which the myriad spheres thrilled audibly,
Touched like a lute-string, and the sons of God
Said AMEN, singing it. I know that this
Is earth not new created but new cursed —
This, Eden’s gate not opened but built up
With a final cloud of sunset. Do I dream?
Alas, not so! this is the Eden lost
By Lucifer the serpent; this the sword
(This sword alive with justice and with fire)
That smote, upon the forehead, Lucifer
The angel. Wherefore, angel, go — depart!
Enough is sinned and suffered.
Lucifer. By no means.
Here’s a brave earth to sin and suffer on.
It holds fast still — it cracks not under curse;
It holds like mine immortal. Presently
We’ll sow it thick enough with graves as green
Or greener certes, than its knowledge-tree.
We’ll have the cypress for the tree of life,
More eminent for shadow: for the rest,
We’ll build it dark with towns and pyramids,
And temples, if it please you: — we’ll have feasts
And funerals also, merrymakes and wars,
Till blood and wine shall mix and run along
Right o’er the edges. And, good Gabriel
(Ye like that word in heaven), I too have strength —
Strength to behold Him and not worship Him,
Strength to fall from Him and not cry on Him,
Strength to be in the universe and yet
Neither God nor his servant. The red sign
Burnt on my forehead, which you taunt me with,
Is God’s sign that it bows not unto God,
The potter’s mark upon his work, to show
It rings well to the striker. I and the earth
Can bear more curse.
Gabriel. O miserable earth,
O ruined angel!
Lucifer. Well, and if it be!
I CHOSE this ruin, I elected it
Of my will, not of service. What I do,
I do volitient, not obedient,
And overtop thy crown with my despair
My sorrow crowns me. Get thee back to heaven,
And leave me to the earth, which is mine own
In virtue of her ruin, as I hers
In virtue of my revolt! Turn thou from both
That bright, impassive, passive angelhood,
And spare to read us backward any more
Of the spent hallelujahs!
Gabriel. Spirit of scorn,
I might say, of unreason! I might say,
That who despairs, acts; that who acts, connives
With God’s relations set in time and space;
That who elects, assumes a something good
Which God made possible; that who lives, obeys
The law of a Life-maker ...
Lucifer. Let it pass!
No more, thou Gabriel! What if I stand up
And strike my brow against the crystalline
Roofing the creatures, — shall I say, for that,
My stature is too high for me to stand, —
Henceforward I must sit? Sit thou!
Gabriel. I kneel.
Lucifer. A heavenly answer. Get thee to thy heaven,
And leave my earth to me!
Gabriel. Through heaven and earth
God’s will moves freely, and I follow it,
As colour follows light. He overflows
The firmamental walls with deity,
Therefore with love; his lightnings go abroad,
His pity may do so, his angels must,
Whene’er he gives them charges.
Lucifer. Verily,
I and my demons, who are spirits of scorn,
Might hold this charge of standing with a sword
‘Twixt man and his inheritance, as well
As the benignest angel of you all.
Gabriel. Thou speakest in the shadow of thy change.
If thou hadst gazed upon the face of God
This morning for a moment, thou hadst known
That only pity fitly can chastise:
Hate but avenges.
Lucifer. As it is, I know
Something of pity. When I reeled in heaven,
And my sword grew too heavy for my grasp,
Stabbing through matter, which it could not pierce
So much as the first shell of, — toward the throne;
When I fell back, down, — staring up as I fell, —
The lightnings holding open my scathed lids,
And that thought of the infinite of God,
Hurled after to precipitate descent;
When countless angel faces still and stern
Pressed out upon me from the level heavens
Adown the abysmal spaces, and I fell
Trampled down by your stillness, and struck blind
By the sight within your eyes,— ‘twas then I knew
How ye could pity, my kind angelhood!
Gabriel. Alas, discrowned one, by the truth in me
Which God keeps in me, I would give away
All — save that truth and his love keeping it, —
To lead thee home again into the light
And hear thy voice chant with the morning stars,
When their rays tremble round them with much song
Sung in more gladness!
Lucifer. Sing, my Morning Star!
Last beautiful, last heavenly, that I loved!
If I could drench thy golden locks with tears,
What were it to this angel?
Gabriel. What love is.
And now I have named God.
Lucifer. Yet, Gabriel,
By the lie in me which I keep myself,
Thou’rt a false swearer. Were it otherwise,
What dost thou here, vouchsafing tender thoughts
To that earth-angel or earth-demon — which,
Thou and I have not solved the problem yet
Enough to argue, — that fallen Adam there, —
That red-clay and a breath, — who must, forsooth,
Live in a new apocalypse of sense,
With beauty and music waving in his trees
And running in his rivers, to make glad
His soul made perfect? — is it not for hope,
A hope within thee deeper than thy truth,
Of finally conducting him and his
To fill the vacant thrones of me and mine,
Which affront heaven with their vacuity?
Gabriel. Angel, there are no vacant thrones in heaven
To suit thy empty words. Glory and life
Fulfil their own depletions; and if God
Sighed you far from him, his next breath drew in
A compensative splendour up the vast,
Flushing the starry arteries.
Lucifer. What a change!
So, let the vacant thrones and gardens too
Fill as may please you! — and be pitiful,
As ye translate that word, to the dethroned
And exiled, man or angel. The fact stands,
That I, the rebel, the cast out and down,
Am here and will not go; while there, along
The light to which ye flash the desert out,
Flies your adopted Adam, your red-clay
In two kinds, both being flawed. Why, what is this?
Whose work is this? Whose hand was in the work?
Against whose hand? In this last strife, methinks,
I am not a fallen angel!
Gabriel. Dost thou know
Aught of those exiles?
Lucifer. Ay: I know they have fled
Silent all day along the wilderness:
I know they wear, for burden on their backs,
The thought of a shut gate of Paradise,
And faces of the marshalled cherubim
Shining against, not for them; and I know
They dare not look in one another’s face, —
As if each were a cherub!
Gabriel. Dost thou know
Aught of their future?
Lucifer. Only as much as this:
That evil will increase and multiply
Without a benediction.
Gabriel. Nothing more?
Lucifer. Why so the angels taunt! What should be more?
Gabriel. God is more.
Lucifer. Proving what?
Gabriel. That he is God,
And capable of saving. Lucifer,
I charge thee by the solitude he kept
Ere he created, — leave the earth to God!
Lucifer. My foot is on the earth, firm as my sin.
Gabriel. I charge thee by the memory of heaven
Ere any sin was done, — leave earth to God!
Lucifer. My sin is on the earth, to reign thereon.
Gabriel. I charge thee by the choral song we sang,
When up against the white shore of our feet
The depths of the creation swelled and brake, —
And the new worlds, the beaded foam and flower
Of all that coil, roared outward into space
On thunder-edges, — leave the earth to God!
Lucifer. My woe is on the earth, to curse thereby.
Gabriel. I charge thee by that mournful Morning Star
Which trembles ...
Lucifer. Enough spoken. As the pine
In norland forest drops its weight of snows
By a night’s growth, so, growing toward my ends
I drop thy counsels. Farewell, Gabriel!
Watch out thy service; I achieve my will.
And peradventure in the after years,
When thoughtful men shall bend their spacious brows
Upon the storm and strife seen everywhere
To ruffle their smooth manhood and break up
With lurid lights of intermittent hope
Their human fear and wrong, — they may discern
The heart of a lost angel in the earth.
CHORUS OF EDEN SPIRITS
(chanting from Paradise, while ADAM and EVE fly across the
Sword-glare).
Hearken, oh hearken! let your souls behind you
Turn,
gently moved!
Our voices feel along the Dread to find you,
O lost, beloved!
Through the thick-shielded and strong-marshalled angels,
They press and pierce:
Our requiems follow fast on our evangels, —
Voice throbs in verse.
We are but orphaned spirits left in Eden
A time ago:
God gave us golden cups, and we were bidden
To feed you so.
But now our right hand hath no cup remaining,
No work to do,
The mystic hydromel is spilt, and staining
The whole earth through.
Most ineradicable stains, for showing
(Not interfused!)
That brighter colours were the world’s forgoing,
Than shall be used.
Hearken, oh hearken! ye shall hearken surely
For years and years,
The noise beside you, dripping coldly, purely,
Of spirits’ tears.
The yearning to a beautiful denied you
Shall strain your powers;
Ideal sweetnesses shall overglide you,
Resumed from ours.
In all your music, our pathetic minor
Your ears shall cross;
And all good gifts shall mind you of diviner,
With sense of loss.
We shall be near you in your poet-languors
And wild extremes,
What time ye vex the desert with vain angers,
Or mock with dreams.
And when upon you, weary after roaming,
Death’s seal is put,
By the foregone ye shall discern the coming,
Through eyelids shut.
Spirits of the Trees.
Hark! the Eden trees are stirring,
Soft and solemn in your hearing!
Oak and linden, palm and fir,
Tamarisk and juniper,
Each still throbbing in vibration
Since that crowning of creation
When the God-breath spake abroad,
Let us make man like to God!
And the pine stood quivering
As the awful word went by,
Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Page 28
