Part 6 (1/2)

--That's if ye carve my epitaph aright, Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully's every word, No gaudy ware like Gandolf's second line-- Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need!

And then how I shall lie through centuries, 80 And hear the blessed mutter of the ma.s.s, And see G.o.d made and eaten all day long, And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!

For as I lie here, hours of the dead night, Dying in state and by such slow degrees, I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point, And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop Into great laps and folds of sculptor's-work: 90 And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts Grow, with a certain humming in my ears, About the life before I lived this life, And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests, Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount, Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes, And new-found agate urns as fresh as day, And marble's language, Latin pure, discreet, --Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?

No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best! 100 Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.

All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope My villas! Will ye ever eat my heart?

Ever your eyes were as a lizard's quick, They glitter like your mother's for my soul, Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze, Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term, And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, 110 To comfort me on my entablature Whereon I am to lie till I must ask ”Do I live, am I dead?” There, leave me, there!

For ye have stabbed me with ingrat.i.tude To death--ye wish it--G.o.d, ye wish it! Stone-- Gritstone, a-crumble! Clammy squares which sweat As if the corpse they keep were oozing through-- And no more lapis to delight the world!

Well go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there, But in a row: and, going, turn your backs 120 --Ay, like departing altar-ministrants, And leave me in my church, the church for peace, That I may watch at leisure if he leers-- Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone, As still he envied me, so fair she was!

NOTES

”The Bishop orders his Tomb” This half-delirious pleading of the dying prelate for a tomb which shall gratify his luxurious artistic tastes and personal rivalries, presents dramatically not merely the special scene of the worldly old bishop's petulant struggle against his failing power, and his collapse, finally, beneath the will of his so-called nephews, it also ill.u.s.trates a characteristic gross form of the Renaissance spirit enc.u.mbered with Pagan survivals, fleshly appet.i.tes, and selfish monopolizings which hampered its development.-- ”It is nearly all that I said of the Central Renaissance--its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin--in thirty pages of the 'Stones of Venice,' put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work” (Ruskin). The Church of St.Praxed is notable for the beauty of its stone-work and mosaics, one of its chapels being so extraordinarily rich that it was called <orto del=”” paradiso=””>, or the Garden of Paradise; and so, although the bishop and his tomb there are imaginary, it supplies an appropriate setting for the poetic scene.

1. Vanity, saith the preacher: Ecclesiastes 1.2.

21. Epistle-side: the right-hand side facing the altar, where the epistle is read by the priest acting as celebrant, the gospel being read from the other side by the priest acting as a.s.sistant.

25. Basalt: trap-rock, leaden or black in color.

31. Onion stone: for the Italian <cipollino>, a kind of greenish-white marble splitting into coats like an onion, <cipolla>; hence so called.

41. Olive-frail: a basket made of rushes, used for packing olives.

42. Lapis lazuli: a bright blue stone.

46. Frascati: near Rome, on the Alban hills.

48. G.o.d the Father's globe: in the group of the Trinity adorning the altar of Saint Ignatius at the church of Il Gesu in Rome.

51. Weaver's shuttle: Job 7.6.

54. Antique-black: Nero antico. Browning gives the English equivalent for the name of this stone.

58. Tripod: the seat with three feet on which the priestess of Apollo sat to prophesy, an emblem of the Delphic oracle.

Thyrsus: the ivy-coiled staffer spear stuck in a pine-cone, symbol of Bacchic orgy. These, with the other Pagan tokens and pictures, mingle oddly but significantly with the references to the Saviour, Saint Praxed, and Moses. See also line 92, where Saint Praxed is confused with the Saviour, in the mind of the dying priest. Saint Praxed, the virgin daughter of a Roman Senator and friend of Saint Paul, in whose honor the Bishop's Church is named, is again brought forward in lines 73-75 in a queer capacity which pointedly ill.u.s.trates the speaker and his time.

66. Travertine: see note ”Pictor Ignotus,” 67.

68. jasper: a dark green stone with blood-red spots, susceptible of high polish.

77. Tully's: Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-46 B. C.).

79. Ulpian: a Roman jurist (170-228 A. D.), belonging to the degenerate age of Roman literature.

99. lucescebat>: he was ill.u.s.trious; formed from lucesco>, an inceptive verb from luceo>: in post cla.s.sic Latin.

102. Else I give the Pope my villas: perhaps a threat founded on the custom of Julius II and other popes, according to Burckhardt, of enlarging their power ”by making themselves heirs of the cardinals and clergy . . . Hence the splendor of tile tombs of the prelates . . . a part of the plunder being in this way saved from the hands of the Pope.”

108. A vizor and a Term: a mask, and a bust springing from a square pillar, representing the Roman G.o.d Terminus, who presided over boundaries.

BISHOP BLOUGRAM'S APOLOGY

1855

No more wine? then we'll push back chairs and talk.

A final gla.s.s for me, though: cool, i' faith!

We ought to have our Abbey back, you see.

It's different, preaching in basilicas, And doing duty in some masterpiece Like this of brother Pugin's, bless his heart!

I doubt if they're half baked, those chalk rosettes, Ciphers and stucco-twiddlings everywhere; It's just like breathing in a lime-kiln: eh?