Free Selected Poems (Penguin Classics) by Robert Browning

of, he must not enter yet –
    The spiritual life around the earthly life:
    The law of that is known to him as this,
    His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.
    So is the man perplext with impulses
    Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,
    Proclaiming what is right and wrong across,
    And not along, this black thread through the blaze –
    [190] ‘It should be’ balked by ‘here it cannot be.’
    And oft the man’s soul springs into his face
    As if he saw again and heard again
    His sage that bade him ‘Rise’ and he did rise.
    Something, a word, a tick o’ the blood within
    Admonishes: then back he sinks at once
    To ashes, who was very fire before,
    In sedulous recurrence to his trade
    Whereby he earneth him the daily bread;
    And studiously the humbler for that pride,
    [200] Professedly the faultier that he knows
    God’s secret, while he holds the thread of life.
    Indeed the especial marking of the man
    Is prone submission to the heavenly will –
    Seeing it, what it is, and why it is.
    ’Sayeth, he will wait patient to the last
    For that same death which must restore his being
    To equilibrium, body loosening soul
    Divorced even now by premature full growth:
    He will live, nay, it pleaseth him to live
    [210] So long as God please, and just how God please.
    He even seeketh not to please God more
    (Which meaneth, otherwise) than as God please.
    Hence, I perceive not he affects to preach
    The doctrine of his sect whate’er it be,
    Make proselytes as madmen thirst to do:
    How can he give his neighbour the real ground,
    His own conviction? Ardent as he is –
    Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old
    ‘Be it as God please’ reassureth him.
    [220] I probed the sore as thy disciple should:
    ‘How, beast,’ said I, ‘this stolid carelessness
    Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march
    To stamp out like a little spark thy town,
    Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?’
    He merely looked with his large eyes on me.
    The man is apathetic, you deduce?
    Contrariwise, he loves both old and young,
    Able and weak, affects the very brutes
    And birds – how say I? flowers of the field –
    [230] As a wise workman recognizes tools
    In a master’s workshop, loving what they make.
    Thus is the man, as harmless as a lamb:
    Only impatient, let him do his best,
    At ignorance and carelessness and sin –
    An indignation which is promptly curbed:
    As when in certain travels I have feigned
    To be an ignoramus in our art
    According to some preconceived design,
    And happed to hear the land’s practitioners
    [240] Steeped in conceit sublimed by ignorance,
    Prattle fantastically on disease,
    Its cause and cure – and I must hold my peace!
        Thou wilt object – Why have I not ere this
    Sought out the sage himself, the Nazarene
    Who wrought this cure, inquiring at the source,
    Conferring with the frankness that befits?
    Alas! it grieveth me, the learned leech
    Perished in a tumult many years ago,
    Accused, – our learning’s fate, – of wizardry,
    [250] Rebellion, to the setting up a rule
    And creed prodigious as described to me.
    His death, which happened when the earthquake fell
    (Prefiguring, as soon appeared, the loss
    To occult learning in our lord the sage
    Who lived there in the pyramid alone)
    Was wrought by the mad people – that’s their wont!
    On vain recourse, as I conjecture it,
    To his tried virtue, for miraculous help –
    How could he stop the earthquake? That’s their way!
    [260] The other imputations must be lies:
    But take one, though I loathe to give it thee,
    In mere respect for any good man’s fame.
    (And after all, our patient Lazarus
    Is stark mad; should we count on what he says?
    Perhaps not: though in writing to a leech
    ’Tis well to keep back nothing of a case.)
    This man so cured regards the curer, then,
    As – God forgive me! who but God himself,
    Creator and sustainer of the world,
    [270] That came and dwelt in flesh on it awhile!
    – ’Sayeth that such an one