Men and Women. Robert Browning

he was dead and then restored to life

      By a Nazarene physician of his tribe:

      —'Sayeth, the same bade "Rise," and he did rise.

      "Such cases are diurnal," thou wilt cry.

      Not so this figment!—not, that such a fume,

      Instead of giving way to time and health,

      Should eat itself into the life of life,

      As saffron tingeth flesh, blood, bones and all!

      For see, how he takes up the after-life.

      The man—it is one Lazarus14 a Jew,

      Sanguine, proportioned, fifty years of age,

      The body's habit wholly laudable,

      As much, indeed, beyond the common health

      As he were made and put aside to show.

      Think, could we penetrate by any drug

      And bathe the wearied soul and worried flesh,

      And bring it clear and fair, by three days' sleep!

      Whence has the man the balm that brightens all?

      This grown man eyes the world now like a child.

      Some elders of his tribe, I should premise,

      Led in their friend, obedient as a sheep,

      To bear my inquisition. While they spoke,

      Now sharply, now with sorrow, told the case,

      He listened not except I spoke to him,

      But folded his two hands and let them talk,

      Watching the flies that buzzed: and yet no fool.

      And that's a sample how his years must go.

      Look, if a beggar, in fixed middle-life,

      Should find a treasure, can he use the same

      With straitened habits and with tastes starved small,

      And take at once to his impoverished brain

      The sudden element that changes things,

      That sets the undreamed-of rapture at his hand

      And puts the cheap old joy in the scorned dust?

      Is he not such an one as moves to mirth—

      Warily parsimonious, when no need,

      Wasteful as drunkenness at undue times?

      All prudent counsel as to what befits

      The golden mean, is lost on such an one:

      The man's fantastic will is the man's law.

      So here—we call the treasure knowledge, say,

      Increased beyond the fleshly faculty—

      Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth,

      Earth forced on a soul's use while seeing heaven:

      The man is witless of the size, the sum,

      The value in proportion of all things,

      Or whether it be little or be much.

      Discourse to him of prodigious armaments

      Assembled to besiege his city now,

      And of the passing of a mule with gourds—

      'T is one! Then take it on the other side,

      Speak of some trifling fact, he will gaze rapt

      With stupor at its very littleness,

      (Far as I see) as if in that indeed

      He caught prodigious import, whole results;

      And so will turn to us the bystanders

      In ever the same stupor (note this point)

      That we too see not with his opened eyes.

      Wonder and doubt come wrongly into play,

      Preposterously, at cross purposes.

      Should his child sicken unto death, why, look

      For scarce abatement of his cheerfulness,

      Or pretermission of the daily craft!

      While a word, gesture, glance from that same child

      At play or in the school or laid asleep,

      Will startle him to an agony of fear,

      Exasperation, just as like. Demand

      The reason why—"'t is but a word," object—

      "A gesture"—he regards thee as our lord

      Who lived there in the pyramid alone,

      Looked at us (dost thou mind?) when, being young,

      We both would unadvisedly recite

      Some charm's beginning, from that book of his,

      Able to bid the sun throb wide and burst

      All into stars, as suns grown old are wont.

      Thou and the child have each a veil alike

      Thrown o'er your heads, from under which ye both

      Stretch your blind hands and trifle with a match

      Over a mine of Greek fire15, did ye know!

      He holds on firmly to some thread of life—

      (It is the life to lead perforcedly)

      Which runs across some vast distracting orb

      Of glory on either side that meagre thread,

      Which, conscious 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—

      "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,

      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

      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

14

Lazarus . . . fifty years of age: in The Academy, Sept. 16, 1896, Dr. Richard Garnett says: "Browning commits an oversight, it seems to me, in making Lazarus fifty years of age at the eve of the siege of Jerusalem, circa 68 A. D." The miracle is supposed to have been wrought about 33 A. D., and Lazarus would then have been only fifteen, although according to tradition he was thirty when he was raised from the dead, and lived only thirty years after. Upon this Prof. Charles B. Wright comments in Poet-lore, April, 1897: "I incline to think that the oversight is not Browning's. Let us stand by the tradition and the resulting age of sixty-five. . . . Karshish is simply stating his professional judgment. Lazarus is given an age suited to his appearance—he seems a man of fifty. The years have touched him lightly since 'heaven opened to his soul.' . . . And that marvellous physical freshness deceives the very leech himself."

15

Greek fire: used by the Byzantine Greeks in warfare, first against the Saracens at the siege of Constantinople in 673 A. D. Therefore an anachronism in this poem. Liquid fire was, however, known to the ancients, as Assyrian bas-reliefs testify. Greek fire was made possibly of naphtha, saltpetre, and sulphur, and was thrown upon the enemy from copper tubes; or pledgets of tow were dipped in it and attached to arrows.