Pomegranates from an English Garden

And I spread myself beneath it,
As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it
In the cleansing sun, his wool, —
Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness
Some defiled, discoloured web —
So lay I, saturate with brightness.

His sin thus purged (how exquisitely wrought out the lovely simile of the sun-cleansed wool!), he is “caught up in the whirl and drift of the vesture’s amplitude,” and thus clinging to the garment’s hem, is carried across land and sea – to a scene so complete a contrast to the one he has just left that he is confused, and some time elapses before he discovers that he is in front of St. Peter’s at Rome: —

X

And so we crossed the world and stopped.
For where am I, in city or plain,
Since I am ’ware of the world again?
And what is this that rises propped
With pillars of prodigious girth?
Is it really on the earth,
This miraculous Dome of God?
Has the angel’s measuring-rod
Which numbered cubits, gem from gem,
’Twixt the gates of the New Jerusalem,
Meted it out, – and what he meted,
Have the sons of men completed?
– Binding, ever as he bade,
Columns in the colonnade
With arms wide open to embrace
The entry of the human race
To the breast of … what is it, yon building,
Ablaze in front, all paint and gilding,
With marble for brick, and stones of price
For garniture of the edifice?
Now I see; it is no dream;
It stands there and it does not seem:
For ever, in pictures, thus it looks,
And thus I have read of it in books
Often in England, leagues away,
And wondered how these fountains play,
Growing up eternally
Each to a musical water-tree,
Whose blossoms drop, a glittering boon,
Before my eyes, in the light of the moon,
To the granite layers underneath.

There follows a description of the worship in the great cathedral – not now, as before, unsympathetic and merely critical, but giving evidence of the liveliest appreciation of the feelings of the intelligent and devout ritualist, as in the following passage: —

Earth breaks up, time drops away,
In flows heaven, with its new day
Of endless life, when he who trod,
Very man and very God,
This earth in weakness, shame and pain,
Dying the death whose signs remain
Up yonder on the accursed tree, —
Shall come again, no more to be
Of captivity the thrall,
But the one God, All in all,
King of kings, Lord of lords,
As his servant John received the words,
“I died, and live for evermore!”

Still he cannot enter into it. He is left outside the door. Distracted with conflicting emotions, his reason repelled by the superstition, his spirit attracted by the lofty devotion which he discovers at the heart of the too gorgeous ritual – he cannot make up his mind whether he should join them for the one reason, or shun them for the other —

XI

* * * * *

Though Rome’s gross yoke
Drops off, no more to be endured,
Her teaching is not so obscured
By errors and perversities,
That no truth shines athwart the lies:
And he, whose eye detects a spark
Even where, to man’s, the whole seems dark,
May well see flame where each beholder
Acknowledges the embers smoulder.
But I, a mere man, fear to quit
The clue God gave me as most fit
To guide my footsteps through life’s maze,
Because himself discerns all ways
Open to reach him: I, a man
Able to mark where faith began
To swerve aside, till from its summit
Judgment drops her damning plummet,
Pronouncing such a fatal space
Departed from the founder’s base:
He will not bid me enter too,
But rather sit, as now I do,
Awaiting his return outside.
– ’Twas thus my reason straight replied
And joyously I turned, and pressed
The garment’s skirt upon my breast,
Until, afresh its light suffusing me,
My heart cried “What has been abusing me
That I should wait here lonely and coldly,
Instead of rising, entering boldly,
Baring truth’s face, and letting drift
Her veils of lies as they choose to shift?
Do these men praise him? I will raise
My voice up to their point of praise!
I see the error; but above
The scope of error, see the love. —