Pomegranates from an English Garden

Longfellow’s “King Robert of Sicily,” though not really parallel, has points of similarity to “The Boy and the Angel.”

THE PATRIOT

AN OLD STORY

I

It was roses, roses, all the way,
With myrtle mixed in my path like mad:
The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,
The church-spires flamed, such flags they had,
A year ago on this very day.

II

The air broke into a mist with bells,
The old walls rocked with the crowd and cries.
Had I said, “Good folk, mere noise repels —
“But give me your sun from yonder skies!”
They had answered “And afterward, what else?”

III

Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun
To give it my loving friends to keep!
Nought man could do, have I left undone:
And you see my harvest, what I reap
This very day, now a year is run.

IV

There’s nobody on the house-tops now —
Just a palsied few at the windows set;
For the best of the sight is, all allow,
At the Shambles’ Gate – or, better yet,
By the very scaffold’s foot, I trow.

V

I go in the rain, and, more than needs,
A rope cuts both my wrists behind,
And I think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds,
For they fling, whoever has a mind,
Stones at me for my year’s misdeeds.

VI

Thus I entered, and thus I go!
In triumphs, people have dropped down dead.
“Paid by the world, what dost thou owe
Me?” – God might question; now instead,
’Tis God shall repay: I am safer so.

The Patriot, on his way to the scaffold, surrounded by a hooting crowd, remembers how, just a year ago, the same people had been mad in their enthusiasm for him. Anything at all, however extravagant, would have been too little for them to do for him (stanza 2; cf. Gal. iv. 15, 16); but now – ! The fourth stanza is very powerful. All have gone who can, to be ready to see the execution; only the “palsied few,” who cannot, are at the windows to see him pass. In the last stanza the thought of a more sudden contrast still is presented. A man may drop dead in the midst of a triumph, to find that in its brief plaudits he has his reward, while a vast account stands against him at the higher tribunal. Far better die amid the execrations of men and find the contrast reversed.

It is “an old story,” and therefore general; but one naturally thinks of such cases as Arnold of Brescia, or the tribune Rienzi. A higher Name than these need not be introduced here, in proof of the people’s fickleness!

INSTANS TYRANNUS

I

Of the million or two, more or less,
I rule and possess,
One man, for some cause undefined,
Was least to my mind.

II

I struck him, he grovelled of course —
For, what was his force?
I pinned him to earth with my weight
And persistence of hate;
And he lay, would not moan, would not curse,
As his lot might be worse.

III

“Were the object less mean, would he stand
“At the swing of my hand!
“For obscurity helps him, and blots
“The hole where he squats.”
So, I set my five wits on the stretch
To inveigle the wretch.
All in vain! Gold and jewels I threw
Still he couched there perdue;
I tempted his blood and his flesh,
Hid in roses my mesh,
Choicest cates and the flagon’s best spilth
Still he kept to his filth.

IV

Had he kith now or kin, were access
To his heart, did I press
Just a son or a mother to seize!
No such booty as these.
Were it simply a friend to pursue
’Mid my million or two,