Men and Women | Page 9

he lies
As if mere sleep
possessed him underneath
These interwoven oaks and pines. Oh
cheer,
Divine presenter of the healing rod,
Thy snake, with ardent

throat and lulling eye,
Twines his lithe spires around! I say, much
cheer!
Proceed thou with thy wisest pharmacies!
And ye, white
crowd of woodland sister-nymphs,
Ply, as the sage directs, these buds
and leaves
That strew the turf around the twain! While I 120 Await,
in fitting silence, the event.
NOTES
"Artemis Prologizes" represents the goddess Artemis awaiting the
revival of the youth Hippolytus, whom she has carried to her woods
and given to Asclepios to heal. It is a fragment meant to introduce an
unwritten work and carry on the story related by Euripides in
"Hippolytus," which see.
AN EPISTLE
CONTAINING THE STRANGE MEDICAL
EXPERIENCE
OF KARSHISH, THE ARAB PHYSICIAN
1855
Karshish, the picker-up of learning's crumbs,
The not-incurious in
God's handiwork
(This man's-flesh he hath admirably made,
Blown
like a bubble, kneaded like a paste,
To coop up and keep down on
earth a space
That puff of vapor from his mouth, man's soul)
--To
Abib, all-sagacious in our art,
Breeder in me of what poor skill I
boast,
Like me inquisitive how pricks and cracks
Befall the flesh
through too much stress and strain, 10 Whereby the wily vapor fain
would slip
Back and rejoin its source before the term--
And aptest
in contrivance (under God)
To baffle it by deftly stopping such--

The vagrant Scholar to his Sage at home
Sends greeting (health and
knowledge, fame with peace)
Three samples of true snakestone--rarer
still,
One of the other sort, the melon-shaped,
(But fitter, pounded
fine, for charms than drugs)
And writeth now the twenty-second time.
20
My journeyings were brought to Jericho:
Thus I resume. Who

studious in our art
Shall count a little labor un-repaid?
I have shed
sweat enough, left flesh and bone
On many a flinty furlong of this
land.
Also, the country-side is all on fire
With rumors of a marching
hitherward:
Some say Vespasian comes, some, his son.
A black
lynx snarled and pricked a tufted ear;
Lust of my blood inflamed his
yellow balls: 30 I cried and threw my staff and he was gone.
Twice
have the robbers stripped and beaten me,
And once a town declared
me for a spy;
But at the end, I reach Jerusalem,
Since this poor
covert where I pass the night,
This Bethany, lies scarce the distance
thence
A man with plague-sores at the third degree
Runs till he
drops down dead. Thou laughest here!
'Sooth, it elates me, thus
reposed and safe,
To void the stuffing of my travel-scrip 40 And
share with thee whatever Jewry yields.
A viscid choler is observable

In tertians, I was nearly bold to say;
And falling-sickness hath a
happier cure
Than our school wots of: there's a spider here
Weaves
no web, watches on the ledge of tombs,
Sprinkled with mottles on an
ash-gray back;
Take five and drop them . . . but who knows his mind,

The Syrian runagate I trust this to?
His service payeth me a
sublimate 50 Blown up his nose to help the ailing eye.
Best wait: I
reach Jerusalem at morn,
There set in order my experiences,
Gather
what most deserves, and give thee all--
Or I might add, Judaea's
gum-tragacanth
Scales off in purer flakes, shines clearer-grained,

Cracks 'twixt the pestle and the porphyry,
In fine exceeds our produce.
Scalp-disease
Confounds me, crossing so with leprosy--
Thou hadst
admired one sort I gained at Zoar-- 60 But zeal outruns discretion. Here
I end.
Yet stay: my Syrian blinketh gratefully,
Protesteth his devotion is my
price--
Suppose I write what harms not, though he steal?
I half
resolve to tell thee, yet I blush,
What set me off a-writing first of all,

An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang!
For, be it this town's
barrenness--or else
The Man had something in the look of him--

His case has struck me far more than 'tis worth. 70 So, pardon if--(lest

presently I lose
In the great press of novelty at hand
The care and
pains this somehow stole from me)
I bid thee take the thing while
fresh in mind,
Almost in sight--for, wilt thou have the truth?
The
very man is gone from me but now,
Whose ailment is the subject of
discourse.
Thus then, and let thy better wit help all!
'Tis but a case of mania--subinduced
By epilepsy, at the turning-point
80 Of trance prolonged unduly some three days:
When, by the
exhibition of some drug
Or spell, exorcisation, stroke of art

Unknown to me and which 't were well to know,
The evil thing
out-breaking all at once
Left the man whole and sound of body
indeed,
But, flinging (so to speak) life's gates too wide,
Making a
clear house of it too suddenly,
The first conceit that entered might
inscribe
Whatever it was minded on the wall 90 So plainly at that
vantage, as it were,
(First come, first served) that nothing subsequent

Attaineth to erase those fancy-scrawls
The just-returned and
new-established soul
Hath gotten now so thoroughly by heart
That
henceforth she will read or these or none.
And first--the man's own
firm conviction rests
That he was dead (in fact they buried him)

--That he was dead and then restored to life
By a Nazarene