Robert Browning: How to Know Him | Page 6

to others,
Not, this one time,
art that's turned his nature.
Ay, of all the artists living, loving,
None
but would forego his proper dowry,--
Does he paint? he fain would
write a poem,--
Does he write? he fain would paint a picture,
Put to
proof art alien to the artist's,
Once, and only once, and for one only,

So to be the man and leave the artist,
Gain the man's joy, miss the
artist's sorrow.
IX
Wherefore? Heaven's gift takes earth's abatement!
He who smites the
rock and spreads the water,
Bidding drink and live a crowd beneath
him,
Even he, the minute makes immortal,
Proves, perchance, but
mortal in the minute,
Desecrates, belike, the deed in doing.
While
he smites, how can he but remember,
So he smote before, in such a
peril,
When they stood and mocked--"Shall smiting help us?"
When
they drank and sneered--"A stroke is easy!"
When they wiped their
mouths and went their journey,
Throwing him for thanks--"But
drought was pleasant."
Thus old memories mar the actual triumph;

Thus the doing savours of disrelish;
Thus achievement lacks a
gracious somewhat;
O'er-importuned brows becloud the mandate,

Carelessness or consciousness--the gesture.
For he bears an ancient
wrong about him,
Sees and knows again those phalanxed faces,

Hears, yet one time more, the 'customed prelude--

"How shouldst
thou, of all men, smite, and save us?"
Guesses what is like to prove

the sequel--
"Egypt's flesh-pots--nay, the drought was better."
X
Oh, the crowd must have emphatic warrant!
Theirs, the
Sinai-forehead's cloven brilliance,
Right-arm's rod-sweep, tongue's
imperial fiat.
Never dares the man put off the prophet.
XI
Did he love one face from out the thousands,
(Were she Jethro's
daughter, white and wifely,
Were she but the Æthiopian bondslave,)

He would envy yon dumb patient camel,
Keeping a reserve of
scanty water
Meant to save his own life in the desert;
Ready in the
desert to deliver
(Kneeling down to let his breast be opened)
Hoard
and life together for his mistress.
XII
I shall never, in the years remaining,
Paint you pictures, no, nor carve
you statues,
Make you music that should all-express me;
So it
seems: I stand on my attainment.
This of verse alone, one life allows
me;
Verse and nothing else have I to give you.
Other heights in
other lives, God willing:
All the gifts from all the heights, your own,
Love!
XIII
Yet a semblance of resource avails us--
Shade so finely touched,
love's sense must seize it.
Take these lines, look lovingly and nearly,

Lines I write the first time and the last time.
He who works in
fresco, steals a hair-brush,
Curbs the liberal hand, subservient proudly,

Cramps his spirit, crowds its all in little,
Makes a strange art of an
art familiar,
Fills his lady's missal-marge with flowerets.
He who
blows thro' bronze, may breathe thro' silver,
Fitly serenade a

slumbrous princess.
He who writes, may write for once as I do.
XIV
Love, you saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead or fashioned
by my fancy,
Enter each and all, and use their service,
Speak from
every mouth,--the speech, a poem.
Hardly shall I tell my joys and
sorrows,
Hopes and fears, belief and disbelieving:
I am mine and
yours--the rest be all men's,
Karshish, Cleon, Norbert and the fifty.

Let me speak this once in my true person,
Not as Lippo, Roland or
Andrea,
Though the fruit of speech be just this sentence:
Pray you,
look on these my men and women,
Take and keep my fifty poems
finished;
Where my heart lies, let my brain lie also!
Poor the speech;
be how I speak, for all things.
XV
Not but that you know me! Lo, the moon's self!
Here in London,
yonder late in Florence,
Still we find her face, the thrice-transfigured.

Curving on a sky imbrued with colour,
Drifted over Fiesole by
twilight,
Came she, our new crescent of a hair's-breadth.
Full she
flared it, lamping Samminiato,
Rounder 'twixt the cypresses and
rounder,
Perfect till the nightingales applauded.
Now, a piece of her
old self, impoverished,
Hard to greet, she traverses the houseroofs,

Hurries with unhandsome thrift of silver,
Goes dispiritedly, glad to
finish.
XVI
What, there's nothing in the moon noteworthy?
Nay: for if that moon
could love a mortal,
Use, to charm him (so to fit a fancy),
All her
magic ('tis the old sweet mythos)
She would turn a new side to her
mortal,
Side unseen of herdsman, huntsman, steersman--
Blank to
Zoroaster on his terrace,
Blind to Galileo on his turret,
Dumb to
Homer, dumb to Keats--him, even!
Think, the wonder of the

moonstruck mortal--
When she turns round, comes again in heaven,

Opens out anew for worse or better!
Proves she like some portent
of an iceberg
Swimming full upon the ship it founders,
Hungry with
huge teeth of splintered crystals?
Proves she as the paved work of a
sapphire
Seen by Moses when he climbed the mountain?
Moses,
Aaron, Nadab and Abihu
Climbed and saw the very God, the Highest,

Stand upon the paved work of a sapphire.
Like the bodied heaven
in his clearness
Shone the stone, the sapphire of that paved work,

When they ate and drank and saw God also!
XVII
What were seen? None knows, none ever shall know.
Only this is
sure--the sight were other,
Not the moon's same side, born late in
Florence,
Dying now impoverished here in London.
God be
thanked, the meanest of his