Robert Browning - The Complete Poems of Robert Browning - 22 Poetry Collections in One Edition

And ’twas noticed he never would honour

De Lorge (who looked daggers upon her)

With the easy commission of stretching

His legs in the service, and fetching

His wife, from her chamber, those straying

Sad gloves she was always mislaying,

While the King took the closet to chat in, —

But of course this adventure came pat in;

And never the King told the story,

How bringing a glove brought such glory,

But the wife smiled — ”His nerves are grown firmer —

“Mine he brings now and utters no murmur.”

Venienti occurrite morbo!

With which moral I drop my theorbo.

Table of Contents

Christmas-Eve

Easter-Day

Table of Contents

I.

OUT of the little chapel I burst

Into the fresh night air again.

I had waited a good five minutes first

In the doorway, to escape the rain

That drove in gusts down the common’s centre,

At the edge of which the chapel stands,

Before I plucked up heart to enter:

Heaven knows how many sorts of hands

Reached past me, groping for the latch

Of the inner door that hung on catch,

More obstinate the more they fumbled,

Till, giving way at last with a scold

Of the crazy hinge, in squeezed or tumbled

One sheep more to the rest in fold,

And left me irresolute, standing sentry

In the sheepfold’s lath-and-plaster entry,

Four feet long by two feet wide,

Partitioned off from the vast inside —

I blocked up half of it at least.

No remedy; the rain kept driving:

They eyed me much as some wild beast,

The congregation, still arriving,

Some of them by the mainroad, white

A long way past me into the night,

Skirting the common, then diverging;

Not a few suddenly emerging

From the common’s self thro’ the paling-gaps, —

— They house in the gravel-pits perhaps,

Where the road stops short with its safeguard border

Of lamps, as tired of such disorder; —

But the most turned in yet more abruptly

From a certain squalid knot of alleys,

Where the town’s bad blood once slept corruptly,

Which now the little chapel rallies

And leads into day again, — its priestliness

Lending itself to hide their beastliness

So cleverly (thanks in part to the mason),

And putting so cheery a whitewashed face on

Those neophytes too much in lack of it,

That, where you cross the common as I did,

And meet the party thus presided,

“Mount Zion,” with Love-lane at the back of it,

They front you as little disconcerted,

As, bound for the hills, her fate averted

And her wicked people made to mind him,

Lot might have marched with Gomorrah behind him.

II.

Well, from the road, the lanes or the common,

In came the flock: the fat weary woman,

Panting and bewildered, down-clapping

Her umbrella with a mighty report,

Grounded it by me, wry and flapping,

A wreck of whalebones; then, with a snort,

Like a startled horse, at the interloper

Who humbly knew himself improper,

But could not shrink up small enough,

Round to the door, and in, — the gruff

Hinge’s invariable scold

Making your very blood run cold.

Prompt in the wake of her, up-pattered

On broken clogs, the many-tattered

Little old-faced, peaking sister-turned-mother

Of the sickly babe she tried to smother

Somehow up, with its spotted face,

From the cold, on her breast, the one warm place;

She too must stop, wring the poor suds dry

Of a draggled shawl, and add thereby

Her tribute to the doormat, sopping

Already from my own clothes’ dropping,

Which yet she seemed to grudge I should stand on;

Then stooping down to take off her pattens,

She bore them defiantly, in each hand one,

Planted together before her breast

And its babe, as good as a lance in rest.

Close on her heels, the dingy satins

Of a female something, past me flitted,

With lips as much too white, as a streak

Lay far too red on each hollow cheek;

And it seemed the very door-hinge pitied

All that was left of a woman once,

Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.

Then a tall yellow man, like the Penitent Thief,

With his jaw bound up in a handkerchief,

And eyelids screwed together tight,

Led himself in by some inner light.

And, except from him, from each that entered,

I had the same interrogation —

“What, you, the alien, you have ventured

“To take with us, elect, your station?

“A carer for none of it, a Gallio?” —

Thus, plain as print, I read the glance

At a common prey, in each countenance,

As of huntsman giving his hounds the tallyho:

And, when the door’s cry drowned their wonder,

The draught, it always sent in shutting,

Made the flame of the single tallow candle

In the cracked square lanthorn I stood under,

Shoot its blue lip at me, rebutting,

As it were, the luckless cause of scandal:

I verily thought the zealous light

(In the chapel’s secret, too!) for spite,

Would shudder itself clean off the wick,

With the airs of a St. John’s Candlestick.

There was no standing it much longer.

“Good folks,” said I, as resolve grew stronger,

“This way you perform the Grand-Inquisitor,

“When the weather sends you a chance visitor?

“You are the men, and wisdom shall die with you,

“And none of the old Seven Churches vie with you!

“But still, despite the pretty perfection

“To which you carry your trick of exclusiveness,

“And, taking God’s word under wise protection,

“Correct its tendency to diffusiveness,

“Bidding one reach it over hot ploughshares, —

“Still, as I say, though you’ve found salvation,

“If I should choose to cry — as now — ’Shares!’ —

“See if the best of you bars me my ration!

“Because I prefer for my expounder

“Of the laws of the feast, the feast’s own Founder:

“Mine’s the same right with your poorest and sickliest,

“Supposing I don the marriage-vestiment;

“So, shut your mouth, and open your Testament,

“And carve me my portion at your quickliest!”

Accordingly, as a shoemaker’s lad

With wizened face in want of soap,

And wet apron wound round his waist like a rope,

After stopping outside, for his cough was bad,

To get the fit over, poor gentle creature,

And so avoid disturbing the preacher,

Passed in, I sent my elbow spikewise

At the shutting door, and entered likewise, —

Received the hinge’s accustomed greeting,

Crossed the threshold’s magic pentacle,

And found myself in full conventicle,

— To wit, in Zion Chapel Meeting,

On the Christmas-Eve of ‘Forty-nine,

Which, calling its flock to their special clover,

Found them assembled and one sheep over,

Whose lot, as the weather pleased, was mine.

III.

I very soon had enough of it.

The hot smell and the human noises,

And my neighbour’s coat, the greasy cuff of it,

Were a pebble-stone that a child’s hand poises,

Compared with the pig-of-leadlike pressure

Of the preaching-man’s immense stupidity,

As he poured his doctrine forth, full measure,

To meet his audience’s avidity.

You needed not the wit of the Sybil

To guess the cause of it all, in a twinkling —

No sooner had our friend an inkling

Of treasure hid in the Holy Bible,