Classic Poem

CHAPTER XVI

O, call that word again! they are your friends,
Your life's associates and your love's content;
That which begins in them, your folly ends;
Then how can vice with vice be discontent?
Behold, deformity sits on your heads,
Not horns, but scorns, not visage, but whole beds.

Behold a heap of sins your bodies pale,
A mountain-overwhelming villany;
Then tell me, are you clad in beauty's veil,
Or in destruction's pale-dead livery?
Their life demonstrates, now alive, now dead,
Tormented with the beasts which they have fed.

You like to pelicans have fed your death,
With follies vain let blood from folly's vein,
And almost starv'd yourselves, stopt up your breath,
Had not God's mercy helped and eas'd your pain:
Behold, a new-found meat the Lord did send,
Which taught you to be new and to amend.

A strange-digested nutriment, even quails,
Which taught them to be strange unto misdeeds:
When you implore his aid, he never fails
To fill their hunger whom repentance feeds:
You see, when life was half at death's arrest,
He new-created life at hunger's feast.

Say, is your god like this, whom you ador'd,
Or is this god like to your handy-frame?
If so, his power could not then afford
Such influence, which floweth from his name:
He is not painted, made of wood and stone,
But he substantial is, and rules alone.

He can oppress and help, help and oppress,
The sinful incolants of his made earth;
He can redress and pain, pain and redress,
The mountain-miseries of mortal birth:
Now, tyrants, you are next, this but a show,
And merry index of your after-woe.

Your hot-cold misery is now at hand;
Hot, because fury's heat and mercy's cold;
Cold, because limping, knit in frosty band,
And cold and hot in being shamefac'd-bold:
They cruel were, take cruelty their part,
For misery is but too mean a smart.

But when the tiger's jaws, the serpent's stings,
Did summon them unto this life's decay,
A pardon for their faults thy mercy brings,
Cooling thy wrath with pity's sunny day:
O tyrants, tear your sin-bemired weeds,
Behold your pardon seal'd by mercy's deeds!

That sting which pained could not ease the pain,
Those jaws that wounded could not cure the wounds;
To turn to stings for help, it were but vain,
To jaws for mercy, which wants mercy's bounds:
The stings, O Saviour, were pull'd out by thee!
Their jaws claspt up in midst of cruelty.

O sovereign salve, stop to a bloody stream!
O heavenly care and cure for dust and earth!
Celestial watch to wake terrestrial dream,
Dreaming in punishment, mourning in mirth;
Now knows our enemies that it is thee
Which helps and cures our grief and misery.

Our punishment doth end, theirs new begins;
Our day appears, their night is not o'erblown;
We pardon have, they punishment for sins;
Now we are rais'd, now they are overthrown;
We with huge beasts opprest, they with a fly;
We live in God, and they against God die.

A fly, poor fly, to follow such a flight!
Yet art thou fed, as thou wast fed before,
With dust and earth feeding thy wonted bite,
With self-like food from mortal earthly store:
A mischief-stinging food, and sting with sting,
Do ready passage to destruction bring.

Man, being grass, is hopp'd and graz'd upon,
With sucking grasshoppers of weeping dew;
Man, being earth, is worm's vermilion,
Which eats the dust, and yet of bloody hue:
In being grass he is her grazing food,
In being dust he doth the worms some good.

These smallest actors were of greatest pain,
Of folly's overthrow, of mischief's fall;
But yet the furious dragons could not gain
The life of those whom verities exhale:
These folly overcame, they foolish were;
These mercy cur'd, and cures these godly are.

When poison'd jaws and venenated stings
Were both as opposite against content —
Because content with that which fortune brings —
They eased were when thou thy mercies sent;
The jaws of dragons had not hunger's fill,
Nor stings of serpents a desire to kill.

Appall'd they were and struck with timorous fears,
For where is fear but where destruction reigns?
Aghast they were, with wet-eye-standing tears,
Outward commencers of their inward pains;
They soon were hurt, but sooner heal'd and cur'd,
Lest black oblivion had their minds inur'd.

The lion, wounded with a fatal blow,
Is as impatient as a king in rage;
Seeing himself in his own bloody show
Doth rent the harbour of his body's cage;
Scorning the base-hous'd earth, mounts to the sky,
To see if heaven can yield him remedy.

O sinful man! let him example be,
A pattern to thine eye, glass to thy face,
That God's divinest word is cure to thee,
Not earth, but heaven, not man, but heavenly grace;
Nor herb nor plaster could help teeth or sting,
But 'twas thy word which healeth every thing.

We fools lay salves upon our body's skin,
But never draw corruption from our mind;
We lay a plaster for to keep in sin,
We draw forth filth, but leave the cause behind;
With herbs and plasters we do guard misdeeds,
And pare away the tops, but leave the seeds.

Away with salves, and take our Saviour's word!
In this word Saviour lies immortal ease;
What can thy cures, plasters, and herbs afford,
When God hath power to please and to displease?
God hath the power of life, death, help, and pain,
He leadeth down and bringeth up again.

Trust to thy downfall, not unto thy raise,
So shalt thou live in death, not die in life;
Thou dost presume, if give thyself the praise,
For virtue's time is scarce, but mischief's rife:
Thou may'st offend, man's nature is so vain;
Thou, now in joy, beware of after-pain.

First cometh fury, after fury thirst,
After thirst blood, and after blood a death;
Thou mayst in fury kill whom thou lov'd'st first,
And so in quaffing blood stop thine own breath;
And murder done can never be undone,
Nor can that soul once live whose life is gone.

What is the body but an earthen case
That subject is to death, because earth dies?
But when the living soul doth want God's grace,
It dies in joy, and lives in miseries:
This soul is led by God, as others were,
But not brought up again, as others are.

This stirs no provocation to amend,
For earth hath many partners in one fall,
Although the Lord doth many tokens send,
As warnings for to hear when he doth call:
The earth was burnt and drown'd with fire and rain,
And one could never quench the other's pain.

Although both foes, God made them then both friends,
And only foes to them which were their foes;
That hate begun in earth what in them ends.
Sin's enemies they which made friends of those;
Both bent both forces unto single earth,
From whose descent they had their double birth.

'Tis strange that water should not quench a fire,
For they were heating-cold and cooling-hot;
'Tis strange that wails could not allay desire,
Wails water-kind, and fire desire's knot;
In such a cause, though enemies before,
They would join friendship, to destroy the more.

The often-weeping eyes of dry lament
Doth pour forth burning water of despair,
Which warms the caves from whence the tears are sent,
And, like hot fumes, do foul their nature's fair:
This, contrary to icy water's vale,
Doth scorch the cheeks and makes them red and pale.

Here fire and water are conjoin'd in one,
Within a red-white glass of hot and cold;
Their fire like this, double and yet alone,
Raging and tame, and tame and yet was bold;
Tame when the beasts did kill, and felt no fire
Raging upon the causers of their ire.

Two things may well put on two several natures,
Because they differ in each nature's kind,
They differing colours have and differing features;
If so, how comes it that they have one mind?
God made them friends, let this the answer be;
They get no other argument of me.

What is impossible to God's command?
Nay, what is possible to man's vain care?
'Tis much, he thinks, that fire should burn a land,
When mischief is the brand which fires bear;
He thinks it more, that water should bear fire:
Then know it was God's will; now leave t' inquire.

Yet might'st thou ask, because importunate,
How God preserv'd the good; why? because good;
Ill fortune made not them infortunate,
They angels were, and fed with angels' food:
Yet may'st thou say — for truth is always had —
That rain falls on the good as well as bad:

And say it doth; far be the letter P
From R, because of a more reverent style;
It cannot do without suppression be;
These are two bars against destruction's wile;
Pain without changing P cannot be rain,
Rain without changing R cannot be pain:

But sun and rain are portions to the ground,
And ground is dust, and what is dust but nought?
And what is nought is naught, with alpha's sound;
Yet every earth the sun and rain hath bought;
The sun doth shine on weeds as well as flowers,
The rain on both distills her weeping showers.

Yet far be death from breath, annoy from joy,
Destruction from all happiness' allines!
God will not suffer famine to destroy
The hungry appetite of virtue's signs:
These were in midst of fire, yet not harm'd,
In midst of water, yet but cool'd and warm'd.

And water-wet they were, not water-drown'd,
And fire-hot they were, not fire burn'd;
Their foes were both, whose hopes destruction crown'd,
But yet with such a crown which ne'er return'd;
Here fire and water brought both joy and pain,
To one disprofit, to the other gain.

The sun doth thaw what cold hath freez'd before,
Undoing what congealed ice had done,
Yet here the hail and snow did freeze the more,
In having heat more piercing than the sun;
A mournful spectacle unto their eyes,
That as they die, so their fruition dies.

Fury once kindled with the coals of rage
Doth hover unrecall'd, slaughters untam'd;
This wrath on fire no pity could assuage,
Because they pitiless which should be blam'd;
As one in rage, which cares not who he have,
Forgetting who to kill and who to save.

One deadly foe is fierce against the other,
As vice with virtue, virtue against vice;
Vice heartened by death, his heartless mother,
Virtue by God, the life of her device:
'Tis hard to hurt or harm a villany,
'Tis easy to do good to verity.

Is grass man's meat? no, it is cattle's food,
But man doth eat the cattle which eats grass,
And feeds his carcass with their nurs'd-up blood,
Lengthening the lives which in a moment pass:
Grass is good food if it be join'd with grace,
Else sweeter food may take a sourer place.

Is there such life in water and in bread,
In fish, in flesh, in herbs, in growing flowers?
We eat them not alive, we eat them dead;
What fruit then hath the word of living powers?
How can we live with that which is still dead?
Thy grace it is by which we all are fed.

This is a living food, a blessed meat,
Made to digest the burden at our hearts,
That leaden-weighted food which we first eat,
To fill the functions of our bodies' parts,
An indigested heap, without a mean,
Wanting thy grace, O Lord, to make it clean!

That ice which sulphur-vapours could not thaw,
That hail which piercing fire could not bore,
The cool-hot sun did melt their frosty jaw,
Which neither heat nor fire could pierce before;
Then let us take the spring-time of the day,
Before the harvest of our joys decay.

A day may be divided, as a year,
Into four climes, though of itself but one;
The morn the spring, the noon the summer's sphere,
The harvest next, evening the winter's moon:
Then sow new seeds in every new day's spring,
And reap new fruit in day's old evening.

Else if too late, they will be blasted seeds,
If planted at the noontide of their growing;
Commencers of unthankful, too late deeds,
Set in the harvest of the reaper's going:
Melting like winter-ice against the sun,
Flowing like folly's tide, and never done.