Appendix
Section 10. Appendix
1. A Strain of Jonah the Prophet.
After the living, aye—enduring death
Of Sodom and Gomorrah; after fires
Penal, attested by time-frosted plains
Of ashes; after fruitless apple-growths,
Born but to feed the eye; after the death
Of sea and brine, both in like fate involved;
While whatsoe’er is human still retains
In change corporeal its penal badge:
A city—Nineveh—by stepping o’er
The path of justice and of equity,
On her own head had well-nigh shaken down
More fires of rain supernal. For what dread
Dwells in a mind subverted? Commonly
Tokens of penal visitations prove
All vain where error holds possession. Still,
Kindly and patient of our waywardness,
And slow to punish, the Almighty Lord
Will launch no shaft of wrath, unless He first
Admonish and knock oft at hardened hearts,
Rousing with mind august presaging seers.
For to the merits of the Ninevites
The Lord had bidden Jonah to foretell
Destruction; but he, conscious that He spare;
The subject, and remits to suppliants
The dues of penalty, and is to good
Ever inclinable, was loth to face
That errand; lest he sing his seerly strain
In vain, and peaceful issue of his threats
Ensue. His counsel presently is flight:
(If, howsoe’er, there is at all the power
God to avoid, and shun the Lord’s right hand
’Neath whom the whole orb trembles and is held
In check: but is there reason in the act
Which in his saintly heart the prophet dares?)
On the beach-lip, over against the shores
Of the Cilicians, is a city poised,
Far-famed for trusty port—Joppa her name.
Thence therefore Jonah speeding in a barque
Seeks Tarsus, through the signal providence
Of the same God; nor marvel is’t, I ween,
If, fleeing from the Lord upon the lands,
He found Him in the waves. For suddenly
A little cloud had stained the lower air
With fleecy wrack sulphureous, itself
By the wind’s seed excited: by degrees,
Bearing a brood globose, it with the sun
Cohered, and with a train caliginous
Shut in the cheated day. The main becomes
The mirror of the sky; the waves are dyed so
With black encirclement; the upper air
Down rushes into darkness, and the sea
Uprises; nought of middle space is left;
While the clouds touch the waves, and the waves all
Are mingled by the bluster of the winds
In whirling eddy. ’Gainst the renegade,
’Gainst Jonah, diverse frenzy joined to rave,
While one sole barque did all the struggle breed
’Twixt sky and surge. From this side and from that
Pounded she reels; ’neath each wave-breaking blow
The forest of her tackling trembles all;
As, underneath, her spinal length of keel,
Staggered by shock on shock, all palpitates;
And, from on high, her labouring mass of yard
Creaks shuddering; and the tree-like mast itself
Bends to the gale, misdoubting to be riven.
Meantime the rising clamour of the crew
Tries every chance for barque’s and dear life’s sake:
To pass from hand to hand the tardy coils
To tighten the girth’s noose: straitly to bind
The tiller’s struggles; or, with breast opposed,
T’ impel reluctant curves. Part, turn by turn,
With foremost haste outbale the reeking well
Of inward sea. The wares and cargo all
They then cast headlong, and with losses seek
Their perils to subdue. At every crash
Of the wild deep rise piteous cries; and out
They stretch their hands to majesties of gods,
Which gods are none; whom might of sea and sky
Fears not, nor yet the less from off their poops
With angry eddy sweeping sinks them down.
Unconscious of all this, the guilty one
’Neath the poop’s hollow arch was making sleep
Re-echo stertorous with nostril wide
Inflated: whom, so soon as he who guides
The functions of the wave-dividing prow
Saw him sleep-bound in placid peace, and proud
In his repose, he, standing o’er him, shook,
And said, “Why sing’st, with vocal nostril, dreams,
In such a crisis? In so wild a whirl,
Why keep’st thou only harbour? Lo! the wave
Whelms us, and our one hope is in the gods.
Thou also, whosoever is thy god,
Make vows, and, pouring prayers on bended knee,
Win o’er thy country’s Sovran!” Then they vote
To learn by lot who is the culprit, who
The cause of storm; nor does the lot belie
Jonah: whom then they ask, and ask again,
“Who? whence? who in the world? from what abode,
What people, hail’st thou?” He avows himself
A servant, and an over-timid one,
Of God, who raised aloft the sky, who based
The earth, who corporally fused the whole:
A renegade from Him he owns himself,
And tells the reason. Rigid turned they all
With dread. “What grudge, then, ow’st thou us? What now
Will follow? By what deed shall we appease
The main?” For more and far more swelling grew
The savage surges. Then the seer begins
Words prompted by the Spirit of the Lord:
“Lo! I your tempest am; I am the sum
Of the world’s madness: ’tis in me,” he says,
“That the sea rises, and the upper air
Down rushes; land in me is far, death near,
And hope in God is none! Come, headlong hurl
Your cause of bane: lighten your ship, and cast
This single mighty burden to the main,
A willing prey!” But they—all vainly!—strive
Homeward to turn their course; for helm refused
To suffer turning, and the yard’s stiff poise
Willed not to change. At last unto the Lord
They cry: “For one soul’s sake give us not o’er
Unto death’s maw, nor let us be besprent
With righteous blood, if thus Thine own right hand
Leadeth.” And from the eddy’s depth a whale
Outrising on the spot, scaly with shells,
Unravelling his body’s train, ’gan urge
More near the waves, shocking the gleaming brine,
Seizing—at God’s command—the prey; which, rolled
From the poop’s summit prone, with slimy jaws
He sucked; and into his long belly sped
The living feast; and swallowed, with the man,
The rage of sky and main. The billowy waste
Grows level, and the ether’s gloom dissolves;
The waves on this side, and the blasts on that,
Are to their friendly mood restored; and, where
The placid keel marks out a path secure,
White traces in the emerald furrow bloom.
The sailor then does to the reverend Lord
Of death make grateful offering of his fear;
Then enters friendly ports.
The while is voyaging, in other craft
Embarked, and cleaving ’neath the lowest waves
A wave: his sails the intestines of the fish,
Inspired with breath ferine; himself, shut in;
By waters, yet untouched; in the sea’s heart
And yet beyond its reach; ’mid wrecks of fleets
Half-eaten, and men’s carcasses dissolved
In putrid disintegrity: in life
Learning the process of his death; but still—
To be a sign hereafter of the Lord —
A witness was he (in his very self),
Not of destruction, but of death’s repulse.
2. A Strain of Sodom.
Already had Almighty God wiped off
By vengeful flood (with waters all conjoined
Which heaven discharged on earth and the sea’s plain
Outspued) the times of the primeval age:
Had pledged Himself, while nether air should bring
The winters in their course, ne’er to decree,
By liquid ruin, retribution’s due;
And had assigned, to curb the rains, the bow
Of many hues, sealing the clouds with band
Of purple and of green, Iris its name,
The rain-clouds’ proper baldric. But alike
With mankind’s second race impiety
Revives, and a new age of ill once more
Shoots forth; allotted now no more to showers
For ruin, but to fires: thus did the land
Of Sodom earn to be by glowing dews
Upburnt, and typically thus portend
The future end. There wild voluptuousness
(Modesty’s foe) stood in the room of law;
Which prescient guest would shun, and sooner choose
At Scythian or Busirian altar’s foot
’Mid sacred rites to die, and, slaughtered, pour
His blood to Bebryx, or to satiate
Libyan palæstras, or assume new forms;
By virtue of Circæan cups, than lose
His outraged sex in Sodom. At heaven’s gate
There knocked for vengeance marriages commit
With equal incest common ’mong a race
By nature rebels ’gainst themselves; and hurts
Done to man’s name and person equally.
But God, forewatching all things, at fix’d time
Doth judge the unjust; with patience tarrying
The hour when crime’s ripe age—not any force
Of wrath impetuous—shall have circumscribed
The space for waiting. Now at length the day
Of vengeance was at hand. Sent from the host
Angelical, two, youths in form, who both
Were ministering spirits, carrying
The Lord’s divine commissions, come beneath
The walls of Sodom. There was dwelling Lot
A transplantation from a pious stock;
Wise, and a practicer of righteousness,
He was the only one to think on God:
As oft a fruitful tree is wont to lurk,
Guest-like, in forests wild. He, sitting then
Before the gate (for the celestials scarce
Had reached the ramparts), though he knew not them
Divine, accosts them unsolicited,
Invites, and with ancestral honour greets;
And offers them, preparing to abide
Abroad, a hospice. By repeated prayers
He wins them; and then ranges studiously
The sacred pledges on his board, and quits
His friends with courteous offices. The night
Had brought repose: alternate dawn had chased
The night, and Sodom with her shameful law
Makes uproar at the doors. Lot, suppliant wise,
Withstands: “Young men, let not your new fed lust
Enkindle you to violate this youth!
Whither is passion’s seed inviting you?
To what vain end your lust? For such an end
No creatures wed: not such as haunt the fens;
Not stall-fed cattle; not the gaping brood
Subaqueous; nor they which, modulant
On pinions, hang suspended near the clouds;
Nor they which with forth-stretched body creep
Over earth’s face. To conjugal delight
Each kind its kind doth owe: but female still