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

      Saul

       Table of Contents

      SAID Abner, “At last thou art come!

       ”Ere I tell, ere thou speak, —

       “Kiss my cheek, wish me well!” Then I wished it,

       And did kiss his cheek.

       And he, “Since the King, O my friend,

       ”For thy countenance sent,

       Nor drunken nor eaten have we;

       Nor until from his tent

       Thou return with the joyful assurance

       The King liveth yet,

       Shall our lip with the honey be brightened,

       — The water be wet.

       “For out of the black mid-tent’s silence,

       A space of three days,

       No sound hath escaped to thy servants,

       Of prayer nor of praise,

       To betoken that Saul and the Spirit

       Have ended their strife,

       And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch

       Sinks back upon life.

       “Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved!

       God’s child with his dew

       On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies

       Still living and blue

       As thou brak’st them to twine round thy harp-strings,

       As if no wild heat

       Were now raging to torture the desert!”

       Then I, as was meet,

       Knelt down to the God of my fathers,

       And rose on my feet,

       And ran o’er the sand burnt to powder.

       The tent was unlooped;

       I pulled up the spear that obstructed,

       And under I stooped;

       Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, —

       All withered and gone —

       That extends to the second enclosure,

       I groped my way on

       Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open;

       Then once more I prayed,

       And opened the foldskirts and entered,

       And was not afraid

       And spoke, “Here is David, thy servant!”

       And no voice replied.

       At the first I saw nought but the blackness;

       But soon I descried

       A something more black than the blackness;

       — The vast, the upright

       Main prop which sustains the pavilion, —

       And slow into sight

       Grew a figure against it, gigantic,

       And blackest of all; —

       Then a sunbeam, that burst thro’ the tent-roof,

       Showed Saul.

       He stood as erect as that tent-prop;

       Both arms stretched out wide

       On the great cross-support in the centre

       That goes to each side:

       So he bent not a muscle, but hung there

       As, caught in his pangs

       And waiting his change, the king-serpent

       All heavily hangs,

       Far away from his kind, in the pine,

       Till deliverance come

       With the spring-time, — so agonized Saul,

       Drear and stark, blind and dumb.

       Then I tuned my harp, — took off the lilies

       We twine round its chords

       Lest they snap ‘neath the stress of the noontide

       — Those sunbeams like swords!

       And I first played the tune all our sheep know,

       As, one after one,

       So docile they come to the pen-door

       Till folding be done;

       — They are white and untorn by the bushes,

       For lo, they have fed

       Where the long grasses stifle the water

       Within the stream’s bed:

       And now one after one seeks its lodging,

       As star follows star

       Into eve and the blue far above us,

       — So blue and so far!

       — Then the tune, for which quails on the cornland

       Will each leave his mate

       To fly after the player; then, what makes

       The crickets elate

       Till for boldness they fight one another:

       And then, what has weight

       To set the quick jerboa amusing

       Outside his sand house

       — There are none such as he for a wonder —

       Half bird and half mouse!

       — God made all the creatures and gave them

       Our love and our fear,

       To give sign, we and they are his children,

       One family here.

       Then I played the help-tune of our reapers,

       Their wine-song, when hand

       Grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship,

       And great hearts expand

       And grow one in the sense of this world’s life;

       And then, the low song

       When the dead man is praised on his journey —

       ”Bear, bear him along

       “With his few faults shut up like dead flowerets;

       ”Are balm-seeds not here

       “To console us? The land has left none such

       ”As he on the bier —

       “Oh, would we might keep thee, my brother!”

       And then, the glad chaunt

       Of the marriage, — first go the young maidens,

       Next, she whom we vaunt

       As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling:

       And then, the great march

       Where man runs to man to assist him

       And buttress an arch

       Nought can break … who shall harm them, our friends?

       Then, the chorus intoned

       As the Levites go up