How have I knelt with arms of my aspiring
Lifted all night in irresponsive air,
Dazed and amazed with overmuch desiring,
Blank with the utter agony of prayer!
“What,” ye will say, “and thou who at Damascus
Sawest the splendour, answeredst the Voice;
So hast thou suffered and canst dare to ask us,
Paul of the Romans, bidding us rejoice?”
You cannot say I have instanced a passage anything short of fine. But do you not feel that a man who is searching for a rhyme to Damascus has not really the time to cry “Abba, father”? Is not your own rapture interrupted by some wonder “How will he bring it off”? And when he has searched and contrived to “ask us,” are we responsive to the ecstacy? Has he not—if I may employ an Oriental trope for once—let in the chill breath of cleverness upon the garden of beatitude? No man can be clever and ecstatic at the same moment.12
As for triple rhymes—rhymes of the comedian who had a lot o’ news with many curious facts about the square on the hypotenuse, or the cassiowary who ate the missionary on the plains of Timbuktu, with Bible, prayerbook, hymnbook too—they are for the facetious, and removed, as far as geometrical progression can remove them, from any Paradise Lost or Regained.
It may sound a genuine note, now and then:
Alas! for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!
Oh, it was pitiful!
Near a whole city full,
Home she had none!
But not often: and, I think, never but in lyric.
III
So much, then, for rhyme. We will approach the question of metre, helped or unhelped by rhyme, in another way; and a way yet more practical.
When Milton (determined to write a grand epic) was casting about for his subject, he had a mind for some while to attempt the story of Job. You may find evidence for this in a MS. preserved here in Trinity College Library.
You will find printed evidence in a passage of his Reason of Church Government:
Time serves not now, [he writes,] and perhaps I might seem too profuse to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse, and the book of Job a brief model …
Again, we know Job to have been one of the three stories meditated by Shelley as themes for great lyrical dramas, the other two being the madness of Tasso and Prometheus Unbound. Shelley never abandoned this idea of a lyrical drama on Job; and if Milton abandoned the idea of an epic, there are passages in Paradise Lost as there are passages in Prometheus Unbound that might well have been written for this other story. Take the lines
Why am I mock’d with death, and lengthen’d out
To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet
Mortality my sentence, and be earth
Insensible! how glad would lay me down
As in my mother’s lap! There I should rest
And sleep secure; …
What is this, as Lord Latymer asks, but an echo of Job’s words?—
For now should I have lien down and been quiet;
I should have slept; then had I been at rest:
With kings and counsellers of the earth,
Which built desolate places for themselves …
There the wicked cease from troubling;
And there the weary be at rest.
There is no need for me to point out how exactly, though from two nearly opposite angles, the story of Job would hit the philosophy of Milton and the philosophy of Shelley to the very heart. What is the story of the afflicted patriarch but a direct challenge to a protestant like Milton (I use the word in its strict sense) to justify the ways of God to man? It is the very purpose, in sum, of the Book of Job, as it is the very purpose, in sum, of Paradise Lost: and since both poems can only work out the justification by long argumentative speeches, both poems lamentably fail as real solutions of the difficulty. To this I shall recur, and here merely observe that qui s’ excuse s’ accuse: a God who can only explain himself by the help of long-winded scolding, or of long-winded advocacy, though he employ an archangel for advocate, has given away the half of his case by the implicit admission that there are two sides to the question. And when we have put aside the poetical ineptitude of a Creator driven to apology, it remains that to Shelley the Jehovah who, for a sort of wager, allowed Satan to torture Job merely for the game of testing him, would be no better than any other tyrant; would be a miscreant Creator, abominable as the Zeus of the Prometheus Unbound.
Now you may urge that Milton and Shelley dropped Job for hero because both felt him to be a merely static figure: and that the one chose Satan, the rebel angel, the other chose Prometheus the rebel Titan, because both are active rebels, and as epic and drama require action, each of these heroes makes the thing move; that Satan and Prometheus are not passive sufferers like Job but souls as quick and fiery as Byron’s Lucifer:
Souls who dare use their immortality—
Souls who dare look the Omnipotent tyrant in
His everlasting face, and tell him that
His evil is not good.
Very well, urge this: urge it with all your might. All the while you will be doing just what I desire you to do, using Job alongside Prometheus Unbound and Paradise Lost as a comparative work of literature.
But, if you ask me for my own opinion why Milton and Shelley dropped their intention to make poems on the Book of Job, it is that they no sooner tackled it than they found it
