**** ROTATE **** **** ROTATE **** **** ROTATE **** **** ROTATE ****

Find this Story

Print, a form you can hold

Wireless download to your Amazon Kindle

Look for a summary or analysis of this Poem.

Enjoy this? Share it!

PAGE 12

Bishop Blougram’s Apology
by [?]

–Not as I state it, who (you please subjoin)
Disfigure such a life and call it names.
While, to your mind, remains another way
For simple men: knowledge and power have rights,
But ignorance and weakness have rights too.
There needs no crucial effort to find truth
If here or there or anywhere about:
We ought to turn each side, try hard and see, 860
And if we can’t, be glad we’ve earned at least
The right, by one laborious proof the more,
To graze in peace earth’s pleasant pasturage.
Men are not angels, neither are they brutes:
Something we may see, all we cannot see.
What need of lying? I say, I see all,
And swear to each detail the most minute
In what I think a Pan’s face–you, mere cloud:
I swear I hear him speak and see him wink,
For fear, if once I drop the emphasis, 870
Mankind may doubt there’s any cloud at all.
You take the simple life–ready to see,
Willing to see (for no cloud ‘s worth a face)–
And leaving quiet what no strength can move,
And which, who bids you move? who has the right?
I bid you; but you are God’s sheep, not mine;

“Pastor est tui Dominus.”

You find
In this the pleasant pasture of our life
Much you may eat without the least offence,
Much you don’t eat because your maw objects, 880
Much you would eat but that your fellow-flock
Open great eyes at you and even butt,
And thereupon you like your mates so well
You cannot please yourself, offending them;
Though when they seem exorbitantly sheep,
You weigh your pleasure with their butts and bleats
And strike the balance. Sometimes certain fears
Restrain you, real checks since you find them so;
Sometimes you please yourself and nothing checks:
And thus you graze through life with not one lie, 890
And like it best.

But do you, in truth’s name?
If so, you beat–which means you are not I–
Who needs must make earth mine and feed my fill
Not simply unbutted at, unbickered with,
But motioned to the velvet of the sward
By those obsequious wethers’ very selves.
Look at me. sir; my age is double yours:
At yours, I knew beforehand, so enjoyed,
What now I should be–as, permit the word,
I pretty well imagine your whole range 900
And stretch of tether twenty years to come.
We both have minds and bodies much alike:
In truth’s name, don’t you want my bishopric,
My daily bread, my influence and my state?
You’re young. I’m old; you must be old one day;
Will you find then, as I do hour by hour,
Women their lovers kneel to, who cut curls
From your fat lap-dog’s ear to grace a brooch–
Dukes, who petition just to kiss your ring–
With much beside you know or may conceive? 910
Suppose we die to-night: well, here am I,
Such were my gains, life bore this fruit to me,
While writing all the same my articles
On music, poetry, the fictile vase
Found at Albano, chess, Anacreon’s Greek.
But you–the highest honor in your life,
The thing you’ll crown yourself with, all your days,
Is–dining here and drinking this last glass
I pour you out in sign of amity
Before we part forever. Of your power 920
And social influence, worldly worth in short,
Judge what’s my estimation by the fact,
I do not condescend to enjoin, beseech,
Hint secrecy on one of all these words!
You’re shrewd and know that should you publish one
The world would brand the lie–my enemies first,
Who’d sneer–“the bishop’s an arch-hypocrite
And knave perhaps, but not so frank a fool.”
Whereas I should not dare for both my ears
Breathe one such syllable, smile one such smile, 930
Before the chaplain who reflects myself–
My shade’s so much more potent than your flesh.
What’s your reward, self-abnegating friend?
Stood you confessed of those exceptional
And privileged great natures that dwarf mine–
A zealot with a mad ideal in reach,
A poet just about to print his ode,
A statesman with a scheme to stop this war,
An artist whose religion is his art–
I should have nothing to object: such men 940
Carry the fire, all things grow warm to them,
Their drugget’s worth my purple, they beat me.
But you–you ‘re just as little those as I–
You, Gigadibs, who, thirty years of age,
Write statedly for Blackwood’s Magazine,
Believe you see two points in Hamlet’s soul
Unseized by the Germans yet–which view you’ll print–
Meantime the best you have to show being still
That lively lightsome article we took
Almost for the true Dickens–what’s its name? 950
“The Slum and Cellar, or Whitechapel life
Limned after dark!” it made me laugh, I know,
And pleased a month, and brought you in ten pounds.
–Success I recognize and compliment,
And therefore give you, if you choose, three words
(The card and pencil-scratch is quite enough)
Which whether here, in Dublin or New York,
Will get you, prompt as at my eyebrow’s wink,
Such terms as never you aspired to get
In all our own reviews and some not ours. 960
Go write your lively sketches! be the first
“Blougram, or The Eccentric Confidence”–
Or better simply say, “The Outward-bound.”
Why, men as soon would throw it in my teeth
As copy and quote the infamy chalked broad
About me on the church-door opposite.
You will not wait for that experience though,
I fancy, howsoever you decide,
To discontinue–not detesting, not
Defaming, but at least–despising me! 970
______________________________________