heir to it. Ay, but who hewed his kingdom from the waste, Cleared, inch by inch, the acres for his sowing, Won back for man that ancient fief o’ the Church, His body? Who flung Galen from his seat, And founded the great dynasty of truth In error’s central kingdom?
Ask men that, And see their answer: just a wondering stare To learn things were not always as they are— The very fight forgotten with the fighter; Already grows the moss upon my grave! Ay, and so meet—hold fast to that, Vesalius. They only, who reconquer day by day The inch of ground they camped on overnight, Have right of foothold on this crowded earth. I left mine own; he seized it; with it went My name, my fame, my very self, it seems, Till I am but the symbol of a man, The signboard creaking o’er an empty inn. He names me—true! Oh, give the door its due I entered by. Only, I pray you, note, Had door been none, a shoulder-thrust of mine Had breached the crazy wall”—he seems to say. So meet—and yet a word of thanks, of praise, Of recognition that the clue was found, Seized, followed, clung to, by some hand now dust— Had this obscured his quartering of my shield?
How the one weakness stirs again! I thought I had done with that old thirst for gratitude That lured me to the desert years ago. I did my work—and was not that enough? No; but because the idlers sneered and shrugged, The envious whispered, the traducers lied, And friendship doubted where it should have cheered I flung aside the unfinished task, sought praise Outside my soul’s esteem, and learned too late That victory, like God’s kingdom, is within. (Nay, let the folio rest upon my knee. I do not feel its weight.) Ingratitude? The hurrying traveller does not ask the name Of him who points him on his way; and this Fallopius sits in the mid-heart of me, Because he keeps his eye upon the goal, Cuts a straight furrow to the end in view, Cares not who oped the fountain by the way, But drinks to draw fresh courage for his journey. That was the lesson that Ignatius taught— The one I might have learned from him, but would not— That we are but stray atoms on the wind, A dancing transiency of summer eves, Till we become one with our purpose, merged In that vast effort of the race which makes Mortality immortal.
“He that loseth His life shall find it”: so the Scripture runs. But I so hugged the fleeting self in me, So loved the lovely perishable hours, So kissed myself to death upon their lips, That on one pyre we perished in the end— A grimmer bonfire than the Church e’er lit! Yet all was well—or seemed so—till I heard That younger voice, an echo of my own, And, like a wanderer turning to his home, Who finds another on the hearth, and learns, Half-dazed, that other is his actual self In name and claim, as the whole parish swears, So strangely, suddenly, stood dispossessed Of that same self I had sold all to keep, A baffled ghost that none would see or hear! “Vesalius? Who’s Vesalius? This Fallopius It is who dragged the Galen-idol down, Who rent the veil of flesh and forced a way Into the secret fortalice of life”— Yet it was I that bore the brunt of it!
Well, better so! Better awake and live My last brief moment as the man I was, Than lapse from life’s long lethargy to death Without one conscious interval. At least I repossess my past, am once again No courtier med’cining the whims of kings In muffled palace-chambers, but the free Friendless Vesalius, with his back to the wall And all the world against him. O, for that Best gift of all, Fallopius, take my thanks— That, and much more. At first, when Padua wrote: “Master, Fallopius dead, resume again The chair even he could not completely fill, And see what usury age shall take of youth In honours forfeited”—why, just at first, I was quite simply credulously glad To think the old life stood ajar for me, Like a fond woman’s unforgetting heart. But now that death waylays me—now I know This isle is the circumference of my days, And I shall die here in a little while— So also best, Fallopius!
For I see The gods may give anew, but not restore; And though I think that, in my chair again, I might have argued my supplanters wrong In this or that—this Cesalpinus, say, With all his hot-foot blundering in the dark, Fabricius, with his over-cautious clutch On Galen (systole and diastole Of Truth’s mysterious heart!)—yet, other ways, It may be that this dying serves the cause. For Truth stays not to build her monument For this or that cooperating hand, But props it with her servants’ failures—nay, Cements its courses with their blood and brains, A living substance that shall clinch her walls Against the assaults of time. Already, see, Her scaffold rises on my hidden toil, I but the accepted premiss whence must spring The airy structure of her argument; Nor could the bricks it rests on serve to build The crowning finials. I abide her law: A different substance for a different end— Content to know I hold the building up; Though men, agape at dome and pinnacles, Guess not, the whole must crumble like a dream But for that buried labour underneath. Yet, Padua, I had still my word to say! Let others say it!—Ah, but will they guess Just the one word—? Nay, Truth is many-tongued. What one man failed to speak, another finds Another word for. May not all converge In some vast utterance, of which you and I, Fallopius, were but halting syllables? So knowledge come, no matter how it comes! No matter whence the light falls, so it fall! Truth’s way, not mine—that I, whose service failed In action, yet may make amends in praise. Fabricius, Cesalpinus, say your word, Not yours, or mine, but Truth’s, as you receive it! You miss a point I saw? See others, then! Misread my meaning? Yet expound your own! Obscure one space I cleared? The sky is wide, And you may yet uncover other stars. For thus I read the meaning of this end: There are two ways of spreading light: to be The candle or the mirror that reflects it. I let my wick burn out—there yet remains To spread an answering surface to the flame That others kindle.
Turn me in my bed. The window darkens as the hours swing round; But yonder, look, the other casement glows! Let me face westward as my sun goes down.
MARGARET OF CORTONA
FRA PAOLO, since they say the end is near, And you of all men have the gentlest eyes, Most like our father Francis; since you know How I have toiled and prayed and scourged and striven, Mothered the orphan, waked beside the sick, Gone empty that mine enemy might eat, Given bread for stones in famine years, and channelled With vigilant knees the pavement of this cell, Till I constrained the Christ upon the wall To bend His thorn-crowned Head in mute forgiveness … Three times He bowed it … (but the whole stands writ, Sealed with the Bishop’s signet, as you know), Once for each person of the Blessed Three— A miracle that the whole town attests, The very babes thrust forward for my blessing, And either parish plotting for my bones— Since this you know: sit near and bear with me.
I have lain here, these many empty days I thought to pack with Credos and Hail Marys So close that not a fear should force the door— But still, between the blessed syllables That taper up like blazing angel heads, Praise over praise, to the Unutterable, Strange questions clutch me, thrusting fiery arms, As though, athwart the close-meshed litanies, My dead should pluck at me from hell, with eyes Alive in their obliterated faces! … I have tried the saints’ names and our blessed Mother’s Fra Paolo, I have tried them o’er and o’er, And like a blade bent backward at first thrust They yield and fail me—and the questions stay. And so I thought, into some human heart, Pure, and yet foot-worn with the tread of sin, If only I might creep for sanctuary, It might be that those eyes would let me rest…
Fra Paolo, listen. How should I forget The day I saw him first? (You know the one.) I had been laughing in the marketplace With others like me, I the youngest there, Jostling about a pack of mountebanks Like flies on carrion (I the youngest there!), Till darkness fell; and while the other girls Turned this way, that way, as perdition beckoned, I, wondering what the night would bring, half hoping: If not, this once, a child’s sleep in my garret, At least enough to buy that two-pronged coral The others covet ‘gainst the evil eye, Since, after all, one sees that I’m the youngest— So, muttering my litany to hell (The only prayer I knew that was not Latin), Felt on my arm a touch as kind as yours, And heard a voice as kind as yours say “Come.” I turned and went; and from that day I never Looked on the face of any other man. So much is known; so much effaced; the sin Cast like a plague-struck body to the sea, Deep, deep into the unfathomable pardon— (The Head bowed thrice, as the whole town attests). What more, then? To what purpose? Bear with me!—
It seems that he, a stranger in the place, First noted me that afternoon and wondered: How grew so white a bud in such black slime, And why not mine the hand to pluck it out? Why, so Christ deals with souls, you cry—what then? Not so! Not so! When Christ, the heavenly gardener, Plucks flowers for Paradise (do I not know?), He snaps