Text and publication
First publ. DP. 28 May 1864; repr. 18642, 1865, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1864. The MS, part of the printer’s copy for DP, is at Morgan. It is a very clean copy, with few cancellations. Preserved with MS is a loose slip of semi-transparent paper with pencil readings not in B.’s hand (MS slip): these refer to six of the lines revised from MS in 1864 and are noted where they occur. Verbal variants between MS and 1864 are relatively numerous in comparison with other DP poems, though mostly minor; only one verbal variant was introduced in subsequent editions.
Composition and date
No precise date can be assigned to the poem, beyond the terminus a quo of 1852 if, as has been suggested, the poem ‘replies’ to Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna, or 1859 if it is linked to Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam (see below); but it is unlikely to have been composed before the publication of M & W, in which it would surely have been included, and B. almost certainly encountered the Rubáiyát not on its first publication but when it was ‘discovered’ by D. G. Rossetti and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle in 1861. This coincides with B.’s return to London, at a time when his friendship with Rossetti was at its closest, and Rossetti, as DeVane notes (Handbook 293), might well have drawn the work to B.’s attention. Moreover, as Edward C. McAleer notes, B.’s letters to Isa Blagden are filled with allusions to Arnold’s Empedocles, beginning with his letter of 25 March 1862 (Dearest Isa 105n.5), and these allusions are all to a passage of Arnold’s poem which refers to extreme old age; B. also met Arnold in this period (ibid. 138). We suggest dating the poem to 1862.
Sources and influences
B.’s knowledge of Judaism and especially of rabbinical legend, which was exceptional for a non-Jew of his time, came to him from his father, whose library contained a number of Hebrew texts and translations, though none by the original of the Rabbi here. The historical Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, also known as Abenezra, was a major Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages (1092/3–1167). Born in Spain, he later went into voluntary exile, spending much of his life wandering across Europe and the Near East. He is best known for his commentaries on the Bible, though he also composed poetry. He wrote in Hebrew, which B. probably could not read in 1864, though he had studied it in his youth and was to take it up again in old age; however, a number of his works were translated into Latin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and B. might have encountered them in that form. Many of Ibn Ezra’s MSS were held in the British Museum, which B. used extensively during his early career; others were in the Bibliothèque Impériale (later Nationale) in Paris and the Vatican Library in Rome, both accessible to B. at different times. The body–soul relation in the poem appears contradictory, but in fact resembles that described by the historical Ibn Ezra. Michael Friedländer notes that in his writings ‘[s]ensuality, if allowed to grow, becomes the source of bodily and mental ruin’ but that ‘[o]n the other hand, celibacy, being in opposition to the will of God as revealed in nature, is likewise objected to’ (Essays on the Writings of Abraham Ibn Ezra [London 1877] 39). Ibn Ezra himself gives the following account in his commentary on Ecclesiastes vii 3: ‘It is known that as long as the bodily desires are strong, the soul is weak and powerless against them, because they are supported by the body and all its powers; hence those who think only of eating and drinking, will never be wise. By the alliance of the intellect with the animal soul (sensibility) the desires are subordinated, and the eyes of the soul are opened a little; but the soul is not yet prepared for pure knowledge, on account of the animal soul which seeks dominion, and produces all kinds of passion; therefore after the victory, gained with the help of the animal soul over the desires, it is necessary that the soul should devote itself to wisdom.’ Ben Ezra’s commitment to the full span of human life seems to be based on principles put forward by Ibn Ezra, who prizes ‘the knowledge acquired by the soul during its connection with the body’: ‘The soul is to Ibn Ezra a treasure of truth, founded both on impressions made by the outer world upon our senses, and on the action of certain intellectual faculties within us’ (Friedländer, pp. 44, 44–5).
The two major contemporary poetic influences are Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna (1852) and Edward FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859). B.’s poem responds in general to the Stoic pessimism advanced by Empedocles at I ii 77–426: there are also verbal echoes. B. greatly admired Arnold’s poem and told Isa Blagden he was ‘really flattered’ when Arnold, who had omitted the poem from collections after 1852, reprinted it in his 1867 Poems at B.’s solicitation (Dearest Isa 274). For other examples of Arnold’s influence on B., see Old Pictures (p. 404) and Cleon (p. 563).
Arnold’s Empedocles appears to deny significant afterlife; the historical Empedocles ambiguously seems to affirm it in several passages, seeing it as the conclusion of a cycle of reincarnation in which having been ‘boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea’, enlightened souls ‘come forth among men on earth as prophets, minstrels, physicians and leaders, and from these they arise as gods, highest in honour’ and ‘[w]ith other immortals … share hearth and table, having no part in human sorrows, unwearied’ (transl. M. R. Wright, Empedocles: the Extant Fragments [1981] 275, 291, 292). This proto-evolutionary scheme may have influenced the model of human existence put forward in B.’s poem.
Lines 151–92 seem to develop (and contradict) the imagery of the divine potter shaping human clay in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát, which itself alludes to passages in the Bible on this theme; in more general terms, Ben Ezra attacks the epicurean pessimism of the Rubáiyát. In 1909 F. L. Sargent published a parallel text comparing the two poems, as Omar and the Rabbi. On B.’s view of FitzGerald himself, see ‘To Edward FitzGerald’ (1889), which expresses his outrage over the posthumous publication of a letter in which FitzGerald had disparaged EBB. A letter to Anne Thackeray Ritchie of 20 July 1889 spoke however of FitzGerald as also ‘a man of genius I was desirous of knowing more closely than through his brilliant Omar translation’ (H. T. Fuller and V. Hammersley, Thackeray’s Daughter [Dublin 1951] p. 166). B.’s library contained a copy of the third edition of FitzGerald’s poem, inscribed ‘R. B. from L. L. T. Sept. 1874’ (Collections A0966).
The stanza-form has a metrical pattern of iambic trimeter in ll. 1–2, 4–5, with an iambic pentameter in line 3 and a hexameter in line 6, rhyming aabccb. It is anticipated in Christina Rossetti, The Martyr, which was privately printed in 1847 and again may well have been shown to B. by D. G. Rossetti. Like many of the poems in this early volume, The Martyr expresses longing for early death; B.’s poem may be an inversion of this. B.’s library contained an advance proof copy of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862: Collections A1968), presented by Gabriel: see ll. 175–80n.
B. may also have been responding to Tennyson’s pessimistic poems on old age, esp. ‘Ulysses’ (1842) and ‘Tithonus’ (1860): ‘Tithonus’ first appeared in the Cornhill (Feb. 1860), and then in Tennyson’s 1864 collection Enoch Arden and Other Poems. Tithonus, a figure from classical mythology, was given immortal life by Aurora, goddess of the dawn, but not immortal youth: like the Struldbrugs in pt. iii of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. he grows perpetually older without being able to die.
Other possible literary influences include Victor Hugo’s Boöz Endormi [Boaz Asleep], published in his La Légende des Siècles (1859), a collection which B. read in that year with strong, though strongly qualified, admiration (Dearest Isa 48–9; his copy is extant, Collections A1266). With the poem’s opening, cp. Isaac Williams’s ‘Elegiac Fragment’ (1849): ‘While lovely flowers of youth remain / Many designs man hath in vain; / Ne’er thinks he shall grow old and die’ (ll. 7–9); also Thomas Moore, ‘My Birth-day’. O. P. Rhyne (‘Browning and Goethe’, MLN xliv [1929] 327) compares a passage from Goethe’s Zahme Xenien (1820).
Parallels in B.
A ‘Rabbi ben Ezra’ also appears in Holy-Cross Day as the author of a ‘Song of Death’ (ll. 69–120, pp. 549–52); as we point out, B.’s use of the name in the earlier poem may have been influenced by the name given to the fictional Jewish convert to Christianity in Manuel Lacunza’s The Coming of Messiah in Glory and Majesty (1827); see headnote, pp. 541–2. Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884) similarly presents the thought of another sage-like figure (this time Persian, like Omar Khayyám, but imaginary), who projects a predominantly optimistic view of human life, again in contrast to FitzGerald and Arnold. B.’s affirmative view of old age had been expressed in Pauline 617–19 (p. 46). In a note to Sordello i 965 (I 458–8) B. wrote: ‘The soul endures but the body changes—even if for the better.’ In DP, A Death (p. 714) provides another positive study of old age; cp. also the Pope in bk. x of Ring and the figure of the village Pope in Ivàn Ivànovitch (DI 1879), esp. ll. 309–321. With the pessimistic epicurean attitude Ben Ezra attacks in ll. 154–80, cp. Cleon (p. 563). Ben Ezra’s emphasis on judging inner motives and impulses as well as external actions belongs to B.’s philosophy of human life as necessarily partial and imperfect, since the perfect conjunction of ‘Power’ with ‘Love’ (see ll. 55–7) belongs only to God; man can (and indeed must) aspire to this perfection, but cannot hope to attain it in earthly life; his progress therefore follows an evolutionary path, both from youth to age and from mortal to immortal life. This philosophy is present from B.’s earliest work (e.g. Paracelsus and Sordello), and shapes the visionary poetics of Saul: ‘’tis not what man Does which exalts him, but what man Would do’ (l. 295, III 518); it is re-stated in late works such as Apollo and the Fates (Parleyings, 1887): ‘Manhood—the actual? Nay, praise the potential! … What is? No, what may be—sing! that’s Man’s essential!’ (ll. 211, 213). In this scheme age and death are ineluctable, yet relative to the larger design of which they form part: as the Fates put it, ‘Our shuttles fly fast, / Weave living, not life sole and whole: as age—youth, / So death completes living, shows life in its truth. / Man learningly lives: till death help him—no lore! / It is doom and must be’ (ll. 243–7).
Criticism
Matthew Arnold’s ‘Growing Old’ (1867) is usually taken to be Arnold’s response to a poem which responds to one of his own: it is deeply pessimistic, absolutely reversing B.’s attitude. It consists of a series of answers to the question: ‘What is it to grow old?’, concluding:
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
For a discussion of these two poems, and a possible joint source in Wordsworth, see Robert E. Lovelace, ‘A Note on Arnold’s “Growing Old” ’, MLN lxvii.1 (Jan. 1953) 21–23.
1
Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
5 Who saith “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”
2
Not that, amassing flowers,
Youth sighed “Which rose make ours,
Which lily leave and then as best recall?”
10 Not that, admiring stars,
It yearned “Nor Jove, nor Mars;
Mine be some figured flame which blends, transcends them all!”
3
Not for such hopes and fears
Annulling youth’s brief years,
15 Do I remonstrate: folly wide the mark!
Rather I prize the doubt
Low kinds exist without,
Finished and finite clods, untroubled by a spark.
4
Poor vaunt of life indeed,
20 Were man but formed to feed
On joy, to solely seek and find and feast:
Such feasting ended, then
As sure an end to men;
Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?
5
25 Rejoice we are allied
To That which doth provide
And not partake, effect and not receive!
A spark disturbs our clod;
Nearer we hold of God
30 Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe.
6
Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go!
Be our joys three-parts pain!
35 Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!
7
For thence,—a paradox
Which comforts while it mocks,—
Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:
40 What I aspired to be,
And was not, comforts me:
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.
What is he but a brute
Whose flesh hath soul to suit,
45 Whose spirit works lest arms and legs want play?
To man, propose this test—
Thy body at its best,
How far can that project thy soul on its lone way?
9
Yet gifts should prove their use:
50 I own the Past profuse
Of power each side, perfection every turn:
Eyes, ears took in their dole,
Brain treasured up the whole;
Should not the heart beat once “How good to live and learn?”
10
55 Not once beat “Praise be Thine!
I see the whole design,
I, who saw Power, see now Love perfect too:
Perfect I call Thy plan:
Thanks that I was a man!
60 Maker, remake, complete,—I trust what Thou shalt do!”
For pleasant is this flesh;
Our soul, in its rose-mesh
Pulled ever to the earth, still yearns for rest:
Would we some prize might hold
65 To match those manifold
Possessions of the brute,—gain most, as we did best!
12
Let us not always say
“Spite of this flesh to-day
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!”
70 As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry “All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!”
13
Therefore I summon age
To grant youth’s heritage,
75 Life’s struggle having so far reached its term:
Thence shall I pass, approved
A man, for aye removed
From the developed brute; a God though in the germ.
14
And I shall thereupon
80 Take rest, ere I be gone
Once more on my adventure brave and new:
Fearless and unperplexed,
When I wage battle next,
What weapons to select, what armour to indue.
15
85 Youth ended, I shall try
My gain or loss thereby;
Be the fire ashes, what survives is gold:
And I shall weigh the same,
Give life its praise or blame:
90 Young, all lay in dispute; I shall know, being old.
16
For note, when evening shuts,
A certain moment cuts
The deed off, calls the glory from the grey:
A whisper from the west
95 Shoots—“Add this to the rest,
Take it and try its worth: here dies another day.”
17
So, still within this life,
Though lifted o’er its strife,
Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last,
100 “This rage was right i’ the main,
That acquiescence vain:
The Future I may face now I have proved the Past.”
18
For more is not reserved
To man, with soul just nerved
105 To act to-morrow what he learns to-day:
Here, work enough to watch
The Master work, and catch
Hints of the proper craft, tricks of the tool’s true play.
19
As it was better, youth
110 Should strive, through acts uncouth,
Toward making, than repose on aught found made;
So, better, age, exempt
From strife, should know, than tempt
Further. Thou waitedst age; wait death nor be afraid!
20
115 Enough now, if the Right
And Good and Infinite
Be named here, as thou callest thy hand thine own,
Subject to no dispute
120 From fools that crowded youth, nor let thee feel alone.
21
Be there, for once and all,
Severed great minds from small,
Announced to each his station in the Past!
Was I, the world arraigned,
125 Were they, my soul disdained,
Right? Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last!
22
Now, who shall arbitrate?
Ten men love what I hate,
Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
130 Ten, who in ears and eyes
Match me: we all surmise,
They, this thing, and I, that: whom shall my soul believe?
23
Not on the vulgar mass
Called “work,” must sentence pass,
135 Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
O’er which, from level stand,
The low world laid its hand,
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:
24
But all, the world’s coarse thumb
140 And finger failed to plumb,
So passed in making up the main account;
All instincts immature,
All purposes unsure,
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount:
25
145 Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
150 This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.
26
Ay, note that Potter’s wheel,
That metaphor! and feel
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,—
Thou, to whom fools propound,
155 When the wine makes its round,
“Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!”
27
Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
160 What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time’s wheel runs back or stops; Potter and clay endure.
He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
165 This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
29
What though the earlier grooves
170 Which ran the laughing loves
Around thy base, no longer pause and press?
What though, about thy rim,
Scull-things in order grim
Grow out, in graver mood, obey the sterner stress?
30
175 Look not thou down but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp’s flash and trumpet’s peal,
The new wine’s foaming flow,
The Master’s lips a-glow!
180 Thou, heaven’s consummate cup, what needst thou with earth’s wheel?
31
But I need, now as then,
Thee, God, who mouldest men;
And since, not even while the whirl was worst,
Did I,—to the wheel of life
185 With shapes and colours rife,
Bound dizzily,—mistake my end, to slake Thy thirst:
So, take and use Thy work!
Amend what flaws may lurk,
What strain o’ the stuff, what warpings past the aim!
190 My times be in Thy hand!
Perfect the cup as planned!
Let age approve of youth, and death complete the same!
1. Cp., here and passim, Wordsworth, The Excursion ix 50–92, which speaks of old age as ‘a final EMINENCE’, or ‘superior height’, which can ‘confer / Fresh power to commune with the invisible world’. O. P. Rhyne (see headnote) compares the last line of Goethe’s poem, ‘Komm, ältele du mit mir’, commenting that B.’s line ‘could very easily be considered a direct translation’ of it.
4. Cp. Psalms xxxi 15: ‘My times are in thy hand: deliver me from the hand of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me.’ Ben Ezra cites the verse again at the end of the poem (l. 190).
5. A whole I planned: cp. l. 56. Probably reflecting Arnold’s Empedocles I ii 82–5: ‘Hither and thither spins / The wind-born, mirroring soul, / A thousand glimpses wins / And never sees a whole’; also the source of this passage in the writings of Empedocles: ‘After observing a small part of life in their lifetime, subject to a swift death they are borne up and waft away like smoke; they are convinced only of that which each has experienced as they are driven in all directions, yet all boast of finding the whole’ (Sextus Empiricus adversus mathematicos 7.122, transl. M. R. Wright, Empedocles: the Extant Fragments [1981] 155). Cp. also Pope, Essay on Man (1732–44) i 60: ‘’Tis but a part we see, and not a whole’, and ll. 56–9.
6. Cp. Isaiah xii 2: ‘Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid’.
7–18. The sense is that Ben Ezra does not blame (‘remonstrate’ with) youth for its experiential greed, however destructive its appetites may be; instead he prizes what these things lead to, ‘doubt’, in contrast with the torpid animal acquiescence involved in certainty. Doubt is illustrated by both of the exclamations ascribed to youth: inability to decide between different flowers, desire for some absolute, transcendent star beyond those actually visible. With this ethic, cp. ll. 109–11; also Dîs Aliter Visum 116–30 (p. 697). See also Pauline 268–80n., esp. 277–8n. (p. 26).
7–12. Based on Arnold’s Empedocles I ii 352–70; cp. esp. ll. 356–7, a passage about the period of youth: ‘Pleasure, to our hot grasp / Gives flowers after flowers’.
12. Cp. Hugo, Boöz Endormi:
Le vieillard, qui revient vers la source première,
Entre aux jours éternels et sort des jours changeants;
Et l’on voit de la flamme aux yeux des jeunes gens,
Mais dans l’oeil du vieillard on voit de la lumière. (p. 36)
[The old man, returning to the primal source, enters the days of eternity and leaves behind the days of change; and while one sees flame in the eyes of young people, in the eye of the old man one sees light.]
Note that B.’s ‘flame’ is to be understood as a metonymy for ‘star’.
15. remonstrate: the scansion dictates the pronunciation ‘re-món-strate’. folly wide the mark: i.e. it would be folly to blame ‘youth’ for ‘such hopes and fears’ (not that ‘youth’ itself exemplifies ‘folly’).
16–18. The praise of ‘doubt’ here does not refer to religious doubt (as in Bishop Blougram 600–5, p. 318) but to the discontent created in man by his unique attribute, self-consciousness: Ben Ezra directly counters the argument of the Greek poet-philosopher Cleon who sees in this faculty man’s ultimate cause for despair (see esp. ll. 181–271, pp. 576–81).
20–21. to feed / On joy: cp. Dryden, Aureng-Zebe V 574–5: ‘Reason’s nice taste does our delights destroy: / Brutes are more bless’d, who gros[s]ly feed on joy’.
22–3. The historical Ben Ezra argued that ‘In the absence of further development, the soul necessarily ceases to exist at the death of the body; this is the lot of the wicked’ (Friedländer, p. 44).
24. This line swiftly became notorious as an illustration of B.’s supposedly harsh and clotted style, though it can of course be defended on mimetic grounds. Cp. Pope, Essay on Man i 81–4: ‘The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, / Had he thy Reason, would he skip and play? / Pleas’d to the last, he crops the flow’ry food, / And licks the hand just rais’d to shed his blood.’ crop-full: this word appears in Milton, L’Allegro 113. maw-crammed: apparently B.’s coinage; but Shakespeare associates ‘maw’ with ‘cram’ in several passages: ‘Do thou but think / What ’tis to cram a maw or clothe a back / From such a filthy vice’ (Measure for Measure III ii 21–3; see also Romeo and Juliet V iii 45, 48).
42–8. The concept of a ‘scale’ of life in which human beings are situated between the animal (or physical) and the divine (or spiritual) has both classical and Christian antecedents. Ben Ezra’s argument is that each person can choose the direction of their life: if you accept that the life of the body is primary, with the soul at its service, you will ‘sink i’ the scale’; if you believe that the body’s mission is to ‘project [the] soul on its lone way’, you will rise towards a higher form of life. The contrast between ‘bestial’ appetite and the primacy of ‘soul’ is very differently treated by other speakers in B., e.g. Fra Lippo Lippi (see e.g. ll. 258–70, pp. 499–500). See also ll. 22–3n.
45. A soul in thrall to the body will exercise itself only on the body’s behalf, neglecting its own, higher aims.
48. its lone way: According to Ibn Ezra, in his commentary on Psalms xxii 22, ‘The soul of every man is called “lonely” … because it is separated, during its union with the human body, from the universal soul, into which it is again received when it departs from its earthly companion’ (Friedländer, pp. 28–29).
52. their dole] the dole (MS, canc.). ‘Dole’ means ‘portion’ or ‘lot’, a sense still current in the period though now archaic; OED’s last citation is a poem by Tennyson publ. in 1871.
53. See l. 5n.
55–7. Cp. 56–9. Cp. Empedocles: ‘there was … a man [Empedocles himself, or possibly Parmenides or Pythagoras] knowing an immense amount, who had acquired a treasure of thoughts … for whenever he reached out with all his thoughts, easily he saw each of the things that there are, in ten and even twenty generations of men’ (in Porphyry, Vita Pythagorae 30).
57. On the conjunction of ‘Power’ and ‘Love’ see headnote, Parallels. see now] shall see (MS); one of B.’s handwritten corrections to 1864 proof (see Appendix C, p. 895).
58–9. Cp. Pope, An Essay on Man i 5–6: ‘[Let us] Expatiate free o’er all this scene of Man; / A mighty maze! but not without a plan’.
62. rose-mesh: apparently B.’s coinage; cp. Instans Tyrannus 20 (III 261).
67–72. Reflecting the historical Ibn Ezra’s belief that the soul’s ‘victory … over the desires’ is obtained ‘with the help of the animal soul’, not against its resistance.
68. this flesh] the flesh (MS).
70. Cp. Shelley, ‘To a Skylark’ 9–10: ‘The blue deep thou wingest, / And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest’. Cp. also Pippa’s first song, in which ‘The lark’s on the wing’ (i 219, p. 111).
71. good things: a common phrase in the Bible, as in Joshua xxiii 14: ‘And, behold, this day I am going the way of all the earth: and ye know in all your hearts and in all your souls, that not one thing hath failed of all the good things which the Lord your God spake concerning you; all are come to pass unto you, and not one thing hath failed thereof ’, and Hebrews xl 7: ‘If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?’
72.] Are ours, nor soul helps flesh, more than flesh helps the soul!” (MS).
73–8. Contrast Sordello iii 950–57 (I 592) where Sordello is said to belong to the class of those who ‘find our common nature … Cling when they would discard it; craving strength / To leap from the allotted world, at length / ’Tis left—they floundering without a term, / Each a God’s germ, but doomed remain a germ / In unexpanded infancy’. The revised text for the Poetical Works of 1863 sign-posts the fact that this ‘doom’ may be avoided: ‘Each a god’s germ, doomed to remain a germ / In unexpanded infancy, unless … / But that’s the story!’—i.e. Sordello will be saved at the end by a vision of the necessary imperfection of human existence.
76–8. The contrast between ‘man’ and ‘the developed brute’ could be read as anti-Darwinian.
79–84. A more ambivalent attitude to this prospect of a future existence of renewed struggle is expressed in Old Pictures 161–76 (p. 422). The image of life as a battle is common in B., most famously articulated in the Epilogue to his final volume, Asolando (1889).
82. unperplexed: used also of the ‘high man’ in A Grammarian (l. 123, p. 596).
84. indue: ‘To put on as a garment; to clothe or cover’ (OED).
87. Cp. A Death 105–6 (p. 730). Be] Leave (1868–88), the only verbal variant in eds. after 1864.
91–6. Cp. Childe Roland 45–8n. (p. 356).
102. proved: using OED sense 6a of ‘prove’: ‘To put (a person or thing) to the test; to test the genuineness or qualities of ’.
104. To] For (MS canc.). with soul just] whose soul is (MS; the 1864 reading is noted on MS slip).
105. Cp. FitzGerald, Rubáiyát, st. xx: ‘To-morrow?—Why, To-morrow I may be / My self with Yesterday’s Sev’n Thousand Years’. FitzGerald’s Preface describes Khayyám as one who ‘after vainly endeavouring to unshackle his Steps from Destiny, and to catch some authentic glimpse of Tomorrow, falls back upon Today (which has outlasted so many Tomorrows!) as the only Ground he got to stand on, however momentarily slipping from under his Feet’ (p. xiii). he learns] it learns (MS; the 1864 reading is noted on MS slip).
111. aught found made;] what was made,— (MS; the 1864 reading is noted on MS slip).
113. know, than tempt] know,—attempt (MS canc.), indicating the sense in which ‘tempt’ is being used; cp. ‘tempter’ in Sordello iii 655 (I 570).
115. if ] that (MS; the 1864 reading is noted on MS slip).
117. Be named] Are named (MS; the 1864 reading is noted on MS slip).
120. Cp. Empedocles II: 220–9: ‘Where shall thy votary fly then? back to men?— / But they will gladly welcome him once more, / And help him to unbend his too tense thought, / And rid him of the presence of himself, / And keep their friendly chatter at his ear, / And haunt him, till the absence from himself, / That other torment, grow unbearable; / And he will fly to solitude again’. Ben Ezra transforms this unproductive dialectic into an evolutionary progression. See also l. 48n. From fools that crowded] From that crowd round (MS; probably a copying error, with ‘fools’ omitted after ‘From’; the 1864 reading is noted on MS slip).
121–3. Cp. Master Hugues 49–50 (III 393): ‘Masters being lauded and sciolists shent, / Parted the sheep from the goats!’ and Cleon 115–22 (p. 573).
124–5. ‘whom’ must be supplied between ‘I’, and ‘the world’ and ‘they’ and ‘my soul’. Edward Nolan’s attempt to interpret the structures as absolute is unconvincing (‘Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra”, Lines 124–125’. Explicator li [Jan. 1993] 90).
125. my soul disdained: cp. Shelley, Rosalind and Helen 566–7: ‘in this erring world to live / My soul disdained not’.
127–32. Cp. La Saisiaz (1878) 297–302.
132. my soul] a man (MS).
133–50. On the value of potential as opposed to actual achievement in B., see headnote, Parallels. There are striking analogies here with A Grammarian (p. 586).
134. must sentence] will sentence (MS).
136. O’er which] Whereon (MS).
138. could value] and valued (MS).
141. passed in] passed by, (MS).
142. All ] The (MS).
143. All] The (MS).
144. weighed … swelled] weigh … swell (MS; ‘swell’ is written over ‘made’).
145–6. Cp. Sordello v 547 (I 692): ‘Thought is the soul of act’, and CE 1035–8 (III 87).
145. hardly] never (MS, canc.).
150. This] All (MS). whose wheel the pitcher shaped: inverted syntax: ‘whose wheel shaped the pitcher’.
151–92. The metaphor of the divine potter is found in sts. lix–lxiii of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát, where it raises questions about the purpose of existence (e.g. st. lxi where one of the ‘pots’ states: ‘Surely not in vain / My Substance from the common Earth was ta’en, / That He who subtly wrought me into Shape / Should stamp me back to common Earth again’ and about God’s justice, as in st. lxiii where another pot asks: ‘They sneer at me for leaning all awry; / What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?’ These images are found in the original Persian texts, but FitzGerald would have had in mind the extensive biblical sources for the divine potter, e.g. Isaiah xlv 9: ‘Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands?’ and Romans ix 20–21: ‘Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?’
153. spins fast] turns round (MS).
154–6. A general paraphrase of the dominant motif of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát, e.g. sts. iii–iv: ‘I heard a Voice within the Tavern cry, / “Awake, my Little ones, and fill the Cup / Before Life’s Liquor in its Cup be dry.” // And, as the Cock crew, those who stood before / The Tavern shouted—“Open then the Door! / You know how little while we have to stay, / And, once departed, may return no more.”’, and st. xx: ‘Ah, my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears / To-day of past Regrets and future Fears’.
156. all] earth (MS). seize to-day! a literal translation of the Latin tag ‘carpe diem’ (Horace, Odes I xi 8).
157–8. Derived from Empedocles, who argues in many places that once the contents of the universe were constituted, ‘nothing ever comes to birth later in addition to these, and there is no passing away, for if they were continually perishing they would no longer exist … Fools … who suppose that what formerly did not exist comes into existence, or that something dies and is completely destroyed’ (transl. M. R. Wright, Empedocles: the Extant Fragments [1981] 167, 268). The ‘atomic’ theory of Epicurus was founded on this principle of the perpetual dissolution and reconstitution of matter, and was given poetic form in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura; the historical Ibn Ezra also endorsed this principle, though not the theological consequences that classical philosophy deduced from it: the indifference of the gods to human life and the finality of death.
159. changes, but thy soul] passes, but the soul (MS).
163–74. The imagery here may be indebted to the historical Ibn Ezra’s argument that ‘it is not so much the soul of the righteous that is to be everlasting as … the divine writing inscribed thereon, that is, the knowledge acquired by the soul during its connection with the body’ (Friedländer, p. 44: Friedländer’s italics).
163. this dance] that dance (MS).
164. plastic circumstance: cp. Charles Mackay, Egeria (1850) III 120–1: ‘Him would the Earth receive as king and lord, / Him would each plastic circumstance obey’. ‘Plastic’ here has the passive sense given in OED 6a: ‘Capable of being moulded, fashioned, or impressed’. (Cp. l. 168.) The word in its active sense was associated with pottery: OED 1a cites Ben Jonson, The Magnetic Lady (1632): ‘a meere Plastick, or Potters ambition’.
165. This Present] That Present (MS).
166. With this concept, cp. in Sordello iii 811–35 (I 582) the extended metaphor of life as the construction of an ‘engine’, which at death will be ‘Dismounted wheel by wheel’. See also ll. 175–80n.
167. its bent] the bent (MS).
170. Which] That (MS). laughing loves: cp. Samuel Boyse, ‘To Mr. William Cumming going to France, in August 1735’ 28–30: ‘For there fair Venus keeps her sov’reign Court, / There all her laughing Loves in Crowds resort, / And in a thousand Shapes surprize the Heart!’ As this context suggests, ‘loves’ are to be understood here as cupids or cherubs (OED love: sense 7a), forming part of the decoration of the ‘cup’; cp. ‘loves and doves’ in Dîs Aliter Visum 63 (p. 694).
173. scull-things: B.’s usual spelling at this date, as in Dîs Aliter Visum 25 (p. 691).
175–80. Based on a number of Biblical texts, e.g. Isaiah xxiv 5–11 and lxv 8 and (principally) Matthew xxvi 28–9: ‘For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father’s kingdom.’ Cp. also Christina Rossetti, ‘The Three Enemies’ (1862): ‘When Christ would sup / He drained the dregs from out my cup’ (ll. 34–5), and her ‘Christian and Jew’ (1862), where believers in heaven are described: ‘Boughs of the Living Vine … Sap of the Royal Vine it stirs like wine / In all’ (ll. 33, 36–7). With the image of the feast and the ‘feast-master’, which evokes another New Testament text, cp. Popularity 16–20n. (pp. 451–2). With the contrast between the finished product and the process of its manufacture, cp. the passage from Sordello cited at l. 166 above, esp. ll. 814–16: ‘[we] watch construct , / In short, an engine: with a finished one / What it can do is all, nought how ’tis done’.
177. lamp’s … trumpet’s] lamps’ … trumpets’ (MS; B.’s positioning of the apostrophe is often ambiguous, but the one after ‘trumpets’ is decisively outside the ‘s’).
183–6. For the source of this language in Arnold’s Empedocles, see l. 5n. The historical Empedocles, unlike Arnold’s character, speaks in some passages of an afterlife as the culmination of a progressive cycle of reincarnations: ‘And at the end they come forth among men on earth as prophets, minstrels, physicians and leaders, and from these they arise as gods, highest in power’ when ‘[w]ith other immortals they share hearth and table, having no part in human sorrows, unwearied’ (Clement, Stromateis 4.150.1, 5.122.3: Clement uses Empedocles’ idea as a Christian harbinger). Arnold himself alludes to the second of these passages in The Strayed Reveller 130–281, but reinforcing the distinction between the indifferent gods and the ‘human sorrows’ of anguished mortal poets: in Empedocles, Callicles’ songs restate the contrast. The imagery recalls the myth of Ixion, who was punished by Zeus (for wooing Zeus’ wife Hera) by being bound to a continually revolving wheel. B. dramatized the story in Ixion (Jocoseria 1883). The phrasing also recalls King Lear: ‘I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire’ (IV vii 45–7).
188. what] written over ‘the’ or ‘those’ in MS.
189. What strain … what warpings] The strain … the warpings (MS).
191. Perfect: the imperative verb (‘Make the cup perfect’), so the accent falls on the second syllable, though readers may also ‘hear’ the word as an adjective, anticipating God’s work: ‘The cup is perfect’. the cup] Thy work (MS).