St. Telemachus

by Alfred Lord Tennyson

　　

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Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peak Been hurl’d so high they ranged about the globe? For day by day, thro’ many a blood-red eve, In that four-hundredth summer after Christ, The wrathful sunset glared against a cross Rear’d on the tumbled ruins of an old fane No longer sacred to the Sun, and flamed On one huge slope beyond, where in his cave The man, whose pious hand had built the cross, A man who never changed a word with men, Fasted and pray’d, Telemachus the Saint. Eve after eve that haggard anchorite Would haunt the desolated fane, and there Gaze at the ruin, often mutter low ‘Vicisti Galilæe’; louder again, Spurning a shatter’d fragment of the God, ‘Vicisti Galilæe!’ but—when now Bathed in that lurid crimson—ask’d ‘Is earth On fire to the West? or is the Demon-god Wroth at his fall?’ and heard an answer ‘Wake Thou deedless dreamer, lazying out a life Of self-suppression, not of selfless love.’ And once a flight of shadowy fighters crost The disk, and once, he thought, a shape with wings Came sweeping by him, and pointed to the West, And at his ear he heard a whisper ‘Rome’ And in his heart he cried ‘ The call of God!’ And call’d arose, and, slowly plunging down Thro’ that disastrous glory, set his face By waste and field and town of alien tongue, Following a hundred sunsets, and the sphere Of westward-wheeling stars; and every dawn Struck from him his own shadow on to Rome. Foot-sore, way-worn, at length he touch’d his goal, The Christian city. All her splendour fail’d To lure those eyes that only yearn’d to see, Fleeting betwixt her column’d palace-walls, The shape with wings. Anon there past a crowd With shameless laughter, Pagan oath, and jest, Hard Romans brawling of their monstrous games; He, all but deaf thro’ age and weariness, And muttering to himself ‘The call of God’ And borne along by that full stream of men, Like some old wreck on some indrawing sea, Gain’d their huge Colosseum. The caged beast Yell’d, as he yell’d of yore for Christian blood. Three slaves were trailing a dead lion away, One, a dead man. He stumbled in, and sat Blinded; but when the momentary gloom, Made by the noonday blaze without, had left His aged eyes, he raised them, and beheld A blood-red awning waver overhead, The dust send up a steam of human blood, The gladiators moving toward their fight, And eighty thousand Christian faces watch Man murder man. A sudden strength from heaven, As some great shock may wake a palsied limb, Turn’d him again to boy, for up he sprang, And glided lightly down the stairs, and o’er The barrier that divided beast from man Slipt, and ran on, and flung himself between The gladiatorial swords, and call’d ‘Forbear In the great name of Him who died for men, Christ Jesus!’ For one moment afterward A silence follow’d as of death, and then A hiss as from a wilderness of snakes, Then one deep roar as of a breaking sea, And then a shower of stones that stoned him dead, And then once more a silence as of death. His dream became a deed that woke the world, For while the frantic rabble in half-amaze Stared at him dead, thro’ all the nobler hearts In that vast Oval ran a shudder of shame. The Baths, the Forum gabbled of his death, And preachers linger’d o’er his dying words, Which would not die, but echo’d on to reach Honorius, till he heard them, and decreed That Rome no more should wallow in this old lust Of Paganism, and make her festal hour Dark with the blood of man who murder’d man.

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