University of Virginia Library

SONNETS TO A PICTURE.

“Satan watching the Sleep of Christ.”—Sir Noel Paton.

I.

[He sleeps; the inner agony hath pass'd]

He sleeps; the inner agony hath pass'd
With the sure dawn that slowly climbs the east;
The night wherein man saw Him not hath ceas'd,
And sleep is on that glorious face at last.
But pain still lingers there, though faint and worn,
Upon the grandest of all brows, whereon
It makes its latest stand to be o'erthrown,
By the sunrise of Love's eternal morn.
It is no painter's touch! beneath those eyes
The mission and the Cross rise slowly up;
Death with them with the dregs that He must sup,
And sorrow with her choruses of sighs.
And over all a halo from above,
God's Signet on His Masterpiece of Love.

II.

[The splendid demon with the lurid eyes]

The splendid demon with the lurid eyes,
Wherein, as when a serpent bites its coil
Nearing its death—hate having felt its foil,
Turns back upon itself before it dies.
He sits; one massive evil, huge of limb,
With hand still clench'd as with the wish to slay;
While those dark brows for ever waste away
With their own anger as they glare at Him.
That beauty which repels nor draws us nigher
Clothes him as with a raiment. We draw near,
Drawn, yet held back as by instinctive fear—
As if a tongue from that dread crown of fire
Could leap to meet us, like a stroke from fate,
And blast us with the poison of its hate.

III.

[A Faust in colours with the good and ill]

A Faust in colours with the good and ill
For ever at their conflict, dumb of speech,
Nor drawing gladiator-like to each,
But armour'd in the panoply of will.
The ages with their trailing shadows wait,
And Time, the white field-marshal with keen eyes,
Surveys the struggle, while the passive skies
Bend and come nearer as if drawn by fate.
Thou thinkest God has hid himself, but, lo!
His awful shadow, or a part, at least,
Of that which is His shadow, dawns to view
In the young day, that, with its plumes aglow,
All silently behind the silent Two
Climbs the blue stair-way of the one-starr'd east.