University of Virginia Library

As death draws nigh,
Peace-maker best, men turn to those who made
Their peace on earth. Mine was a life of wars;
Was that my fault? I know not. Roman half,
Barbaric half, I was not made for peace;
My blood rushed fiercely as Dalmatian floods
When thunder shakes our hills. I knew in youth
A house among those hills; on stillest days
Close round it reeled a tempest of its own,
Whirlwind of confluent winds whose course was shaped
By distant mountains. Like that house was I.
Strange hands remote had shaped me unto storm:
Storm sang the dusky matins of my life;
Storm sang my vesper psalms. Others have fled
To wastes in search of peace: I, late baptized,
Rushed there to war on fiends whose Chief had warred
Upon my Chief in the great wilderness.
Five years we battled. Victory doubtful seemed:
God spake; then ceased the winds, and fell the waves,
And there was a great calm. New foes succeeded,
Foes from Christ's household, anchorets of the East
That ground their teeth against me. ‘Ho,’ they cried,
‘Impostor of the Gentile world far West,
Tread'st thou our East?’ Then shook I from my feet
The burning sands in testimony against them:
I passed to Antioch; to Byzantium next
Better so called than by his arrogant name
Who made God's church an appanage! Next I saw
That great Thebais and its hermit sons,
And wrote their deeds. At Rome Pope Damasus
Loved me; his Saints too loved me. All the more
They hated me without a cause, those priests,
Ill-tonsured heads, obsequious; men who trod
The rich man's floors whispering his leech, and eyed
Askance the miser's will. I pointed 'gainst them
This finger now so stark. Ascetics false;
Solitaries whom envy not their fasts made lean;
And, noisomer culprits, priests that ate from gold,
That, sinning with the people sinned against them,
That prophesied illusions and deceits
And therefore won no Vision from the Lord:
On such I hurled God's bolts.