University of Virginia Library

Silently sat the artist alone,
Carving a Christ from the ivory bone.
Little by little, with toil and pain,
He won his way through the sightless grain,
That held and yet hid the thing he sought,
Till the work stood up, a growing thought.
And all around him, unseen yet felt,
A mystic presence forever dwelt,
A formless spirit of subtle flame,
The light of whose being went and came
As the artist paused from work, or bent
His whole heart to it with firm intent.
Serenely the spirit towered on high,
Fixing the blaze of his majesty
Now north, now south, now east, now west:
Wherever the moody shadows pressed
Their cloudy blackness, and slyly sought
To creep o'er the work the artist wrought,
A steady wrath in the spirit's gaze
Withered the skirts of the treacherous haze,
And gloomily backward, fold on fold,
The surging billows of darkness rolled.

“Husband, why sit you ever alone,
Carving your Christ from the ivory bone?
O carve, I pray you, some fairy ships,
Or rings for the weaning infant's lips,
Or toys for yon princely boy who stands
Knee-deep in the bloom of his father's lands,
And waits for his idle thoughts to come;
Or carve the sword-hilt, or merry drum,
Or the flaring edge of a curious can,
Fit for the lips of a bearded man;
With vines and grapes in a cunning wreath,
Where the peering satyrs wink beneath,
And catch around quaintly-knotted stems
At flying nymphs by their garment hems.
And carve you another inner rim;
Let girls hang over the goblet's brim,
And dangle in wine their white foot-tips;
While crouched on their palms, with pouting lips,
Long-bearded Pan and his panting troop
In the golden waves their faces stoop.
O carve you something of solid worth—
Leave heaven to heaven, come, earth, to earth.
Carve that thy hearth-stone may glimmer bright,
And thy children laugh in dancing light.”

Steadily answered the carver's lips,
As he brushed from his brow the ivory chips;—
While the presence grew with the rising sound,
Spurning in grandeur the hollow ground,
As if the breath on the carver's tongue
Were fumes from some precious censer swung,
That lifted the spirit's wingéd soul
To the heights where crystal planets roll
Their choral anthems, and heaven's wide arch
Is thrilled with the music of their march;
And the faithless shades fled backward, dim
From the wondrous light that lived in him.—
Thus spake the carver,—his words were few,
Simple and meek, but he felt them true,—
“I labor by day, I labor by night;
The Master ordered, the work is right:
Pray that He strengthen my feeble good;
For much must be conquered, much withstood.”
The artist labored, the labor sped,
But a corpse lay in his bridal bed.

Wearily worked the artist alone,
As his tears ran down the ivory bone;
And the presence lost its wonted glow,
For its trembling heart was beating low,
And the stealthy shadows came crawling in,
With the silent tread of a flattered sin;
Till the spirit fled to the Christ's own face,
Like a hunted man to a place of grace;
On the crown, the death-wrung eye, the tear,
On the placid triumph, faint yet clear,
That trembled around the mouth; and last
On the fatal wound, its brightness passed,
Shrinking low down in the horrid scar,
And flickering there like a waning star.
Slowly he labored with drooping head,
For the artist's heart from his work had fled.
He moaned, he muttered his lost one's name,
He looked on the Christ with a look of shame;
He called, he listened, no voice replied;
He prayed her to come again, and chide
The hateful work which his hand began;
He promised ships, rings, toys, drinking-can.
With level stare, through the thickening shade,
Hither and thither his eye-balls strayed;
But ne'er turned upward where, just above,
A single star with a look of love—
Divine, supernal, transcending sense—
Shone on him a splendor so intense
That it half replaced the spirit's light,
And thwarted the leaguering bands of night.
Albeit he did not see the star,
Sense is not a perfect pass nor bar
To the mystic steps of love; his heart
Felt a dumb stir through its chillest part,
Felt a warm glow through its currents run,
And knew, as the blind man knows the sun,
That the night was past, and day was come.
Bravely he bent o'er the ivory bone;
But dull and dusk as a time-stained stone,
From some mouldering sculptured aisle redeemed,
The face of the slighted figure seemed;
Till with heart and soul the artist cast
His mind on the visionary past,
When the face put on a purer hue,
While again the wondrous presence grew;
And the star's and the spirit's leaguéd light
Baffled the cunning of plotting night.

“Father, why sit you ever alone,
Carving this Christ from the ivory bone?
Unlovely the figure, and passing grim
With cramping tortures in every limb.
A ghastly sight is the open wound,
The wicked nails, and the sharp thorns bound
O'er his heavy brow's crowned agony:—
Fearful is Christ on the cursed tree!”
“And see you nothing,” the artist said,
“But pain and death in this sacred head?—
No triumph in the firm lip see you?
No gracious promise which struggles through
The half-closed lids; or no patient vow
Sealed on the breadth of this mighty brow?
Is my purpose idle, my labor vain?”
They answered, “We see but death and pain.”
A little word had frozen his blood;
All silent the woful artist stood,
Turning the figure, now here, now there,
With the stolid wonder of despair.
Blankly his eye-balls he swept around,
As one who wakes from a dream profound,
And doubts the actual world he sees,
Yet knows his visions but fantasies.
“Nothing?” the artist murmured again.
“Nothing,” they answered, “but death and pain.
O, father, come to the sunny heath,
Where the violets nod in their own sweet breath,
Where the roses, prodigal as fair,
Squander their wealth on the thankless air,
And all the glory of heaven and earth
Meets in the hour of the lily's birth;
Where the wheeling sky-larks upward throng,
Chasing to heaven their morning song,
Till its music fades from the listening ear,
And only God's placid angels hear,
As they hush their matin hymn, and all
Serenely bend o'er the crystal wall.
Hasten, dear father; there 's nothing there
So dread as yon figure's dying stare;
For sun and dew have a cunning way
Of making the dullest thing look gay:
There 's a wonder there in the coarsest stone,
Which you cannot solve, yet still must own.
Or, if it suit not your present mood,
Come with us then to the darksome wood;
Where cataracts talk to hoary trees
Of the world in by-gone centuries,
Ere the dew on Eden's hills had dried,
Or its valleys lost their flowery pride;
When earth beneath them, and heaven above,
Were lulled in the nursing arms of love,
And all God's creatures together grew—
A peace in the very air they drew—
Until sin burst nature's golden zone,
And nature dwindled, and sin has grown.
Come, father, there 's more of joy and good
In our merry heath and solemn wood,
Than the cold, dead hands of art can reach,
Or its man-made canons darkly teach.”
“Children, dear children, it may not be:
This work the Master hath set for me.
All are not framed of the self-same clay;
And some must labor, or none could play.”
The bright flowers blossomed, the sky-larks sang,
Deep in the forest the cataracts' clang
Went up, unheard, in the silent sun;
The childish ears, which their charms had won,
And the tongues they woke, were there no more—
They lay with the clay that breathed of yore.
Up sprang the artist, and glared around,
Dashing the Christ to the shuddering ground,
With a cry whose piercing agony
Made hell reëcho with welcome glee,
And all the trembling angels pale
At the terrors of that human wail.
“Was it for this I was singled out
From the cringing, slavish, coward rout
That blacken foul earth? Was it for this
I bore the low sneer, the open hiss,
The cross, the passion, the cheerless toil—
Which nothing fosters, and all things foil—
Only that Thou shouldst be glorified
In the Saviour who sitteth by Thy side?
And is this Thy servant's rich reward?
Are these the blessings which Thou hast stored
For the faithful few?—From sons of men
Choose me for Thy chiefest rebel, then!
Thrice cursed be the murderous, cheating thought
That led me blindly! The hand that wrought
This ivory fraud, thrice curséd be;
For it slew the hearts that lived for me!
Thrice cursed be the sight of heaven and earth!
Thrice cursed be the womb that gave me birth!
Thrice cursed be the blood on Calvary poured!
Cursed, cursed be Thy hollow name”—The word,
That might have uttered unpardoned sin,
Died on his shuddering lips; and within,
Like a dead weight, on his palsied tongue
The impious thought of his fury hung.
Around, above, with one rapid stoop,
The waiting shadows of evil swoop;
And in and out, through the vast turmoil
Of cloudy currents, that twist and coil
In endless motion, unnumbered forms—
Countless as sands in the desert storms—
Were drifted in masses indistinct;
No limb to a neighboring shape seemed linked.
Now a woful head came staring through,
Then withered hands, where the head withdrew;
Now a brow with wrathful furrows knit,
Then the trailing hair of a girl would flit,
Like a meteor, from the dusky throng
That whirled with the cloudy tide along.
One, more audacious than all the rest,
Who wore his crimes, as a haughty crest
Nodding its plumes o'er a conqueror proud,
Stepped boldly forth from the writhing cloud,
Stepped boldly forth on the solid land,
And clutched the Christ with his sinful hand.
Instant the shadows were rent in twain,
Dashed here and there o'er the frighted plain,
And the star burst blazing from above;
Stern vengeance mixed with its holy love,
As full on the brow of the child of hell,
With the crash of a flaming battle-shell,
The beams of the angry planet fell.
Right boldly the startled demon gazed,
And backward, with dauntless front upraised—
Upon whose terrific waste still gloomed
Hate unsubdued and wrath unconsumed—
He faced the star-beams, and slowly strode
Into the depths of his drear abode.
Motionless sat the artist alone,
Fixing his eyes on the ivory bone,
Yet seeing nothing. The vengeful star,
As the routed shadows fled afar,
Softened its lustre, and gently glanced
On his torpid breast. As one entranced
Stirs with dumb life, in the solid gloom
Of some unhealthy, damp-dripping tomb;
Feels his coffin-lid with groping hands,
Or clutches the grave-clothes' tightened bands,
And then with a murmur turns him o'er,
Drowsily dozing to death once more:
So seemed the artist. The star-beams brought
A dim sensation, a vague half-thought,
That glimmered a while around his brain,
Then faded, and all was dark again.
But still the warm, loving splendor shone;
And close to the side of the greater one,
Two stars, in their new-born freshness, came
Down from the throne of mercy, a flame
With all its brightness. A silvery trail
Died out behind them in sparkles pale,
As they wheeled within the lustrous sphere
Of the elder star, and shot their clear
Commingled rays o'er the abject clay,
That prone, unmoving, and silent, lay,
With a dull, cold load of stupid pain
Pressed on his heart and his senseless brain.
As the springtide sun, that sets aglow
The tufted meadows with melting snow,
And turns by degrees the icy hills
To balmy vapors and fruitful rills,
So shone the stars on the torpid man;
Until, as the first hard tear-drop ran,
A thought through his gloomy bosom stole.
At once, with a shock of pain, the whole
Broad human nature arose amazed,
With all its guilt on its brow upraised.
Ah, me! 't was a mournful sight, to see
The three stars shining, so peacefully,
On the raging breast of him who poured
His puny wrath at our gracious Lord.
A while, with stubborn and wilful might,
The artist strove to drive from his sight
The kindly look of the starry trine;
Yet, turn as he might, some power divine
Would soften his will, he knew not why,
And draw to the light his troubled eye.
Long, long he looked; till his heavy grief
Of heart gushed forth, and a full relief
Of balmy tear-drops fell, round on round,
Like the blood which marks yet heals a wound.
He staggered, he bowed his stubborn knee,
He fixed his eyes on the shining three;
And the tears so magnified his gaze,
That the face of heaven seemed all ablaze
With light and mercy. He knew the stars
That looked through his earthly dungeon-bars.—
“I see,” he shouted, “ye live, ye live!
Death is a phantom! O God, forgive!”

Steadily worked the artist alone,
Carving the Christ from the ivory bone.
Again the bright presence shone around
With a light more dazzling, more profound.
Through day, through night, through fair, through foul,
The artist wrought with a single soul;
And when hand would tire, or eye grow dim,
He looked at the stars that looked at him,
Until power and vision both were given,
And he carved the Christ by light from heaven.
Under each cruel thorn-point he hid
A world of grief, and each drooping lid
Was closed round its mortal tears of pain;
But the nostrils curved in proud disdain
Of death and his feeble tyranny,
And the mouth was calm with victory.
High over all, the majestic brow
Looked down on the storm which raged below,
Big with the power and the god-like will
That said to the sinking heart—“Be still!”
And it was still. For who once had looked
On that mighty brow, saw not the crooked
And veinéd fingers that clutched the nails,
Nor the fitful spasm that comes and fails
In the dropping legs, nor the wide wound;
O, no! the thorn-wreath seemed twisted round
A victor's head, like a diadem,
And each thorn-point bore a royal gem.

Silently sat the artist alone;
For the Christ was carved from the ivory bone.
The presence bowed with a holy awe,
And paled in the light of the thing it saw:
But the three stars sang a single word,
Faint and subdued, like a widowed bird
That sings to her own sad heart alone,
And feels that no creature hears her moan.
The artist echoed their timid psalm,
Bowing to earth, with palm clasped in palm;
And, “Pardon, pardon, pardon,” he prayed,
As the Christ upon his heart he laid.
“Pardon, O, pardon!” the three stars sang:
“Pardon, O, pardon!” All heaven rang
With dulcet sounds, as the angel throng
Joined in the depths of the choral song,
With harp, and viol, and timbrel sweet.
“Pardon, O, pardon!” the saints repeat,
With shrouded faces and solemn close,
As hearts remembering their human woes.
And martyrs, who bore their fiery scars
Like trophies gathered in long-past wars,
Cried “Pardon, pardon!” And heaven's wide hills,
And fruitful valleys, and golden rills,
And long, long levels of sunny sky,
Were vibrant with living sympathy;
And folded and gathered into one
The waves of the multitudinous tone,
Until, like a wingéd thing that glows
With the first joy of its wings, arose
In pride of triumph the mighty sound,
And circled the mercy-seat around;
Till the glory grew, the sign was given,
And another joy was born in heaven.