University of Virginia Library

So it was for a time; but ere long there fell upon Israel a curse,
Evil still following on evil, bad passing on into worse;
No showers fell softly from heaven, the streams of the hills were all hushed,
The hot sun had burnt them all up, and the sky as a furnace was flushed;
Red, fierce, and malignant its rays, like flames from a fathomless hell,
Over the dry, parched vineyards and the desolate olive-grounds fell;
Wild asses ran hither and thither, snuffing the air as they went,
The streams that water the valleys were long since vanished and spent.
Iron-bound and hard was the earth: no tender herbage was seen;
No fresh corn gladdened the eyes with its tufts of feathery green;
The fair broad valleys of Shechem were like one vast desert of sand,
And the people fainted with hunger; the famine was sore in the land.

Three years passed over our heads, with the sickness of hope deferred;
They prayed, but they prayed in vain; not a voice to answer was heard;
The king mourned sore for his people, the people were hushed in despair:
What arm but their God's could relieve them? and that arm against them was bare.
When vision and prophet had failed them, they turned in their utter distress
To the great High Priest of our nation, and he, in his priestly dress,
In the bright robes of Aaron his father (so have they told me the tale)
Entered the Holy of Holies, the darkness within the veil;
The twelve bright gems on his breast, that he for his people might plead,
No tribe unremembered there in that hour of the nation's need;
And over his heart there sparkled the Urim's mysterious glow,
Its wild, oracular rays pregnant with weal or with woe;
As he went (so they told me) it gleamed with the lurid, terrible red,
Which told that blood-guilt was upon us, that for blood more blood must be shed.
And Abiathar standing there, with fixed, immoveable gaze,
Looked down through the thick, black darkness on the strange, disastrous blaze.
Long time he stood stiffened and dumb, by the hand of Jehovah oppressed;
At last, half-choked as he spake it, the hollow voice came from his breast:
Forth from his faltering lips the death-bearing oracle flew:
“For Saul and his bloody house, for them who the Gibeonites slew,
For them has the curse fallen on us, for them has the land waxen faint;
Theirs is the putrid sore, yea, theirs is the pestilent taint;
The sword of the Lord will fall heavy alike on evil and good;
All have shared in the guilt by their silence—the land is defilèd with blood.”

I knew it. That slaughter was evil. They had not wronged him, those slaves,
Hewing wood, drawing water, nought else, till they slept in their graves:
No glory was there to win, no men of renown to lay low;
They perished as brute beasts perish, bowing their heads to the blow;
Why should Saul, the hero, the strong, stain his sword with the blood of the weak?
What led him on children and women his terrible vengeance to wreak?
I know not. The deed was done. In vain for mercy they cried;
The oath of our fathers availed not; Saul gave the command, and they died.
It was true: I may not deny it; atonement was needed. No time
Could blot out that foul stain of blood, could cancel that dark day of crime;
The cries of the widow and orphan had risen for vengeance on high;
Thence came the drought and the famine, the curse on the earth and the sky;
Gladly we offered our treasures, our gold and our silver, our all,
To build up the desolate homes made empty and lonely by Saul.
But, oh! was it right to risk all on the hated Gibeonites' choice,
The lives of the freemen of Israel to hang on the bond-slaves' voice,
The sons of a king to perish for obeying their father's command,
As the scapegoat dies in the wilderness, bearing the sins of the land?
Wily and subtle as ever, the Gibeonites scoffed at our prayer;
No sight would glut their revenge but the looking on our despair;
They knew that the fallen are friendless. One only King David would save;
The son of his darling Jonathan might creep to his father's grave;
Dearly did Michal pay for the taunt of her passing scorn,
When the five who called her mother from her fond embrace were torn.
Was it well this deed should be his, the Psalmist-king who had told
Of truths that our fathers knew not in the rougher days of old?
From the white-robed choir of the Levites, in the courts of our Sacred Tent,
His hymns had spread through all Israel, waking new thoughts as they went,
Proclaiming to all that no blood of bulls or of goats might avail,
That thousands of rams, ten thousands of rivers of oil would fail,
That one thing only God asks for, the broken and penitent heart,
That all who repent and believe in the glad news of mercy have part.
Was it right that he should disown this, that human victims should bleed,
As for Moloch, the King of Gehenna, to the true God of Abraham's seed?
Was the sickening odour that tainted the soft south wind as it passed,
A fragrance of sweet-smelling incense that in His sight found favour at last?

I know not: faint, weary, perplexed, I bowed my head to the shame,
I did not tremble or weep when the hour of my agony came:
They led them out one by one, they fastened each to his cross,
While I, the mother, stood silent, counting my infinite loss;
With nail and with cord they bound them, each one to his cursèd tree
On the hill of Gibeah of Saul (so ran King David's decree),
Before the Lord they hanged them, with muttered curses and prayer,
And the priests laid the sins of the nation on their heads of waving hair;
In Gibeah of Saul, in the home where they in their childhood had played,
And their father's heart had exulted, as he sat in the terebinth's shade,
In Gibeah of Saul, where of old the people had hailed him as king,
Glad to repose for a while, their jubilant praises to sing.

A few days before, when as yet the barley was green in the ear,
They and I ate our Passover meal. We wept not; no tear
Made the bitter herbs yet more bitter. With solemn, unwavering voice
They sang of the stretched-out arm that had made our fathers rejoice.
It was over, that feast. Ere yet the people had gone to their home,
Ere the sickle was put to the corn, or the ripening wave-sheaf had come,
They led them forth one by one, my own, my goodly and brave.
They trembled not, feared not: not with the dread of the slave,
Not with the fire of the warrior struggling with passionate breath,
Not with the tears of a woman, went they to the hour of their death.
Strange peace, not of earth, had come o'er them. They stood there, willing to die,
Offered for Israel's sake, to draw rain from the hot, sullen sky.
Without one struggle or cry, calm in their patience they stood,
Calm as when Abraham, our father, laid Isaac, his son, on the wood,
Patient as Isaac was when he bowed his head to the knife;
Dumb as the sheep to his shearers, so they, too, yielded their life.

That, too, was over. The crowds were scattered each to his own;
The darkness came over the land. I was left to mourn there alone;
I looked on the pale, wan features that once I had lovingly pressed,
Sweet with the fragrant oil as a field which the Lord God hath blest;
I looked on the tortured forms, which once were supple and lithe,
Leaping from crag to crag, as the roebuck joyous and blithe;
Weary and worn I slept not, yet my waking thoughts were as dreams;
Through the dark overhanging shadows there came strange and wonderful gleams.
I had asked in my woe, “How came this? Why did evil begin?
Why should fresh curse upon curse fall, heaping sin upon sin?
Why was their youth cut off in all its beauty and prime?
How could their blood atone for their own or their fathers' crime?”
A voice came forth from the darkness, just heard in the silence of night,
A whisper making one tremble, a murmur ineffably light;
“And hast thou not learnt it, O mourner? hath not the oracle come,
Giving sight to the eyes that were blind, giving speech to the lips that were dumb?
Thy sons, thou hast loved them of old, but when in thy life didst thou know
The power of love in its might till that love was mingled with woe?
When were they worthiest of love? Was it when eager and young,
They chased the wild deer on the hills, and, leaping, rejoiced as they sung?
Was it when, ardent, exulting, they fought with the foes of their race,
To the fiercest and bravest of all turning their lion-like face?
Or is it not now, when thou seest them a sacrifice meet for the Lord,
Willing victims, self-offered, pure, looking on high for reward?
Yes, He owns them, their Father, their God, the Almighty, All Good,
Not as Moloch, the King of Gehenna, delighting in slaughter and blood,
But rejoicing, accepting, forgiving, whenever the fire of his love
Burns in the hearts of his servants, as it burns in the seraphs above,
When, ceasing to live for themselves, they are ready to die for their race,
Willing as cursèd to suffer, that it may find mercy and grace:
Through all the confusions of guilt, David's weakness, the Gibeonites' wrong,
Through all the harsh discords and darkness God is still eternally strong;
The thick clouds of evil pass off, the distant horizon is clear,
The day-star of hope has arisen, the dawn of Redemption is near.”

As the word of the Lord comes to prophet or priest, so it came,
Making my bones to tremble, burning my heart with its flame,
And then as new thoughts woke within me, I questioned once more:
“Ah me, if the death of my sons can thus avail to restore,
Can turn from a sin-stained land the darkness that over it hung,
Giving life to the perishing soul, giving speech to the faltering tongue,
What might not He do, when He, the King, the Anointed shall come,
Claiming us all as His people, leading us all to His home;
He whom our prophets have told of, saying to His Father, ‘Thy will,
Yea, even thine, O my God, have I come upon earth to fulfil.’
If a king were to reign on this earth, not warring and slaying, like Saul,
But ruling in mercy and peace, loving and gentle to all,
Nobler and truer and kinder than David was in his youth,
Walking in stainless purity, clad in invincible truth;
If He, in the depth of His love, were willing His people to save
From all that torments and divides them, from death and the power of the grave;
If He, as my sons hang before me, were to hang on the cursèd tree,
Self-yielding His life when His will to keep or to lose it was free,
Choosing to suffer man's sorrows, choosing man's burden to bear,
Tempted as they are tempted, tasting their doubt and despair,
Would not that life be great beyond all man's fancy can dream?
Would not that death be strong in the might of its power to redeem?
There also my sorrow, it may be, shall not be contemned in his eyes;
There, also, a mother's fond love may watch by the cross till He dies.
I feel I can measure her grief: I dare believe He would turn
His pitying look upon me, nor the sin-stained concubine spurn;
Outcast and scorned though I be, I dream I might venture there
To wash His feet with my tears, to wipe those feet with my hair.”

The vision was over; I woke to my lonely, terrible task,
But hope, strength, life were within me, all I had ventured to ask;
On the rock I spread forth my sackcloth, with my torch I scared away
The vultures and the dogs unclean that scented out their prey.
Day passed on after day, and the harvest-fields grew white,
And the maiden-gleaners shuddered as they watched the ghastly sight:
All summer long I bore the heat of the fiery sun at noon,
And at night I faced the maddening rays of the sullen, lurid moon;
The bodies withered on the trees, till at last the raindrops fell,
The first fresh showers that blest the earth with soft and quickening spell:
“The curse was past,” men said, “their fears for the future might cease,
The Lord was entreated for Israel; the land might again dwell in peace.”

Men told the king of my watching, and the heart of David was moved,
And once again there woke in him the thought of those he had loved.
He gave them a kingly tomb: in the grave of their fathers they sleep;
Men may go there to tell of their praise, I may go there to sit and to weep:
And the heroes also are there. In that grave father and son,
Lovely and pleasant together, still undivided are one,
My sons, too, sleep with their father, and I, when the Angel of Death
Shall summon my soul to depart with the icy cold of his breath,
When life's long struggle is over, and the shadows over me fall,
Shall lie down to rest by his side, by the side of my loved one, my Saul.