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MICHAEL ANGELO’S Studio. He is at work on the cartoon of the Last Judgment.
MICHAEL ANGELO. WHY did the Pope and his ten Cardinals | |
| Come here to lay this heavy task upon me? | |
| Were not the paintings on the Sistine ceiling | |
| Enough for them? They saw the Hebrew leader | |
| Waiting, and clutching his tempestuous beard, | 5 |
| But heeded not. The bones of Julius | |
| Shook in their sepulchre. I heard the sound; | |
| They only heard the sound of their own voices. | |
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| Are there no other artists here in Rome | |
| To do this work, that they must needs seek me? | 10 |
| Fra Bastian, my Fra Bastian, might have done it, | |
| But he is lost to art. The Papal Seals, | |
| Like leaden weights upon a dead man’s eyes, | |
| Press down his lids; and so the burden falls | |
| On Michael Angelo, Chief Architect | 15 |
| And Painter of the Apostolic Palace. | |
| That is the title they cajole me with, | |
| To make me do their work and leave my own; | |
| But having once begun, I turn not back. | |
| Blow, ye bright angels, on your golden trumpets | 20 |
| To the four corners of the earth, and wake | |
| The dead to judgment! Ye recording angels, | |
| Open your books and read! Ye dead, awake! | |
| Rise from your graves, drowsy and drugged with death, | |
| As men who suddenly aroused from sleep | 25 |
| Look round amazed, and know not where they are! | |
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| In happy hours, when the imagination | |
| Wakes like a wind at midnight, and the soul | |
| Trembles in all its leaves, it is a joy | |
| To be uplifted on its wings, and listen | 30 |
| To the prophetic voices in the air | |
| That call us onward. Then the work we do | |
| Is a delight, and the obedient hand | |
| Never grows weary. But how different is it | |
| In the disconsolate, discouraged hours, | 35 |
| When all the wisdom of the world appears | |
| As trivial as the gossip of a nurse | |
| In a sick-room, and all our work seems useless. | |
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| What is it guides my hand, what thoughts possess me, | |
| That I have drawn her face among the angels, | 40 |
| Where she will be hereafter? O sweet dreams, | |
| That through the vacant chambers of my heart | |
| Walk in the silence, as familiar phantoms | |
| Frequent an ancient house, what will ye with me? | |
| ’T is said that Emperors write their names in green | 45 |
| When under age, but when of age in purple. | |
| So Love, the greatest Emperor of them all, | |
| Writes his in green at first, but afterwards | |
| In the imperial purple of our blood. | |
| First love or last love,—which of these two passions | 50 |
| Is more omnipotent? Which is more fair, | |
| The star of morning, or the evening star? | |
| The sunrise or the sunset of the heart? | |
| The hour when we look forth to the unknown, | |
| And the advancing day consumes the shadows, | 55 |
| Or that when all the landscape of our lives | |
| Lies stretched behind us, and familiar places | |
| Gleam in the distance, and sweet memories | |
| Rise like a tender haze, and magnify | |
| The objects we behold, that soon must vanish? | 60 |
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| What matters it to me, whose countenance | |
| Is like Laocoön’s, full of pain? whose forehead | |
| Is a ploughed harvest-field, where three-score years | |
| Have sown in sorrow and have reaped in anguish? | |
| To me, the artisan, to whom all women | 65 |
| Have been as if they were not, or at most | |
| A sudden rush of pigeons in the air, | |
| A flutter of wings, a sound, and then a silence? | |
| I am too old for love; I am too old | |
| To flatter and delude myself with visions | 70 |
| Of never-ending friendship with fair women, | |
| Imaginations, fantasies, illusions, | |
| In which the things that cannot be take shape, | |
| And seem to be, and for the moment are. Convent bells ring. | |
| Distant and near and low and loud the bells, | 75 |
| Dominican, Benedictine, and Franciscan, | |
| Jangle and wrangle in their airy towers, | |
| Discordant as the brotherhoods themselves | |
| In their dim cloisters. The descending sun | |
| Seems to caress the city that he loves, | 80 |
| And crowns it with the aureole of a saint. | |
| I will go forth and breathe the air awhile. | |
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