Collected Poems (26 page)

There was not much of laughing loud together,

Or banqueting, after the Pisan coup.

Campaigns and sieges, battles and assaults —

Ungilding in the glut and mire of war.

We thought when Gregory died there would be respite,

But wished him back before this Innocent

Had run one scale upon his harp of hate.

He’ll likely die now, when his death’s no profit.

The evil always die too late for thanks,

Serene and impotent, their worst full blown.

I hated war, but matched against my father’s,

My hatred of it was intemperate love.

There never was so great a warrior,

A general so visioned and aggressive,

Who so rebelliously despised his calling.

It wore into his very strength and sinews

Like trace-chains on the haunches of a charger.

But still his camp outlustered any court,

Was rumored into fable as the home

Of every undared dark delirious vice,

And still he browbeat fame and looked the victor.…

It was a specious semblance of his world.

When Innocent fled Rome for France, it seemed

Our victory, but was our brink of ruin.

There was no fleet to summon merrily

And catch the Conclave he convened for Lyons,

He did not fall in Gregory’s trap. And I

Nor Pietro could devise a scheme to stave

The darkening fate that gathered as we gazed

To hurtle on a head so undeserving.

If he had gone himself, Berard, and stood

Before them in his cloak of burning wrath,

Could they have found him guilty? Oh, I think

They would have swept their croziers up like swords

And sworn to follow him, though bound for hell.

But likely not. They were old tepid men,

By whom to be adjudged as by one’s equals

Was desecration and indignity.

So Thaddeus went, and Pietro followed him,

To act the absent and imperial

Protagonist; while one old man and I

With sombre hearts kept near the emperor

And made Turin our waiting place for news.

The tricks of prison life are strange, Berard.

Here in my cell I’ve paced so many times

That length of hall where his great feast was held

That I can count the casements down one wall,

The lolling torches sconced along the other,

And often, sleepless, in a mad calm dream

I seem to move about there in the moonlight,

Lonesome as Abel’s ghost alone in death,

Searching for something missed but unremembered,

And gazing with vague misty eyes far out

Across the night-washed lowlands of Turin.

Why did he choose of all times that for feasting,

Summoning friends, near friends, near enemies,

To drink deep and to make a show of pleasure,

When all the while our hearts were raw with waiting

For news of Thaddeus and his mission’s end?

But the room glittered with its crush of guests,

The dipping torch-light through its own blue smoke

Crimsoning carcanets and jewelled clasps,

Daubing with fire the burnished bowls and beakers —

And he too glittered from his daïsed throne

At the long table’s end, above the crowd,

Superb in tissued gold and rash abandon.

How wearily for us the mirth rushed on!

And when we heard those clattering hoofs outside

Dash up and halt, how well we knew some fate

With hooded vizor stood, a wall’s width from us,

And would not stand there long. So Thaddeus entered —

Forgive my telling what you know already!

I am a draft of visions. Hear me out,

Or I shall strangle in their mounting fumes! —

It seemed he’d never walk that length of room

And stand before my father, whispering.

Then lacked the emperor courtesy, if ever:

He brushed the words back Thaddeus was speaking

And rose; the chatter froze away to silence.

His own words sprang across the air like arrows:

“My friends, we have somewhat of news to hear

Which Thaddeus brings still piping from the Pope.

We’ll hear it with you. The worst is not too bad

To share with friends, simply, with no concealment.

Speak, Thaddeus, speak: as if to me alone.”

And Thaddeus faced us, anguish on his face

And such nobility as heartbreak chisels.

They could find naught wherewith to charge my father

Save heresy — no vileness, no one act

Infamous or diseased with evil outcome!

But day by day they clustered in their church,

Stinking with sweat and incense, and pawed through

The jewelled details of his passionate life,

Seeking for filth, hungry for carrion —

Carrion-beaked and carrion-clawed themselves!

As Thaddeus spoke, I saw those cardinals,

Archbishops, abbots, royal emissaries,

Ranged in the tainted darkness of their church,

Posturing as the world’s high court of justice

And tottering through the motions of a trial

Whose sentence had been writ before its charge.

Guzzlers and sycophants of envious Rome!

Louis of France, for all his saintliness,

Pled for the emperor, and England’s voice

Was just though weak. So potent was the suasion

Of Thaddeus when at last they gave him leave

To answer and defend, the council shook,

They say, with conscience-stabbed irresolution.…

But Innocent poured out his eloquent hate

And while the organ groaned, the hymns surged up —

As through some fissure cracked in noisy hell —

Those old men dashed their writhing torches down

And in the awful darkness cursed my father.…

’Twas here you will recall that Thaddeus stopped,

Sank to his seat and dumbly clutched the table.

And my father’s voice leaped out, “Go on, go on!

The sentence?” It was not Thaddeus who answered.

Da Vigna spoke, standing far down the room,

A late arrival here as at the Conclave:

His tones, clear always, never seemed so clear:

“Anathema and Excommunication.”

I saw my father smile. Da Vigna saw it.

He paused and spoke again: “And this besides:

The Holy Roman Empire’s Emperor,

Frederick, called the Second, is hereby

Deposed — allegiance to him voided, nay,

Forbidden: thus saith the Conclave with one voice.”

Lightning — that blinded as it crashed, downward!

There was a deadly daze of silence. It grew.

All gazed toward my father. But he was silent,

And motionless upon the conspicuous throne.

Their stupor turned ferocious restlessness:

Fear that he searched in vain for words to feed them

Smothered my heart and twitched about my nostrils.

But still he did not speak or lift his eyes.

Suddenly swirled the blade-hiss of his voice:

“Arabs, ho there! Fetch here my treasure chests!”

Our wonder was a terror and a stillness

The whole while that they found and brought the chests.

We leaned and saw them by the lowest step

And barely let our eyes seek up to where

He sat and gazed upon them. Then he stood,

And slowly step by step came down — stooping,

Horribly focussed on the treasure chests.

One hand trailed to his girdle’s keys and hung,

And he himself unlocked and opened each.

He lifted one by one his sacred crowns,

Jerusalem’s, the Kingdom’s, last the Empire’s,

And held them to the light with fixed filmed eyes,

Then strained about to face us, stealthily.

The spectre of his voice called through a cave:

“They are all here.” That hollow sound awoke him:

He straightened, set the great crown on his head,

And mounted to his throne the way he would,

All emperor, of world and self possessed.

How hot then poured his lava eloquence,

Molten and vehement! but back of it

Cold mind, and crafty watching of his hearers.

He probed the vacillant world in probing them —

Those faces brutal, unintelligent,

Ferocious in their avidness to live,

Confused or terrified at Pietro’s news.

They listened to his wrath. But at his warning

Of what submission to such arrogance

Boded to them who were themselves enthroned

And could by this same precedent be dashed

From their high stations at an old man’s whim —

He set them breathing hard and fingering sword-hilts.

Then it was pitiful, Berard, to see him,

Warmed at their warming, hope to flush their hearts

With the wild rosy splendor of his dream.

He dignified them with the truth — explained

His kingdom of the spirit for the few,

His fancied freedom for the falcon-souled —

As if they could partake of visioning.

They chilled: and slipped vague glances at their neighbors.

And then I caught da Vigna watching them,

The hovering wings of his eyes gray as old ice.

He felt their ebb of ardor, but no sooner

Than Frederick himself, who forthwith changed

And spiced his argument to suit their stomachs.

He challenged Innocent to pull him down,

Dared him to set another in his place,

Swearing he’d hold it as his sacred right

Though old men cursed and quenched their torches out.

Their strength was equal to a torch’s quenching,

But not to quenching an imperial sun.

Then on from there of strengths and weaknesses —

The man-power his from Etna to the Rhine,

His fleets, allies, resources, endless treasure

Against the starveling papal regiments,

The flight from Rome, the general disaffection,

The iterated and unanswered calls

For tithes and tribute. Conclaves could convene,

But Victory crowned the strong, and who as strong

In all the armored world as Frederick?

Cheeks flushed and flashing eyes were everywhere:

The hot contagion of his words as always

Had done its work: his last phrase thundering still,

They clashed their swords down on the reeling table,

Tossed up their goblets in a mighty toast,

And shouted, “Death to Rome! Frederick! Frederick!”

He gravely bowed and gravely waved them out

With “Gentlemen, be your sleep calm as mine.”

They joined the darkness. With the last one’s exit

He sank back in his throne: I kept my place

And waited for his eyes to look for mine.

We were alone: the shadowy hall was empty,

Bleak with disorder, stale with feasting done.

He sat immobile as a carven king:

I feared to rouse him from that fell abstraction

And he seemed not to know I even lived.

The lights waned and the moonlight grew and lengthened

And bars of hollow silver spanned the gloom.

And still we sat apart and no word spoken.

Then I crept down the table to his throne

And stood beneath him, saw his eyes wide open,

But not the eyes I knew. They did not see me.

I mounted one by one the purple steps

And coming to his feet sat there, and leaned

My head against the throne, flush with his knee.

At last I questioned: “What does it mean, my father?”

I thought he had not heard me; then he spoke

From loneliness, across an infinite chasm:

“The end. Darkness ahead. Darkness ahead.” —

Words the fewest and most sorrowful

That ever sunk their anchors in my soul!

We were so close! yet I could not reach out

And soothe the grief of his profound despair.

The vultures tear us on our several hills

Which neighbor no two closelier than yields

A perfect view of our most loved one’s anguish.

I knew he saw the conclave’s condemnation

As the immitigable blow of fate

That crashed down all the fabric of his life

And left his hopes dispowered as a dream.

And I knew what he saw was very truth

Though what I saw was only curling chaos

And nothing clear and nothing of fair promise.

So though the ebbing smoke-drifts of the room

I looked out on the lowlands and the moonlight

And watched the ravelled cloud-banks floating past,

The spindrift of a sunset’s storm of color,

And thought of his cloud-splendor now so toppled.…

There was much time for many thoughts to stumble

Before he stirred and spoke in that far way,

But now his voice was frayed and slow with pain:

“Save yourself, Enzio. For you there’s time.

You are not safe with Helios any more.”

My throat swelled suddenly and all my will

Was in the forcing of a voice to answer:

“I will not leave you now; nor ever leave you.

We will fight on as we have fought, together.”

His body’s quiver was a long time dying:

“We will fight on then, Enzio, my son.”

His hand blessed for a moment my bent head.

The torches guttered out; down the long hall,

Across the litter of the banquet table,

The windows poured their caverns of gray fire;

And still he sat, sagged forward, hands on knees,

The imperial crown a red slur round his forehead.

A moon misshapen stumbled down the sky,

Bloody and sick. And there was no more to say.…

Another man had broken: not my father.

He fought on, with a difference that grew.…

How do we hate iniquity and thrive,

But, hating them that are iniquitous,

Harden and grow ourselves somehow attaint

With the venom hoarded for the unrighteous foe?

Unjust dilemma! We cannot grip an evil

Fleshless, abstract, not cased in him or her

On whom we may lay hands of wrath and ruin!

To not hate wrong rubs out man’s one distinction:

Ably to hate it saps the root of reason.

He grew to hate, a clenched, vein-jutting hatred,

And Innocent and them opposed he hated.

The priests will write it in their manuscripts —

For flourish to his catalogue of crimes —

That he was cruel. I have found all men so.

But true it is he hardened after Lyons:

He did not lag in cruelty; indeed,

His old Sicilian temperateness dried up.

The tide was set against him: each new day

Brought new defections, losses, perjured friends,

But still he dominated with his dripping sword

The whole peninsula — and for his camp

Built him a city — “Victory,” alas.

That monster citadel he meant as answer,

Insult and challenge to the Conclave’s edict.

He could not name its name even to me

Afterwards. Verily, Parma, I could wish

To live, if life of mine could work revenge!

It had not fallen, had I not been elsewhere.

Berard, it is not all the treasure lost,

The scoffing of the world, even the death

Of Thaddeus torn, still living, limb from limb,

That makes so passing pitiful to me

Vittoria’s capture. But I am picturing always

His gay return from hunting through the woods.

He was so great a hunter, and its love

Medicined him when most his soul was sickened.

I see him, rested by his weariness,

Riding ahead upon his sweating stallion

With all the rough loud hunters in his wake,

And coming to a clearing on the hillside,

And catching sight below him on the plain

Of acred flames where once Vittoria spread

And running ants that were his armies once.

Humiliation heaped on helplessness!

He never hunted after that, Berard,

And lacked, I know, the sweetening of that

Forgetful wholesomeness. That Parma stole.