Ixion by Robert Browning — Read

High in the dome, suspended, of Hell, sad triumph, behold us! / Here the revenge of a God, there the amends of a Man. / Whirling forever in torment, flesh once mortal, immortal / Made -- for a purpose of hate -- able to die and revive, / Pays to the uttermost pang, then, newly for payment replenished, / Doles out -- old yet young -- agonies ever afresh; / Whence the result above me: torment is bridged by a rainbow, -- / Tears, sweat, blood, -- each spasm, ghastly once, glorified now. / Wrung, by the rush of the wheel ordained my place of reposing, / Off in a sparklike spray, -- flesh become vapor through pain, -- / Flies the bestowment of Zeus, soul's vaunted bodily vesture, / Made that his feats observed gain the approval of Man, -- / Flesh that he fashioned with sense of the earth and the sky and the / ocean, / Framed should pierce to the star, fitted to pore on the plant, -- / All, for a purpose of hate, re-framed, re-fashioned, re-fitted, / Till, consummate at length, -- lo, the employment of sense! / Pain's mere minister now to the soul, once pledged to her pleasure -- / Soul, if untrammelled by flesh, unapprehensive of pain! / Body, professed soul's slave, which serving beguiled and betrayed / her, / Made things false seem true, cheated through eye and through ear, / Lured thus heart and brain to believe in the lying reported, -- / Spurn but the trait'rous slave, uttermost atom, away, / What should obstruct soul's rush on the real, the only apparent? / Say I have erred, -- how else? Was I Ixion or Zeus? / Foiled by my senses I dreamed; I doubtless awaken in wonder: / This proves shine, that -- shade? Good was the evil that seemed? / Shall I, with sight thus gained, by torture be taught I was blind / once? / Sisuphos, teaches thy stone -- Tantalos, teaches thy thirst / Aught which unaided sense, purged pure, less plainly demonstrates? / No, for the past was dream: now that the dreamers awake, / Sisuphos scouts low fraud, and to Tantalos treason is folly. / Ask of myself, whose form melts on the murderous wheel, / What is the sin which throe and throe prove sin to the sinner! / Say the false charge was true, -- thus do I expiate, say, / Arrogant thought, word, deed, -- mere man who conceited me godlike, / Sat beside Zeus, my friend -- knelt before Heré, my love! / What were the need but of pitying power to touch and disperse it, / Film-work -- eye's and ear's -- all the distraction of sense? / How should the soul not see, not hear, -- perceive and as plainly / Render, in thought, word, deed, back again truth -- not a lie? / "Ay, but the pain is to punish thee! " Zeus, once more for a pastime, / Play the familiar, the frank! Speak and have speech in return! / I was of Thessaly king, there ruled and a people obeyed me: / Mine to establish the law, theirs to obey it or die: / Wherefore? Because of the good to the people, because of the honor / Thence accruing to me, king, the king's law was supreme. / What of the weakling, the ignorant criminal? Not who, excuseless, / Breaking my law braved death, knowing his deed and its due -- / Nay, but the feeble and foolish, the poor transgressor, of purpose / No whit more than a tree, born to erectness of bole, / Palm or plane or pine, we laud if lofty, columnar -- / Loathe if athwart, askew, -- leave to the axe and the flame! / Where is the vision may penetrate earth and beholding acknowledge / Just one pebble at root ruined the straightness of stem? / Whose fine vigilance follows the sapling, accounts for the failure, / -- Here blew wind, so it bent: there the snow lodged, so it broke? / Also the tooth of the beast, bird's bill, mere bite of the insect / Gnawed, gnarled, warped their worst: passive it lay to offence. / King -- I was man, no more: what I recognized faulty I punished, / Laying it prone: be sure, more than a man had I proved, / Watch and ward o'er the sapling at birthtime had saved it, nor / simply / Owned the distortion's excuse, -- hindered it wholly: nay, more -- / Even a man, as I sat in my place to do judgment, and pallid / Criminals passing to doom shuddered away at my foot, / Could I have probed through the face to the heart, read plain a / repentance, / Crime confessed fools' play, virtue ascribed to the wise, / Had I not stayed the consignment to doom, not dealt the renewed ones / Life to retraverse the past, light to retrieve the misdeed? / Thus had I done, and thus to have done much more it behooves thee, / Zeus who madest man -- flawless or faulty, thy work! / What if the charge were true, as thou mouthest, -- Ixion the cherished / Minion of Zeus grew vain, vied with the godships and fell, / Forfeit through arrogance? Stranger! I clothed, with the grace of / our human, / Inhumanity -- gods, natures I likened to ours. / Man among men I had borne me till gods forsooth must regard me / -- Nay, must approve, applaud, claim as a comrade at last. / Summoned to enter their circle, I sat -- their equal, how other? / Love should be absolute love, faith is in fulness or naught. / "I am thy friend, be mine! " smiled Zeus: "If Heré attract thee," / Blushed the imperial cheek, "then -- as thy heart may suggest! " / Faith in me sprang to the faith, my love hailed love as its fellow, / "Zeus, we are friends -- how fast! Heré, my heart for thy heart! " / Then broke smile into fury of frown, and the thunder of "Hence, / fool! " / Then through the kiss laughed scorn "Limbs or a cloud was to / clasp? " / Then from Olumpos to Erebos, then from the rapture to torment, / Then from the fellow of gods -- misery's mate, to the man! / -- Man henceforth and forever, who lent from the glow of his nature / Warmth to the cold, with light colored the black and the blank. / So did a man conceive of your passion, you passion-protesters! / So did he trust, so love -- being the truth of your lie! / You to aspire to be Man! Man made you who vainly would ape him: / You are the hollowness, he -- filling you, falsifies void. / Even as -- witness the emblem, Hell's sad triumph suspended, / Born of my tears, sweat, blood -- bursting to vapor above -- / Arching my torment, an iris ghostlike startles the darkness, / Cold white -- jewelry quenched -- justifies, glorifies pain. / Strive, mankind, though strife endure through endless obstruction, / Stage after stage, each rise marred by as certain a fall! / Baffled forever -- yet never so baffled but, e'en in the baffling, / When Man's strength proves weak, checked in the body or soul, / Whatsoever the medium, flesh or essence, -- Ixion's / Made for a purpose of hate, -- clothing the entity Thou, / -- Medium whence that entity strives for the Not-Thou beyond it, / Fire elemental, free, frame unencumbered, the All, -- / Never so baffled but -- when, on the verge of an alien existence, / Heartened to press, by pangs burst to the infinite Pure, / Nothing is reached but the ancient weakness still that arrests / strength, / Circumambient still, still the poor human array, / Pride and revenge and hate and cruelty -- all it has burst through, / Thought to escape, -- fresh formed, found in the fashion it fled, / Never so baffled but -- when Man pays the price of endeavor, / Thunderstruck, downthrust, Tartaros-doomed to the wheel, -- / Then, ay, then, from the tears and sweat and blood of his torment, / E'en from the triumph of Hell, up let him look and rejoice! / What is the influence, high o'er Hell, that turns to a rapture / Pain -- and despair's murk mist blends in a rainbow of hope? / What is beyond the obstruction, stage by stage though it baffle? / Back must I fall, confess "Ever the weakness I fled"? / No, for beyond, far, far is a Purity all-unobstructed! / Zeus was Zeus -- not Man: wrecked by his weakness, I whirl. / Out of the wreck I rise -- past Zeus to the Potency o'er him! / I -- to have hailed him my friend! I -- to have clasped her -- my love! / Pallid birth of my pain, -- where light, where light is, aspiring / Thither I rise, whilst thou -- Zeus, keep the godship and sink!