Ferishtah's Fancies by Robert Browning — Read

"Look, I strew beans"...

(Ferishtah, we premise, / Strove this way with a scholar's cavilment / Who put the peevish question: "Sir, be frank! / A good thing or a bad thing -- Life is which? / Shine and shade, happiness and misery / Battle it out there: which force beats, I ask? / If I pick beans from out a bushelful -- / This one, this other, -- then demand of thee / What color names each justly in the main, -- / 'Black' I expect, and 'White' ensues reply: / No hesitation for what speck, spot, splash / Of either color's opposite, intrudes / To modify thy judgment. Well, for beans / Substitute days, -- show, ranged in order, Life -- / Then, tell me its true color! Time is short, / Life's days compose a span, -- as brief be speech! / Black I pronounce for, like the Indian Sage, -- / Black -- present, past, and future, interspersed / With blanks, no doubt, which simple folk style Good / Because not Evil: no, indeed? Forsooth, / Black's shade on White is White too! What's the worst / Of Evil but that, past, it overshades / The else-exempted, present? -- memory, / We call the plague! 'Nay, but our memory fades / And leaves the past unsullied! ' Does it so? / Why, straight the purpose of such breathing-space, / Such respite from past ills, grows plain enough! / What follows on remembrance of the past? / Fear of the future! Life, from birth to death, / Means -- either looking back on harm escaped, / Or looking forward to that harm's return / With tenfold power of harming. Black, not White, / Never the whole consummate quietude / Life should be, troubled by no fear! -- nor hope -- / I 'll say, since lamplight dies in noontide, hope / Loses itself in certainty. Such lot / Man's might have been: I leave the consequence / To bolder critics or the Primal Cause; / Such am not I: but, man -- as man I speak: / Black is the bean-throw: evil is the Life! ")