Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, PEREGRINUS, by LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

PEREGRINUS, by             Poem Explanation     Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: Much bruit have I about the world, and fame
Last Line: Death of peregrinus.
Subject(s): Religion; Theology


Persons.

Peregrinus Proteus.
Marcon, a Christian.
Chorus of Corinthian youths.

ARGUMENT.

PEREGRINUS, a man notable when the Christian Church was young, having famously
lived a wicked life, publicly burnt himself in Greece.
LUCIAN has left one account of the manner of his dying. Another account is
here set forth.

BEFORE THE PYRE.

Peregrinus.

Much bruit have I about the world, and fame,
A baying hound, hath never left my sleuth
Nor left to noise the air with feats of mine.
But to be known have I much viciousness
Performed, and gone in lust for many years.
And now I come to burn myself, and this
Shall be the famousest of all my deeds.
I mean to be a flame and a flying smoke,
A wide astonishment to the dim minds
That hamper all the world. But I escape
From that obsequious fame that dogged my life
Yelping, a voice to please ignorant ears.
Now as my flesh shall marry the lit air
In golden burning, news of my bright death
Shall run a fiery gait upon the thoughts
Of upright men, an unaccustomed ardour.
Yet I grieve over my dear desires and lusts
That have to be so cruelly destroyed.
But there's no help; they are a mutiny,
They grow too strong, and would be masters in me.
I'll not have that. I'll ruin them with the flame
Rather than drive a team I cannot steer.
Moreover, as I burn my living flesh,
I write a message which, if men will read
And follow in the way I link them on,
Will make more joy and beauty in the earth
Than all the hopes of Heaven and fears of God.
When men shall fear their Selves, and after that
Worship their Selves (for worship's the one way
To make a thing sacred and worthy worship)
Men will have come to their full stature then.
Therefore I go into the pains of fire
To shew the world a symbol of such worship:
Nor can I any other way now give
Clean priestly service to my sacred part.
This Marcon too shall preach me to the lands,
I the Nehushtan and the Moses he.
Lo, Marcon comes, and up the ladder I
Reluctant climb: I tread no more on grass,
The earth shall no more be a road for my feet.
But I am climbing higher than this frame
Of timber, higher than any flame shall lunge,
When it is burning me, I climb aloft,
And draw man's thought towering after me.
It is not anguish of the fire comes now,
But the mighty anguish of becoming holy
After long dwelling in the shops of lust.
Air, thou fresh pleasant creature, dear to breathe,
Wilt thou become a fierceness in my lungs?
And thou, dusk evening, shalt soon be torn
With blaze, and reel at the manner of my end.
Here am I at the top. Lonely it seems;—
And I am hung over the risk of death.

Marcon.

A hateful thing is friendship false; yet good
And profitable may it be if God
Bends, as he can, the crooked ill to straight.
I was a friend to Peregrinus,—friend
In seeming: with the falsehood I serve God.
This man, to draw the moths o' the world to his
Strange lores, here willingly will burn himself,
A death uncouth, to take the world aghast;
And worse than the loose heats and smokes of his life
Will be the pestilent reek of his wild death.
I must prevent him perfecting his death.
Godless and fraudulent he lived: his flesh
So trampled on his mind, no doubting knew
Great-lusted Peregrinus, but he sinned
His life away, not pausing 'twixt his bouts;
He was mere ravening of the baser kind,
Till in these storms unto a vile harbour
This poor ship drave, into the shelter of hell,
And rides calm, anchor'd to the devil's heart.
O, I have sicken'd at his blasphemy,
Applauding it and adding my own wit
(Which God forgive) to keep him in those ways.
He holds he hath a better tongue than Christ
To make men leave the dirt and stand upright;
And, lest he found a head to dupe indeed,
I as disciple swallowed all his teaching,
His crazy watchwords (how I spew them out)
Self-serving, self-delight, ay, and self-worship.
And madly he will give himself to stand
In fire until he chars to death, for hopes
Of startling all the unaware dark minds
To manfulness, with a new faith the world
Rumouring farther abroad than Galilee
And Olivet have gone about the mouths
Of nations, and are sacred in men's ears:
And flames perhaps look nobler than a cross.
God gave me cunning; and I swore to be
The preacher of his notions. He will die
Trusting his words to me. I swore besides
From Corinth to collect with choice a sage
Assembly of staid witnesses. For them
He waits, for them I have swept up
A ribald crowd of youths; well known to these
By fame is Peregrinus. I have said
That he will burn himself lest he should lose
(For he perceives men's ears grow tired of him)
His infamy, and come to an obscure end:
But openly, in concourse, he will set
The doors of death on fire, and burst a way
By flames through the forbiddance of his flesh,
And win great mention in the talk of feasts.
This—sport it is to them—they come to view
With glee unruly; yea, behold they come,
Less gentle pack than wolves, announced by wine
Upon the air, laughter and flown gibing,
The snarling happiness of cruel men.
How have men's mouths become so terrible?

Chours.

Two here alone;
Have we been fooled, we are enough
To snatch the jest from these,
And with what merry injuries we please
Bind it on them.
'Tis like we shall be entertained
Whatever case befall.
When God sent down strict duties
To school His men, the kinder Devil sent
Pleasures in a gay troop;
Tunefully they dance over the heart;
And of them all the queen is Cruelty,
The subtlest, the least sensuous,
Keener than keen odours,
Fiercer than fierce wine in the brain,
Reaching into the life of us farther than love,
A rapture with no satisfaction in it,
Making the lungs gasp, forgetting to breathe,
And the heart stand still, trembling.
But also it is gravely thought
That pleasures be indeed from God's hands
To be a means of climbing from the earth.
And not amiss that city would be judged
The princeliest, the nearest heaven,
Which had stept up all rungs of lower pleasures,
And had abandoned all the sorts of delight
For this amazement of the nerves,
This sharp delicious ransack of the brain,
This ravishing wild piracy of the soul,
Cruelty.
This need not crawl laborious through a sense,
This hath no masterful appetites
Warily to serve, capricious gate-keepers,—
Now welcoming in pleasure to the mind
As high-birtht lady they are glad to see
Coming to cheer their lord,
Now shutting sulky doors
Before her entrance, calling her ill-names,
Saying they are sick,
Cannot rise to draw the bolts,
Nor would let her tempt
Their lord, the mind, to harlotry.
But Cruelty hath no gates,
Nor qualmish porters in her way:
Though she get help from sense,—
For struggle, eyes,
Ears for cries,
Smelling when we use the fire,—
Yet in the main she is mere intelligence;
And a dull thing seemeth sense
And sensual delight,
To one who has let the exquisite
Passion of cruelty trouble his heart
To blithe laughter, and learnt
Skill in tormenting.
To me in warm love busied, or in cups,
A whisper came,
A quiet fame,
That Peregrinus would all willingly
Torture his living limbs with fire.
Then I arose from soft enjoyment,
From wine and lust and hours of scent,
To try the thinnest highest element
Delight can use for being, Cruelty;
Hail, Marcon, we are come,
Hail to thy crazed victim.
Pay us now our jest, this man's torment.
Mar. Mayhap I yet may use persuasion On him. My master, Peregrinus
there!
Per. Art eager then? art thou as ready as I?
Mar. The worshippers are come: they wait the priest.
Per. And soon the priest shall put on holy robes.
Mar. Not a soft weaving, such as loves the skin.
Per. But golden, but a glory, the wealth of flame.
Mar. Shall man not love his life, but prefer death?
Per. He shall love Self better than he loves life.
Mar. And yet thou say'st, death utterly scatters Self.
Per. Nothing it matters if that be or not.
Mar. How pleasant in the beating heart is life.
Per. But if a man hath left to rule his lusts,
Which are to teach him wonder only,—fed
And pamper'd them unwisely, till he knows
Beasts of desire are in him, bloated things,
And his imagination is no more
Than a byre full of moaning appetites,
And danger is that they may break out wild,
Root up and dung the orchard of his soul
And in foul mischief plough it and stamp to mud,
And the lord Self be under maniac hoofs,—
Then better than such outrage is to die.
Mar. What gain to Self is that, if Self is murder'd?
Per. The gain of standing upright to the end.
Mar. Fixed, then, thou art to burn life out of thee?
Per. Yes, and to be the king of all my being.
Mar. O, but it is a dreadful way to death.
Per. The worse the pain, the kinglier am I.
Hast thou forgot, moreover, that this act
Is as an angel standing upon earth
Amid a burning secrecy of wings,
Summoning hearts to heed news out of Heaven?—
"Take care that no harm come, Man, to thy Self,
And death is better than to be defiled."
I am to announce the holiness of Self;
I am the trumpet, but thou art the herald.
Mar. Stop, I will sit no more beside thy danger;
Burn thyself as thou wilt, but now at last
Know I detest, spit out, and fear thy doctrine,
As God does thee. Thou art the Devil's friend:
Burn now and to eternity. I am
A Christian.
Per. A slave. O lying tongue
I half suspected this. Love thou thy malice,
I am not harmed. This serious company
Shall now proclaim my ending to the world.
Chorus. He comes to speak. Look well for fear in him,
For that's the seasoning in a man's torment.
Per. O men, desire no great farewell of me.
I have strapt indeed a harness against fear
Upon me, but he shoots many arrows.
And there's no breast given as target to him
His sharp archery may not wound at length,
However forged about with the mind's brass.
Yet must I tell you why I burn myself.
Behold, the world and all the beings in it
A multitude of waves upon a sea.
But as a chance of flows and currents often
Seizes the watery substance into whirl,
And in the sea doth separately exist
That whirl, so is the kind of man in the world
Or scatter a pool of quicksilver and see
How easily the drops are one again;
But if one drop have rolled among some dirt,
The skin it now hath keeps it out of the rest.
So is man's nature floating in the world,
Having acquired a dirt of strange desires
To keep him still unmixt with the one substance.
Take not too closely, though, that "dirt": I mean
Only to nail upon your memories
This ruling word: how utterly apart
Man, by the Self he hath, is from the world.
Chorus. What, is he teaching? Come, let's have some tales
Among ourselves.—It seems a well-built pyre.
Per. So then there is a new creature in the old
Draught of eternal flowing substance down
The spacious alley of the will of God,—
Gathered perplexity of substance, called
The Self of Man: and let it be a boat
Steered by strong wilful oars about the tide.
It is well said, Be good and love mankind;
But it is better said, Be beautiful
And love yourselves: for this contains the other.
How can you love what is not beautiful?
I would have each man passionately in love
With his own Self: see that it take no harm,
And let not the base breathing of the world,
The nuzzling friendship of such mouths as munch
Garbage, come tarnishing your silver thought.
The one sure thing in all the world is Self;
See that it be Self worthy the having,
And namely one that is never satisfied
With its own excellence. I know a way
The kind of Man may be a holy kind,
And dress itself in beauty as the sun
Wears naturally, excellent in the heavens,
For self-delight his golden gear of virtue.
For none who love and honour their own selves
Would do the frauds, malices, sneakings, lies,
The huffing impudence and bragg'd lechery,
That cause the life of man to smear a scum
Over the world as if a sewer had burst.
But cease to stand about the swampy earth
And grieve to find the mud holding your ankles
When you would seek, following a light-foot dream,
The good firm land that has not been in storms
Of evil rain, nor been drowned nastily.
Follow no dreams; try not to mend the world,
But mend yourselves. Ye love unthriftily
God and your neighbour; call in your rambling love,
Ye need it all yourselves to shore your wills
From resting on the soft uncleanly sin.
When you have thus grown strong (and you shall find
Mercy the prop to make a soul most strong),
Then you shall join me in this mystery,
Self-worship, and not die (as I must do)
To enter it. For worship can make holy,
And man shall be a sacred thing at last
When difficulty he learns to be the priest
Of his own Self, lighting clean fires of worship
With every faculty of flesh and soul.
And henceforth in the world shall walk a ghost
With the appearance of blown fire, to haunt
The ease of men, and amaze them out of comfort.
For here I lift up to the world a token,
A burning type of high self-love, the world's
Instance of the self-worship's ritual.
I have sinned the unforgivable sin against
Myself, rendering body and mind unfit
To be inhabited by a sacred thing,
And profit ye thereby. For greatest wrong
Compels this greatest act of worship from me.
I made of my desires not ecstasy
But lust; as rooms of mere delight
I lived in passions, not seeing that they were
Porches only into wonder, and made
To be past through, but not inhabited.
And like a deadly climate they have grieved
And spoilt my nature, crept into my marrow,
And made intolerable wrong in my soul.
But I will not have myself so dismayed
Or with wild infamous handling hurt and pusht
From being throned. I come to burn myself.
And as I stand naked before the hot
Mouth of the hungry fire, and am devoured,—
As by its dreadful love I am enjoyed,
And have no being except pain until
Perfectly I become the mate of flame,
Then know that I with golden voice announce
And sound over the world from midst my bright
Rapture out of dishonourable life,
That henceforth in the hearts of men shall be
Their own worship: Self is the sacred thing.
Now let thy torches be prepared, Marcon.
Chorus. Oft have I wisht
I had beheld the famous sport
The King of Egypt gave unto his court,
When she, the fairest of his wives,
Thinking she was not husbanded enough,
In action went the same way as her thought.
Her the king gave choice,—on swords to die
Or else to have her face publicly
Tortured into hideousness.
And joy ran down the anxious streets
When the king let cry amid blown horns
His mercy, that her beauty should be murder'd,
But she might keep her life
They say the thing went happily:
It might have been a panther
Beneath the struggled men,
So spat and yelled the lady,
Bit and scratched, butted and kickt,
Tore at the irons and shook hands with burning
To save a little of her look;
After, when the heat-loosen'd flesh set firm,
Her lips were ludicrously writhed.
But this thing promises a greater joke
Than that Egyptian quip.
And after this I think I shall not wish so much
That I had seen her face,
Her undelighted grin,
When first they trapt her visage in a gin
Of white-hot wires and were ingenious
To screw with branding her neck-sinews
Into a rigid wrying tackle,
And the smoke of her own flesh was tangled in her hair.
Per. Friends, friends, good friends, it was a jest.
Chorus. Now it begins; now mark him well, dear souls.
Per. What fool hath taken the ladder? Bring it back.
Chorus. You see, 'tis as the wise heads say. A beast
But gives, howe'er elaborately killed,
A single pleasure. But a man gives twain,—
Both killing and ridiculous fear of death.
Per. The ladder, Marcon; dear Marcon, bring me the ladder.
What art thou doing with that torch, thou fool?
Keep off, take care of all those flying sparks,
Stamp it into the sand;—no, no, good Marcon,
Bring it not near the faggots, see how it spits
Hot resin. Hold it away, curst fool, away.—
You there, Corinthians, hold that murderous man;
Bind him, throttle him, friends, and let me down.
Chorus. This is the best: on us he calls to save.
Per. Have ye not had enow of jest? and more
Will come; hereafter I will make myself
Your banquets' laughing stock, the clown of feasts,
But only let me down.—I will not die.
Chorus. Thou wilt not die! Fool, dost thou think we have left
Our night's pursuits, and will not see thee die?
Marcon, light thou the pyre, or we will hurl
Thee into it, and burn the pair of you.
Per. Ah,—now I see what bloody men ye are;
And I must die mockt at by such a herd,
And they will make a jest of me over the world,
No honourable report. Marcon, too,
Forswears his part; into what strange darkness
Has been betrayed the shining of my death?—
That would have been a medicine for all minds
Enfeebled with the bane of help from Heaven
And roused them from the pallets of sick ease
Which self-mistrust, that priestly surgery,
Drove them to lie on; but not now, not now
I burn myself, like hyssop, for the world.
What then? Why, it is as it should be now.
For now privately I shall do my worship
And have my own approval, no stared applause,
Far better rite. To my own holiness,
To my Self, is all my being sacrificed:
I am the Champion against my own wrong.
Marcon, my heart is braced; yare with thy fires.
Chorus. Little flames, merry flames, modest low chucklings,
This is but maidenly pretence of shyness;
Little flames, happy flames, what are these secrets
You so modestly whisper one another?
Do we not know your golden desires,
And the brave way you tower into lust
Mightily shameless?
Why do you inly skulk among the timber?
Stand up, yellow flames, take the joy given you;
Resins and spunkwood, faggots and turpentine,
A deal of spices, a great cost of benzoin,
Everything proper for your riot, O flames.
Leap up the bavins,
Run up these joys we have built like a stair for you;
Fuel lies topmost waiting your frenzy
Better than sap, better than tar,
For you to kindle.
'Tis flesh and blood, life and feeling,
Desperate moisture besieged by your heat,
Silly resistance to your golden desires,
Agony wrestling with pitiless glee,
Mad Peregrinus;
Rarely delightful to you, I guess.
—Ha, didst hear?
A cry, like a frightened bird, flew out,
But sudden it stopt, as a hunter
Shot the wild flight.
Flames, flames, rejoice, ye have found him!
Up with you now, stroke him first and singe him gently,
Call out some vagaries from him,
And then take hold of the man
And tie his soul up in torment.
Ah, but I wish I could be as flames are;
No more deal in such peddlings of desire
As senses cheaply buy,
But quite become desire
As you do, flames.
Mar. Now I have done good service to the Lord
With my false friendship; for the man is gone
And his hugg'd wickedness along with him
To be unseen, and no more to God's eyes
Hateful, smother'd beyond all offending
In violent places full of the old worm.
O flame, O nature prosperous for the Lord,
O captain over the angers of just Heaven,
Have now thy hottest, holiest zeal, and turn
The mercy of the air to indignation.
Slacken not thou from whiteness, be not red
Nor even gold, but white and terribly white,
The utter purity thou hadst from God
When he began to war. Be fiercely good,
Till thou hast lickt this evil up, and made him
Flakes of fire in the night. But thou, O Lord,
Let me be pleasant and delightful to thee;
Forget not me, if I have served thee here.
And thou, blue-kirtled Mary, who on earth
Didst nourish God, an infancy of flesh
Taking the simple milk of thy dear breast
Instead of spiritual thrones adoring;
When he, thy Son, down to his promist judgment
Rides out of Heaven upon Eternity
Harnesst under his hands, and with one stroke
Of wielded holiness on this clotted nature
Breaks up mortality and turns to ghost
The whole fixt starry creature of the world,
An universal Easter of all being,
Mary, look that I come into the light.
Chorus. Did the much-wander'd Peregrinus—
Or the much-lying ('tis the same)—
Say ever he had seen the Phœnix burning?
Into those brave tales of his,—
The hairy giants who desired him for meat,
The Northern dragons that he slew,
And showed the tooth of one,
(But that, I have heard, came from an alligartha's jaws:
He found it dead and rotting once,
And fought with nothing fiercer than a stink,)—
Into those excellent impudences
Surely the Phœnix came,
Shrieking as the flames tired upon her,
And all the Arabian air
Full of the messages of burning myrrh?
For methinks he would be making now
An image of such vision.
But when these ashes whiten,
Will a famous ghost spring out,
Spurning the glow-hearted logs
Till into sparks they lighten,
A more perpetual life?
Ay, in immortal laughter,
Like a beetle overcome in amber,
We will catch his ghost.
See, thou crazy ghost,
Lovingly we have limed thee
In imperishable gum of merriment,
Tomb thou never shalt escape.
At many a feast, when chaplets are awry
And tipsy spilth is wasting half the wine
And all the lanterns sway,
Thou shalt be handed round and praised
More than Atlantic pearl or topaz out of Meroe,
Thou precious ghost, safe from time
In a clear sepulchre of laughter.
Ah! Ah!
How greatly flared the pyre,
With what a roar its framework fell,
The scaffolding all loosed with fire.
Did see, my friends, that neck of flame
Leap from these ended agonies?
There is a crimson dazzle in my eyes;
Was there not a mighty swag of smoke
Like, most like, a big unnatural bat?
It was over us, with sparkling eyes,
And large hollow wings outspread;
Did they not flap heavily
Like wings of a demon huge vampire
Bloated with sleepy blood?
Did it not hiss and scream?—
Or was it moisture of a pine made steam
And forcing through the wood?
'Tis likely, for as I lookt again
Nothing was there to abash the stars,
And all quite vain
Of smoke the golden flames did spire.
Well, we will take thy lesson,
As near as we can get to it.
The world is a muddy place,
Mankind is an unpleasant race;
What shall we do with our time here?
There is no good answer at all,
Save this, the thing of most delight,
For which all, except fools, must fight,
Is to be known and pointed out in the street.
Fame must be bought at any price,—
Folly, ignomy, or vice,
It matters not, so fame is bought.
And better it is to die as thou hast done
Than to live unknown.

Mar. O stop this foolish noise, you murderers,
For such you are who swarmed to this affair
Merely to see him die, and would not help him.
Chorus. Look at this angry man. Who was it told
The city of this jest? And didst thou help?
Mar. I let him die because—you will not take me—
His thoughts burnt like wicked sulphur, and spoilt
God's pleasure in the fragrant prayers of saints.
Chorus. And how did his burning flesh smell to thy god?
Agreeably to his nose?
Mar. Peace, insolent mouth.
Chorus. But why should Peregrinus burn himself?
Mar. Because he thought to loose over the earth
Widely a running blasphemy, and dip
Men's thoughts in his, as in a vat of brimstone.
Chorus. But this is wild talk. Did he not die for fame?
Mar. Not as you think. But, friends, I would not have
This thing much known; tell it not commonly.
Semi-chorus. The world shall hear, the world shall laugh,
And he who paints with nimblest fancy
What on the top was hid,
How flame and smoke leapt down his throat and tore
His inwards with convulsing storm,
The hideous end of his vain life,
He shall most jocular hearers find,
Raise the merriest laughter.
And if this Marcon spread abroad
Any of this notion,
That Peregrinus had some other purpose
Than a mere craze for infamy
So dying in this manner,
He shall be laught to scorn and for a fool
Pointed at by mockers.
Chorus. In olden time they held it was the gods
Plagued to madness such as he
Who sought with shouted fame
To make the world his temple;
And, though now we have no gods,
Strangeness visits still brains of men,
As shooting-stars furrow clear skies
Into unusual lights.
But what care whence it comes?
For being here, good it is for laughter.
It is unwise to question,
But it is very wise to laugh;
Behold, gone is Peregrinus,
Of his mad death only a smoulder left.
Now never was there in the world a game
So merry as this ravishing
Death of Peregrinus.






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