SOLILOQUY OF THE SPANISH CLOISTER
GR-R-R—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!
Water your damned flower-pots, do!
If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,
God’s blood, would not mine kill you!
What! your myrtle-bush wants trimming?
Oh, that rose has prior claims—
Needs its leaden vase filled brimming?
Hell dry you up with its flames!
At the meal we sit together:
Salve tibi! I must hear
Wise talk of the kind of weather,
Sort of season, time of year;
Not a plenteous cork-crop; scarcely
Dare we hope oak-galls, I doubt:
What’s the Latin name for “parsley”?
What’s the Greek name for swine’s snout?
Whew! we’ll have our platter burnished,
Laid with care on our own shelf;
With a fire-new spoon we’re furnished,
And a goblet for ourself,
Rinsed like something sacrificial
Ere ’tis fit to touch our chaps
Marked with L for our initial!
(He-he! There his lily snaps!)
Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores
Squats outside the convent bank
With Sanchicha, telling stories,
Steeping tresses in the tank,
Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horsehairs,
Can’t I see his dead eye glow
Bright as ’t were a Barbary corsair’s?
(That is, if he’d let it show!)
When he finishes refection,
Knife and fork he never lays
Crosswise, to my recollection,
As do I, in Jesu’s praise.
I the Trinity illustrate,
Drinking watered orange pulp—
In three sips the Arian frustrate,
While he drains his at one gulp.
Oh, those melons! If he’s able,
We’re to have a feast, so nice!
One goes to the abbot’s table,
All of us get each a slice.
How go on your flowers? None double?
Not one fruit-sort can you spy?
Strange! And I, too, at such trouble
Keep them close-nipped on the sly!
There’s a great text in Galatians,
Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine distinct damnations,
If I trip him just a-dying,
Sure of heaven as sure can be,
Spin him round and send him flying
Off to hell, a Manichee?
Or, my scrofulous French novel
On gray paper, with blunt type!
Simply glance at it, you grovel
Hand and foot in Belial’s gripe.
If I double down its pages
At the woful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
Ope a sieve and slip it in’t?
Or, there’s Satan! One might venture
Pledge one’s soul to him, yet leave
Such a flaw in the indenture
As he’d miss till, past retrieve,
Blasted lay that rose-acacia
We’re so proud of! Hy, Zy, Hine....
’St, there’s Vespers! Plena gratia,
Ave, Virgo! Gr-r-r—you swine!
Robert Browning.