The scene thus outlined prepares us for the culmination of Section VI.
For lo, what think you? suddenly
The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky
Received at once the full fruition
Of the moon’s consummate apparition.
The black cloud-barricade was riven,
Ruined beneath her feet, and driven
Deep in the West; while, bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready
For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.
’Twas a moon-rainbow, vast and perfect.
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But above night too, like only the next,
The second of a wondrous sequence,
Reaching in rare and rarer frequence,
Till the heaven of heavens were circumflexed,
Another rainbow rose, a mightier,
Fainter, flushier and flightier,—
Rapture dying along its verge. (ll. 373-399.)
So the poet leads us to the climax—to the silence awaiting the answer to the speaker’s query
Oh, whose foot shall I see emerge? (l. 400.)
Then follow Sections VII and VIII, revealing the vision.
The too-much glory, as it seemed,
Passing from out me to the ground,
Then palely serpentining round
Into the dark with mazy error.
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All at once I looked up with terror.
He was there.
He himself with his human air.
On the narrow pathway, just before.
But the writer keeps strictly within the bounds of reverence:
I saw the back of him, no more. (ll. 424-432.)
This treatment in itself may, I believe, be not unjustly taken as indicative of Browning’s devotional attitude towards the subject. When, in Section IX, the face is turned upon the narrator, he but records
So lay I, saturate with brightness. (l. 491.)