When earth is lifted and the light comes in.
Penn-Raven was the Friend! Blessed Penn-Raven! He had given him gold with which to build the city of his desires. There was Gabrielle. How glad she would be to help him build that city, that house of gold in particular where he and she should live! She should be partner to his every mood. Gabrielle too should receive rebirth and with him build that house. Poor Bartholow!
Bartholow is a man upon whom the Light has fallen. What he will do with it is the subject of the poem. Where Lancelot was the study of a man in pursuit of the Light, Roman Bartholow is the study of a man after the Light had come. If both men were heroes in the sense that Galahad was a hero, no suffering would be entailed. But these are mortal men and mortal men are plagued with ignorance and frailty. Each has to learn that when the Light gleams before him he must follow it alone. Alone he must live in the Light. Alone he must fight for it. Few men know this and of all men Bartholow was the most unaware.
Bartholow then, because he did not know that his new position demanded the leaving of the old, still clung, but with added eagerness, to the hope of entering into spiritual communion with his wife. He was ever besieging her with his hopes and reproving her for delinquency, but by degrees he came to perceive that she would never erect that house with him. Gabrielle had two reasons, neither of which he knew. She was no longer his wife and she alone realized that the Light for him might mean the night for her. Roman was too wrapt up in himself to discover the first, the second he could learn, as Gabrielle had learned, only through suffering. So on he hoped and thought about it. Then Gabrielle, revealing that weakness, that was so peculiarly hers, of telling preferably the wrong and obvious reason for her delinquency to the right and subtle one, made it out to him that she could not share his light because Penn-Raven was hers too intimately. Anon came the Raven himself and forced the truth upon the husband, making a darkness to cover him that was far more agonizing than any he had known. When Bartholow saw this and would abandon the Light to seek again a less tormented existence, Penn-Raven said to him, “There is no going back”. He said, with an insight and eloquence unusual to him,
Your doom is to be free. The seed of truth
Is rooted in you, and the seed is yours
For you to eat alone. You cannot share it
Though you may give it, and a few thereby
May take of it and so not wholly starve.
...