|
|
|
Prev
| Next
| Contents
THE GOOD SHEPHERD WITH THE KID.
He saves the sheep; the goats he doth not save!
So rang Tertullian's sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried:
"Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,
Who sins, once washed by the baptismal wave!"
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed,
The infant Church: of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave.
And then she smiled, and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid
Her head in ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew;
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.
Of these writers, Tennyson is the foremost: he has written the poem of
the hoping doubters, the poem of our age, the grand minor organ-fugue
of In Memoriam. It is the cry of the bereaved Psyche into the dark
infinite after the vanished Love. His friend is nowhere in his sight, and
God is silent. Death, God's final compulsion to prayer, in its dread, its
gloom, its utter stillness, its apparent nothingness, urges the cry.
Meanings over the dead are mingled with profoundest questionings of
philosophy, the signs of nature, and the story of Jesus, while now and
then the star of the morning, bright Phosphor, flashes a few rays through
the shifting cloudy dark. And if the sun has not arisen on the close of
the book, yet the Aurora of the coming dawn gives light enough to make
the onward journey possible and hopeful: who dares say that he walks in
the full light? that the counsels of God are to him not a matter of
faith, but of vision?
Bewildered in the perplexities of nature's enigmas, and driven by an
awful pain of need, Tennyson betakes himself to the God of nature, thus:
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|
|
|