Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
Descriptive Poems: III. PlacesA View across the Roman Campagna
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)O
Out in the offing through mist and rain,
Saint Peter’s Church heaves silently
Like a mighty ship in pain,
Facing the tempest with struggle and strain.
Soundless breakers of desolate land!
The sullen surf of the mist devours
That mountain-range upon either hand,
Eaten away from its outline grand.
Where the ship of the Church heaves on to wreck,
Alone and silent as God must be
The Christ walks!—Ay, but Peter’s neck
Is stiff to turn on the foundering deck.
Now leave the ship for another to steer,
And proving thy faith evermore the same
Come forth, tread out through the dark and drear,
Since He who walks on the sea is here!
He is not as rash as in old Galilee.
Safer a ship, though it toss and leak,
Then a reeling foot on a rolling sea!
—And he’s got to be round in the girth, thinks he.
His nets are heavy with silver fish:
He reckons his gains, and is keen to infer,
“The broil on the shore, if the Lord should wish,—
But the sturgeon goes to the Cæsar’s dish.”
Fisher of fish wouldst thou live instead,—
Haggling for pence with the other Ten,
Cheating the market at so much a head,
Griping the bag of the traitor dead?
Thou weep’st not, thou, though thine eyes be dazed:
What bird comes next in the tempest shock?
Vultures! See,—as when Romulus gazed,
To inaugurate Rome for a world amazed!