“Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister” (1842)

1.

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!

2.

At the meal we sit together;
   Salve tibi!^[1] 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”?

3.

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!)

4.

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 ’twere a Barbary corsair’s?
   (That is, if he’d let it show!)

5.

When he finishes refection,
   Knife and fork he never lays
Cross-wise, to my recollection,
   As do I, in Jesu’s praise.
I the Trinity^[2] illustrate,
   Drinking watered orange pulp–
In three sips the Arian^[3] frustrate;
   While he drains his at one gulp!

6.

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!

7.

There’s a great text in Galatians,^[4]
   Once you trip on it, entails
Twenty-nine district damnations,
   One sure, if another fails;
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?^[5]

8.

Or, my scrofulous French novel
   On grey 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 woeful sixteenth print,
When he gathers his greengages,
   Ope a sieve and slip it in’t?

9.

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!^[6] Gr-r-r–you swine!