[Previous: lines 674-692]
Jesus and his disciples, examining a series of artistic representations of world-history inside the temple at Jerusalem, move on the flood.
Omnibus hïc pauci extinctis mortalibus ibant------------
inclusi ligno summas impune per undas.
Ingens lativago fluitabat machina ponto, [695]
et vix extabant immani corpore montes;
quos procul abruptus collisis nubibus ignis
ingeminans creber cœlo rutilante petebat.
Hic natum senior nudo Isacon ense petebat,
infelix pater, exequitur dum tristia jussa. [700]
Aspiceres illum toto iam corpore niti
dextram attollentem: nondum respexerat; et iam
nuncius ecce aderat cœli demissus ab arce,
iussa ferens primis contraria: victima iuxtà
pascebat, pueri ignari pro caede parata, [705]
candidus et villis aries argenteus albis.
Hinc fratrem invisum narrata ob somnia fratres
vendebant, misero mentiti dira parenti
funera, discerptumque feris : pater ipse cruentam
versabat nati tunicam, lacrimisque rigabat. [710]
Hic etiam, Phariis dum cives ducit ab oris,
post longa exilia in patriam, promissaque regna
legifer auxiliis fretus cœlestibus heros;
orta lues populum errantem miseranda repente
serpentum afflatu leto dabat, atque iacebant [715]
corpora tabifico passim morientia morsu.
Dux vero in medio campi suspendit ahenum
ingenti e malo colubrum, stratosque iubebat
dirigere huc aciem intentos, lignumque tueri,
quae miseris erat haud dubiae via sola salutis. [720]
Parte alia, rostro terebrans sibi viscera acuto,
fœta avis implumes pascebat vulnere natos.
Stant olli circùm materno sanguine laeti,
et pectus certatim omnes rimantur apertum.
When disaster slew the world a few escaped------------
enclosed inside timber and riding out the flood:
a huge boat crafted to float the wide ocean. [695]
You could scarcely see the peaks of huge mountains;
and clouds above collided abruptly, fiery
with lighting and thunder that shook the sky.
Next a father drew sword on his son, Isaac—
unhappy patriarch! obeying sad law: [700]
see how his whole body strains with the effort
right arm raised! He hasn’t yet turned, can’t see
the angel come from heaven's high citadel
to rescind the former command—a new victim
is grazing, unwitting kid, ready for slaughter, [705]
a handsome ram with a silvery-white coat.
Here brothers sold a brother. Hating his dream
interpretations they lied to their parent
saying wild beasts killed him: father gripped the bloody
tunic of his child and watered it with his tears. [710]
And here, leading his folk out of Pharaoh’s realm
after long exile, towards their promised land:
the Lawgiver! a hero aided by heaven.
Suddenly those wanderers were afflicted by plague:
felled by contagion spread by serpents’ breath [715]
consuming and killing them where they lay.
Their leader hung, in the middle of a field,
a bronze snake from a tall pole, and ordered
the people lying there to gaze on the wood:
the only salvation for those in misery. [720]
Elsewhere, a sharp-beaked bird cruelly tore her bowels,
feeding her newborn unfledged chicks from the wound.
They clustered around their mother, rejoicing,
in her blood and pecking at the open wound.
Next on the tour of temple bas-reliefs, Vida’s continuing ekphrasis, are four patriarchs: Noah, Abraham, Jacob and Moses. The game here—if game isn't too trivialising a term—is that Vida does not name any of these four, but describes indicative scenes in a way that invites the reader to identify whom is portrayed.
So, rather than saying ‘next was the flood, which some escaped inside Noah’s ark’, Vida talks of how everybody died except for some few who were ‘inclusi ligno’, ‘enclosed in wood’. This, apart from its Biblical provenance, is an allusion to one of the most famous bits of Vergil’s Aeneid: Aeneas’s account of the fall of Troy, and how Laocoön tried to warn the Trojans not to roll the wooden horse inside the city walls: ‘I fear the Greeks,’ he declares, ‘even when they bring gifts’, adding hoc inclusi ligno occultantur Achivi, ‘surely enclosed in wood there are Achaeans lurking’ [Aeneid, 2:45]. There’s an intriguing cross-current here: Noah’s wooden ark carries a few through desolation to start a new world, where the Trojan wooden horse carries Ulysses and the Achaeans through the city gates to bring desolation to Troy. The city has to fall, though: felix culpa to facilitate the birth of the new city, the world capital Rome. There are, I know, a great many medieval and renaissance representations of Noah’s ark; I don’t know if any do what Vida does here and fold-in an implicit comparison with the Trojan horse. In Vergil, we go from destroyed Troy to Rome; in Vida we go from (soon to be) devastated Jerusalem to Rome. There are many kinds of flood in the world.
The emphasis in all four of these patriarchal cases is on suffering and sickness as correlatives of man's sinful state; and Vida, artfully enough, insinuates the cure—Christ, of course—into his descriptions by degrees. So the father about to kill son is about to be reprieved, because a substitutionary sacrifice is standing by, handsome in silver and white. Christ's sacrifice, to-come, is the ultimate substitution. Another father takes the blood staining the tunic of his favoured son as a sign that the boy has been cruelly killed, but we know the truth: the blood belongs (another unwitting substitute to the sacrifice of the young man) to an animal, and Joseph is not only alive but will return in splendour. With Moses, Vida focusses on a less famous episode: Numbers 21:4–9, when God told Moses to erect so that the Israelites who saw it would be protected from dying from the bites of the ‘fiery serpents’, which God had sent to punish them for speaking against him and Moses.
The afflictions of the Edenic serpent, author of humanity's woes, are cured by a new, eternal serpent: in the suffering of the body (Christ on the cross) is the cure for all bodies. Vida caps these four brief episodes with an image of a pelican—not named as such in the text, but unmistakeable:
In medieval Europe, the pelican was thought to be particularly attentive to her young, to the point of providing her own blood by wounding her own breast when no other food was available. As a result, the pelican came to symbolise the Passion of Jesus and the Eucharist, supplementing the image of the lamb and the flag. A reference to this mythical characteristic is contained for example in the hymn by Saint Thomas Aquinas, ‘Adoro te devote’ or ‘Humbly We Adore Thee’, where in the penultimate verse, he describes Christ as the loving divine pelican, one drop of whose blood can save the world.This is the final image in Vida's prolonged ekphrasis; after this the narrative picks up again with Christ leaving the temple and intervening in the case of the woman taken in adultery.
The final image looks, perhaps, like an abrupt shift in focus away from from the patriarchs to a pecky avis, but Vida is in fact picking up and tying-off (as it were) the Egyptian and serpentine threads from earlier in the passage:
A pelican is a bird of Egypt, and dwelleth in deserts beside the river Nile. The pelican loveth too much her children. For when the children be haught, and begin to wax hoar, they smite the father and the mother in the face, wherefore the mother smiteth them again and slayeth them. And the third day, the mother smiteth herself in her side, that the blood runneth out, and sheddeth that hot blood on the bodies of her children. And by virtue of that blood, the birds that were before dead quicken again. Master Jacobus de Vitriaco in his book of the wonders of the Eastern parts telleth another cause of the death of pelicans' birds. He saith that the serpent hateth kindly this bird. Wherefore when the mother passeth out of the nest to get meat, the serpent climbeth on the tree, and stingeth and infecteth the birds. And when the mother cometh again, she maketh sorrow three days for her birds, as it is said. Then (he saith) she smiteth herself in the breast and springeth blood upon them, and reareth them from death to life, and then for great bleeding the mother waxeth feeble, and the birds are compelled to pass out of the nest to get themselves meat. And some of them for kind love feed the mother that is feeble, and some are unkind and care not for the mother, and the mother taketh good heed thereto, and when she cometh to her strength, she nourisheth and loveth those birds that fed her in her need, and putteth away her other birds, as unworthy and unkind, and suffereth them not to dwell nor live with her. [Bartholomaeus Anglicus [13th-century], De proprietatibus rerum, book 12 (this is Robert Steele's 1893 translation, from Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus, 1893)]
[Next: lines 725-792]
No comments:
Post a Comment