[Previous: lines 815-845]
Mary has come to the foot of the cross to grieve for her dying son.
Hic demum matri rediit vox faucibus egre;------------
ingentemque dedit gemitum: tum robora largo
tristis, inexpletùm lacrymans, lavit humida fletu,
et tales amplexa trabem dabat ore querelas:
“Nam quem te miserae matri, pulcherrime rerum, [850]
nate, refers? Talin voluisti occumbere leto?
Nec tibi noster amor subiit, ne funera adires
talia, ne culpam alterius hac morte piares,
et letale dares miserae sub pectore vulnus?
Heu! quem te, nate, aspicio! tuane illa serena [855]
luce magis facies aspectu grata? Tui ne
Illi oculi? quae tam scelerata insania tantum
Ausa nefas? heu! quàm nato mutatus ab illo,
cui nuper manus impubis, omnisque iuventus
occurrit festam venienti laeta per urbem; [860]
perque viam ut regi velamina picturata,
arboreasque solo frondes, et olentia serta
sub pedibus stravere, Deum omnes voce fatentes?
His exornatum gemmis, hoc murice cerno?
At non certè olim praepes demissus Olympo, [865]
nuncius haec pavidae dederat promissa puellae.
Sic una ante alias felix ego, sic ego cœli
incedo regina: mea est haec gloria magna;
hic meus altus honos. Quò reges munera opima
obtulerunt mihi post partus? quò carmina laeta [870]
cœlestes cecinere chori; si me ista manebat
sors tamen, et vitam cladem hanc visura trahebam?
Felices illae, natos quibus impius hausit
insontes regis furor ipso in limine vitae,
dum tibi vana timens funus molitur acerbum. [875]
Ut cuperem te diluvio cecidisse sub illo!
Hos hos horribili monitu trepidantia corda
terrificans senior luctus sperare iubebat,
et cecinit fore, cùm pectus mihi figeret ensis:
nunc altè mucro, nunc altè vulnus adactum. [880]
Saltem huc ferte oculos vos ô quicunque tenetis
Hac iter, et comitem dulci me reddite nato;
quando nulla mihi superant solatia vitae,
atque meo major nusquam dolor: addite meme
huic etiam, si qua est pietas, et figite trunco. [885]
Aut vos, ô montesque feri, quaeque ardua cerno
me supra frondere cacumina, parcite, quaeso,
vos saltem, vos ô nostro exaturata dolore
respicite, et miserae tandem succurrite matri:
nunc nunc praecipiti casu convulsa repentè [890]
in me unam ruite, et tantos finite labores.”
Hos virgo, atque alios dabat ore miserrima fletus:
nec comites possunt flentem illam abducere fidae.
Finally the bereft mother found her voice,------------
gave out a great groan. She washed the wooden
beam with her copious heartbroken tears,
embracing the timber as she wept, and cried:
“Is this how you return to your long-suffering [850]
mother, beautiful child? Can you wish such a death?
Was our love together not strong enough
that you would seek death, to redeem the sins
of other people and wound my mortal heart?
Oh! Is this my son? Is that really your [855]
noble face, more to me than light itself? Are
those your eyes? What wicked madness would dare
such outrages? oh! How changed, my son, from
the man greeted by crowds of youths on all sides
making a joyful festival as you entered the city; [860]
they laid out coloured carpets as for a king,
and strewed thick palm leaves and fragrant garlands
under your feet acclaiming you a god!
Where now are your jewels, where is your purple robe?
The messenger sent down from Olympus [865]
never promised this to a frightened young girl.
Is this how I’m blessed, how I go to heaven
as queen, the glory of that great place—in mourning?
Is this my high honour? Why did those kings
give me gifts at your birth? Why are joyous hymns [870]
sung for me by angels if this was always my fate?
Why have I lived to see his life hung on this beam?
Happy those mothers whose innocent children
were swept past life’s threshold by that angry king
as he tried in vain to encompass your life. [875]
How I wish that flood of death had taken you!
These, these were the terrible struggles that
old man warned me of, scaring my soul, when he
prophesied the sword would stick in my breast:
now the blade is pushed home, leaving a great wound. [880]
At the very least look on me, all you who
take this road: let me join my sweet son’s fate;
since there is no comfort left to me in life,
and no-one has even known greater pain. Add
me there, for pity’s sake, nail me to that beam. [885]
You wild mountains, you arduous peaks clad
with leaf-thick trees, I pray you: show me mercy!
You have saturated yourselves with my sorrow—
look at me, grant succour to a miserable mother:
now, now, sunder yourselves and tumble down [890]
to fall on me and end my sufferings!”
So the virgin spoke, with many other lamentations:
and her companions could not lead her away.
The old man of line 878, who prophesied that Mary would suffer terribly, a sword through her breast, is Simeon (in Luke 2:25-35); Vida has already dramatized this encounter in Book 3, lines 684-738.
Otherwise this whole passage is, in effect, a dramatic monologue, spoken by Mary in the access of her emotional agony. As such it’s pretty affecting, a stretch of poetry that manages to rise above its sometimes rather formal and stiffly Vergilian matrix to express actual misery. What is especially effective, I think, is the way Vida alternates more straightforward articulations of personal misery with elements that sound, often, more like rebukes: wishing Jesus had died in the massacred of innocents when he was still a baby: ‘How I wish that flood of death had taken you!’ and demanding of him ‘was your love for me not strong enough that you should seek such a death?’ The rather stinging rhetorical question in line 850-51 ‘is this how you return to me, my beautiful child?’ (“Nam quem te miserae matri, pulcherrime rerum/nate, refers? ) derives from Vergil: Euryalus’s mother hears, from ‘winged Fame’, that her son has perished on the battlefield:
aut quae nunc artus avolsaque membraIndeed the grief of Euryalis’s mother in Aeneid 9 is, in a larger sense, one of Vida’s prototypes here.
et funus lacerum tellus habet? Hoc mihi de te,
nate, refers? [Aeneid 9:490-91]
‘And where now are you mangled limbs and broken body? Is this, my son, how you come back to me?’
I am aware of various musical traditions of the ‘stabat mater’, but I’m less familiar with the verbal or literary tradition of things like this, Vida’s dramatic monologue, even as to the question of whether such a tradition really exists. There are important modern analogues, certainly, and one of the most notable is Colm Tóibín's short but beautifully judged novella The Testament of Mary (2012), pictured at the head of this post. Of the two major cultural figurations of Mary, as fulfilled new mother feeding a baby at her breast, and as heartbroken old woman forced to watch her beloved son died a shameful and agonising death, Tóibín's is a novel that focuses wholly on the latter. His Mary certainly loves, but does not particularly understand, her son, and one of the strengths of the novel is the way it lays this complicated dynamic out as one of the truths of parenthood itself. It is not uncommon for a mother to love but not like her child, I think (or a father, indeed). More, there is something mournfully, or even balefully, uncanny in all parental love, since these little creatures in which we invest so much, emotionally (and materially), that make us so vulnerable to heartbreak, that so dominate our lives, will leave us. That's as it should be; we don't want to keep our grown-up kids with us, they must make their own lives of course, and of course we don't want them to predecease us. Except that we do want to keep our grown-up kids with us, and would like to forbid them from making their own lives, of course, and that they won't (we hope) predecease us is another way of saying we will die and they will live on. Unnerving, really. I mean my conscious mind desperately hopes for it, but my unconscious finds it more than a little usettling, I think, that my kids will be living, loving and drinking wine in the sunshine when I am cold and dead in the ground. So it goes.
The Testament of Mary delicately but devastatingly delineates this. Naomi Alderman's Guardian review has its finger on the novella's pulse:
In the Gospel of Matthew we're told that Jesus's mother and brothers come to see him preaching and want to speak to him: “Someone told him, ‘Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.’ He replied to him, ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ Pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers’.” Not the behaviour of a good Jewish son. At the wedding at Cana, where Jesus pulls his water-to-wine party trick, when Mary tries to talk to him Jesus replies brusquely: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?“”. Maybe they'd never really got on. The tradition is, of course, that she knew his divinity from the start, and she remains still a potent figure in Christian myth and worship, but tradition is not text. When we go back to the gospels we find an irritable, not loving, relationship.Vida is not in this category, quite, of course: his heroic Jesus us all blond beauty and life-affirming brilliance. But, even if only glancingly, this section of the Christiad touches on the more complex and conflicted nature of parental love, and thus of all love. It is the fundamental imbalance in love, the Forsterian boast (a very strange one, when you come to think of it) that if he were faced with the choice of betraying his country or betraying a friend he could only hope he'd have the courage to betray his country. It's the Antigone, in other words: the individual loved-one outranks all the other people in the world (the World Well Lost For Love, as Dryden renamed Anthony and Cleopatra); a fine and romantic but fundamentally unsustainable head-rush of a moral position. Since the main story of the Gospels is that of a god willing to undergo unspeakable agony to redeem all the other people in the world, it seems out of place in this context; but The Testament of Mary, and in its smaller way this Vida monologue, play a counterpointing tune, speak to a less selfless apprehension of the dual egosim of love as a passion. As Tóibín's Mary puts it: “if you want witnesses then I am one and I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.”
Colm Tóibín bravely takes this textual truth as his starting point for a gentle, thoughtful reimagining of Mary's own experience of her life in his new novella, The Testament of Mary. His Mary suspects her son is “out of his mind”, just as the Gospel of Mark tells us Jesus's family did. She finds him frightening and distant. The novel doesn't challenge Jesus's miracles but does present them as disquieting as much as glorious. The raising of Lazarus is given the beautiful, dark, muted edge with which a pre-Enlightenment mind would have experienced it. Yes, it happened. No, it's not clear that it was a good idea – like the returned corpse in The Monkey's Paw, the dead do often come back wrong: “Slowly, the figure dirtied with clay and covered in graveclothes wound around him began with great uncertainty to move … like some strange new creature jerking and wriggling towards life.” Later we're told: “Lazarus, it was clear to me, was dying. If he had come back to life it was merely to say a last farewell to it. He recognised none of us, barely appeared able to lift the glass of water to his lips as he was handed small pieces of soaked bread by his sisters.”
[Next: lines 894-912]
I think you've written Forster's sentiment the wrong way round, although your gloss implies your understanding is the right way round, as it were.
ReplyDeleteOh you're quite right! Thanks for that catch; have amended my text.
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