And see God made and eaten all day long,
And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste
Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! 
For as I lie here, hours of the dead night,
Dying in state and by such slow degrees,
I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,
And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point,
And let the bedclothes, for a mortcloth, drop
Into great laps and folds of sculptor’s-work:  90
And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts
Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,
About the life before I lived this life,
And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests,
Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount,
Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes,
And new-found agate urns as fresh as day,
And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet,
—­Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend? 
No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best! 100
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage. 
All lapis, all, sons!  Else I give the Pope
My villas!  Will ye ever eat my heart? 
Ever your eyes were as a lizard’s quick,
They glitter like your mother’s for my soul,
Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,
Piece out its starved design, and fill my vase
With grapes, and add a vizor and a Term,
And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx
That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down, 110
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask
“Do I live, am I dead?” There, leave me, there! 
For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude
To death—­ye wish it—­God, ye wish it!  Stone—­
Gritstone, a-crumble!  Clammy squares which sweat
As if the corpse they keep were oozing through—­
And no more lapis to delight the world! 
Well go!  I bless ye.  Fewer tapers there,
But in a row:  and, going, turn your backs 120
—­Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace,
That I may watch at leisure if he leers—­
Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone,
As still he envied me, so fair she was!

NOTES

“The Bishop orders his Tomb” This half-delirious pleading of the dying prelate for a tomb which shall gratify his luxurious artistic tastes and personal rivalries, presents dramatically not merely the special scene of the worldly old bishop’s petulant struggle against his failing power, and his collapse, finally, beneath the will of his so-called nephews, it also illustrates a characteristic gross form of the Renaissance spirit encumbered with Pagan survivals, fleshly appetites, and selfish monopolizings which hampered its development.—­ “It is nearly all that I said of the Central Renaissance—­its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin—­in thirty pages of the ‘Stones of Venice,’ put into as many lines, Browning’s being also the antecedent work” (Ruskin).  The Church of St.Praxed is notable for the beauty of its stone-work and mosaics, one of its chapels being so extraordinarily rich that it was called Orto del Paradiso, or the Garden of Paradise; and so, although the bishop and his tomb there are imaginary, it supplies an appropriate setting for the poetic scene.