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1861
OVER the dumb campagna-sea, | |
| 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. | 5 |
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| Motionless waifs of ruined towers, | |
| Soundless breakers of desolate land! | |
| The sullen surf of the mist devours | |
| That mountain-range upon either hand, | |
| Eaten away from its outline grand. | 10 |
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| And over the dumb campagna-sea | |
| 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. | 15 |
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| Peter, Peter, if such be thy name, | |
| 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! | 20 |
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| Peter, Peter!—he does not speak,— | |
| 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. | 25 |
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| Peter, Peter!—he does not stir,— | |
| 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.” | 30 |
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| Peter, Peter, thou fisher of men, | |
| 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? | 35 |
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| At the triple crow of the Gallic cock | |
| 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! | 40 |
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