poem_the_capucin_of_rome.php
THE CAPUCIN OF ROME.
Joaquin Miller
nly a basket for fruits or bread - And the bits you divide with your dog, which you
- Had left from your dinner. The round year through
- He never once smiles. He bends his head
- To the scorn of men. He gives the road
- To the grave ass groaning beneath his load.
- He is ever alone. Lo! never a hand
- Is laid in his hand through the whole wide land,
- Save when a man dies, and he shrives him home.
- And that is the Capucin monk of Rome.
- He coughs, he is hump'd, and he hobbles about
- In sandals of wood. Then a hempen cord
- Girdles his loathsome gown. Abhorr'd!
- Ay, lonely, indeed, as a leper cast out.
- One gown in three years! and—bah! how he smells!
- He slept last night in his coffin of stone,
- This monk that coughs, this skin and bone,
- This living dead corpse from the damp, cold cells,—
- Go ye where the Pincian, half-level'd down,
- Slopes slow to the south. These men in brown
- Have a monkery there, quaint, builded of stone;
- And, living or dead, tis the brown men's home,—
- These dead brown monks who are living in Rome!
- You will hear wood sandals on the sanded floor;
- A cough, then the lift of a latch, then the door
- Groans open, and—horror! Four walls of stone
- All gorgeous with flowers and frescoes of bone!
- There are bones in the corners and bones on the wall;
- And he barks like a dog that watches his bone,
- This monk in brown from his bed of stone—
- He barks, and he coughs, and that is all.
- At last he will cough as if up from his cell;
- Then strut with considerable pride about,
- And lead through his blossoms of bone, and smell
- Their odors; then talk, as he points them out,
- Of the virtues and deeds of the gents who wore
- The respective bones but the year before.
- Then he thaws at last, ere the bones are through,
- And talks right well as he turns them about
- And stirs up a most unsavory smell;
- Yea, talks of his brown dead brothers, till you
- Wish them, as they are, no doubt, in—well,
- A very deep well .... And that may be why,
- As he shows you the door and bows good-by,
- That he bows so low for a franc or two,
- To shrive their souls and to get them out—
- These bony brown men who have their home,
- Dead or alive, in their cells at Home.
- What good does he do in the world? Ah! well,
- Now that is a puzzler But, listen! He prays.
- His life is the fast of the forty days.
- He seeks the despised; he divides the bread
- That he begg'd on his knees, does this old shavehead.
- And then, when the thief and the beggar fell!
- And then, when the terrible plague came down,
- Christ! how we cried to these men in brown
- When other men fled! Ah, who then was seen
- Stand firm to the death like the Capucin ?