Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope 100
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 105
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,
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask 110
“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— 115
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
—Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace, 120
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!

And now we enter into the Bishop’s final chaotic rant. His character is revealed in its weakness and fear. His life has been built around a desperate envy of a man who has died, and whom he can never now best. And yet, his whole desire is to best the dead, even in death.
He begins with an instance of the contradiction between his pious face as a Bishop, and the manipulative private self:
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope 100
My villas!

The first line is quote from Genesis. Joseph has risen to second in Egypt. He has rescued his family from the famine and is presenting his father to the Pharoah:

Genesis 47:7–9 (AV)
7 And Joseph brought in Jacob his father, and set him before Pharaoh: and Jacob blessed Pharaoh. 8 And Pharaoh said unto Jacob, How old art thou? 9 And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.

The Bishop quotes the line as a pious sentiment, a sort of religious truism. His life is not really a parallel to Jacob’s life. Nor does he intend the allusion. Instead, the allusion creates a double irony. There is the surface irony: He uses the religious sentiment as a throw-away along the lines of the “vanity of vanities” quoted at the beginning. And yet, his life has actually been bitter to him: it has been marked with envy of one who is now dead. Also, he sees his life as too short and hence he seeks to extend his life into death, “Dying in state and by such slow degrees” (84).
There is irony at the level of the allusion: Jacob is speaking to the king, Jacob having been rescued from death by the life of his on whom he thought was dead. Jacob’s hope and rest have been in life, and in his son. The Bishop’s hope is in death. His fear is in his sons.
He now moves to a demand backed by a threat: Either you provide with a fabulous tomb all of lapis lazuli with even more pagan ornamentation, I leave your inheritance to the pope:
All lapis, all, sons! Else I give the Pope 100
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 105
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,
To comfort me on my entablature
There is to be a scene from Greek mythology, the thyrsus was the favored weapon of Dionysus.
Some of the details: “Will ye ever eat my heart?” Why are you always killing me? But it is striking way to consider the issue. He so fears a second rate tomb that the thought of such a tomb is more fearsome than death itself.
And now we come upon another detail of their mother. There seems to be something less than affection in the relationship. Your eyes remind me of your mother’s, but also they are like “lizard” eyes in their movement. They ‘glitter’ but they “glitter” for his soul.:
Ever your eyes were as a lizard’s quick,
They glitter like your mother’s for my soul,
It is from this observation that he complains of his tomb, that it is impoverished and starved:
Or ye would heighten my impoverished frieze,
Piece out its starved design
It is from this that moves to his command to provide also a scene of battle. The previous scene was one of rampant sexuality. Perhaps the frieze gives us a glimpse into his relationship to their mother. It was profane, being outside marriage. In one place it is lascivious. In this instance, a combat to the death.

There are two more movements in the Bishop’s farewell. First we have his bizarre relationship to the tomb once more recounted, and his fear that sons will fail:

To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask 110
“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— 115
And no more lapis to delight the world!

The tomb will not be a comfort to the living, it will be a comfort to him. And beneath his tomb he will wonder if he is alive or dead:
To comfort me on my entablature
Whereon I am to lie till I must ask 110
“Do I live, am I dead?”
His inability to know he will be dead, his utter rejection of the possibility is strange, and also the hinge upon which his demands lie. I need this for my comfort. But the fact remains, he will not know.
And then his fear, coupled to anger at the injustice: Go ahead, let my corpse “ooze” out of the tomb made of cheap materials, sandstone (“gritstone”). They have no gratitude for their father. Which begs the question, what has he done for them? He has threatened them and made blasphemous offers.
Also, that last night is striking: the lapis will delight the world—when he is the one who wants it.
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— 115
And no more lapis to delight the world!

And at last we have his departure. He makes his farewell, asks for candles (tapers), and then leaves us with the final irony. The church is a church for peace, but it is actually a place of rivalry, envy, and eternal struggle between Gandolf and the Bishop. Their mother is once more reduced to a conquest and acquisition, like a tomb:
Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there,
But in a row: and, going, turn your backs
—Ay, like departing altar-ministrants,
And leave me in my church, the church for peace, 120
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!
And the last repated irony: He cannot see Gandolf leer, nor will Gandolf ever see him.
This returns us to the opening line: This is all vanity, an appearance without substance. And yet that appearance drives him, even into the grave.

—That’s if ye carve my epitaph aright, 

Choice Latin, picked phrase, Tully’s every word,      75

No gaudy ware like Gandolf’s second line— 

Tully, my masters? Ulpian serves his need! 

And then how I shall lie through centuries, 

And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, 

And see God made and eaten all day long,                80

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,                 85

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: 

And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts 

Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,               90

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,              95

And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet, 

—Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend? 

No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best! 

The Latin Epitaph

This section is marked off by a reference to the epitaph to be carved upon the tomb (the final reference being an inclusio, a repetition of the opening topic, marking the end of a section).

First Tully and Ulpian

Ulpian, “Domitius Ulpianus, a celebrated Roman jurist under the emperors Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Heliogabalus, and Alexander Severus, fragments of whose writings are found in the Pandects; he was murdered in Gaul, A. D. 230.” Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, Harpers’ Latin Dictionary (New York; Oxford: Harper & Brothers; Clarendon Press, 1891), 1925.

Tully is another name for the great Roman rhetorician Cicero:

“A famous Roman statesman and orator of the first century notable for both his political activity and influential writings and speeches (106–43 BC). As a political figure, Cicero was a key figure during the time of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Marc Antony, and Octavian. He defended senatorial authority and was exiled from Rome for his part in exposing a conspiracy by Catiline. Upon his return from exile, he opposed Caesar (d. 44 BC) and, later, Marc Antony. Eventually, Cicero was captured and killed by Antony’s men as an act of vengeance (see Plutarch, Cic., 48–49; Seneca, Contr., 7.2). As an orator, Cicero delivered over a hundred speeches which contributed to his reputation as one of the greatest orators of antiquity. As a writer, he produced hundreds of letters and other writings on philosophy, religion, and rhetoric. The size of Cicero’s literary output makes his writings immensely valuable for the study of early Christianity. In particular, his works on ancient rhetoric and philosophy were influential to the philosophical and religious environment in which early Christianity existed.”

John D. Barry et al., eds., “Cicero,” The Lexham Bible Dictionary (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016).

And so the Bishop agonizes over which will be his Latin phrase will be carved upon his tomb. First, he denigrates Gandolf’s choice of the later writer, Ulpian in favor of the more classical Tully. He calls Ulpian “gaudy”, which is a veiled sling at “vain” from Ecclesiastes as quoted in the first line of the poem. The poem could certainly be analyzed successfully against Ecclesiastes, such as “Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from a man’s envy of his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.” Eccl. 4:4. The Bishop striving does spring from envy and will as fruitless as trying to gather up the wind. But it drives him nonetheless. Hence, the irony of his vain quest which he thoughtless denigrates as vanity.

We now move to the madness of the Bishop:

And then how I shall lie through centuries, 

And hear the blessed mutter of the mass, 

And see God made and eaten all day long,                80

And feel the steady candle-flame, and taste 

Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke! 

For as I lie here, hours of the dead night, 

He will hear nothing. Ever. And there is also the ghastly explanation of the Mass, “And see God made and eaten.”   He will feel no candle flame, nor taste the smoke.

He then seems to see himself being transformed into his tomb:

Dying in state and by such slow degrees, 

I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook,                 85

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: 

He dies “by such slow degrees.” The body represented on the tomb become his arms “clasping a crook”; his feet become stones; the sculptor’s work is his clothing. Thus, the slow degrees are a transmogrification into stone. His body is thus moving in the opposite direction of the Mass. While the bread is transformed into the Body; his body is turned to stone.

He continues his representation of decay by thinking of the candles

And as yon tapers dwindle, and strange thoughts 

Grow, with a certain humming in my ears,  

Having said he will die by degrees, he now seems to be dying by degrees. There is the wandering of his mind followed by nonsense:

About the life before I lived this life, 

And this life too, popes, cardinals and priests, 

Saint Praxed at his sermon on the mount, 

He had a life before he was a priest, followed by “this life” of clerical honor. And then the mistake of Saint Praxed for Jesus’s sermon on the mount (mentioned above, in the grotesque mixture of sacred and rankly profane imagery on the frieze; and so we know the Bishop knows this fact but here his mind is wandering).

His wandering mind then turns to his mistress, their mother,

Your tall pale mother with her talking eyes, 

And new-found agate urns as fresh as day, 

Their beautiful mother is somehow coupled to urns: which would carry the ashes of a body. So, does he mean her eyes are the color of agate-urns? Or that she is somehow matched with the urns. And how could urns be either “new-found” or “fresh as days.”  This is the confused speech of one whose brain is failing.

He then catches himself and returns to his proposition of the Latin:

And marble’s language, Latin pure, discreet, 

—Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend? 

No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best! 

Elucescebat comes from Elucesco in Late Latin (after the period of Cicerco and thus must be from Ulpian). The verb means to dawn, shine forth. Here, then, something like “he shone”, which can then be taken figuratively for fame or brilliance of some sort.

The Incoherence of the Imagery

Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years: 

Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?                50

Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black— 

‘Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else 

Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath? 

The bas-relief in bronze ye promised me, 

Those Pans and Nymphs ye wot of, and perchance  55

Some tripod, thyrsus, with a vase or so, 

The Saviour at his sermon on the mount, 

Saint Praxed in a glory, and one Pan 

Ready to twitch the Nymph’s last garment off, 

And Moses with the tables .

There are three events in this section. First, the standard pieties:

Swift as a weaver’s shuttle fleet our years: 

Man goeth to the grave, and where is he?                50

The quotes half-quotes a passage from Job:

⁶           My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,

And are spent without hope.

⁷           O remember that my life is wind:

Mine eye shall no more see good.

⁸           The eye of him that hath seen me shall see me no more:

Thine eyes are upon me, and I am not.

⁹           As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away:

So he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more.

Job 7:6–9. The idea is readily apparent: Our life is brief and then is gone.  Time moves as quickly as a weaver uses his shuttle. Note then the following images: Our life is like a wind, like a cloud. Notice also the “no more” repeatedly in this section. To die is to be gone and unobserved. If you go down to the grave, you will not come back. The bishop breaks off the “goeth down to the grave” with a question, “Where is he?”

That alteration of the Biblical text is key to the Bishop’s thinking. Where will I be when I die? I will be right here, gazing over at Gandolf – and Gandolf in envy seeing that I have outdone him death.

Thus, while playing off of the Biblical text, he explicitly rejects the conclusion. His tomb is a fight for an immortality of earth-bound memory.

Where does a man go? Without answering the question, the Bishop returns to the stone of his tomb:

Did I say basalt for my slab, sons? Black— 

‘Twas ever antique-black I meant! How else 

Shall ye contrast my frieze to come beneath? 

He has a plan for a marble frieze which will be topped with black (and apparently a globe of lapis lazuli above all).

Here then we come to the incoherence of the Bishop’s ideas as a series of images. He is seeking a series of images which are directly contradictory. On one hand, he seeks images appropriate for a church: Christ at the Sermon on the Mount, Moses receiving the Commandments. To this is coupled profane and lurid pagan images. That he brings these together without any hint of confusion is striking. But this demonstrates who this Bishop is. The Christian veneer of his office, is only a veneer. At heart he is an antique (note the use of the word to describe the black) pagan.

Lapis Lazuli

Draw close: that conflagration of my church 

—What then? So much was saved if aught were missed! 

My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig 

The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, 35

Drop water gently till the surface sink, 

And if ye find . . . Ah God, I know not, I! … 

Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, 

And corded up in a tight olive-frail, 

Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,                            40

Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape, 

Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast … 

Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all, 

That brave Frascati villa with its bath, 

So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,         45

Like God the Father’s globe on both His hands 

Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay, 

For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! 

The conflagration

Draw close: that conflagration of my church 

—What then? So much was saved if aught were missed! 

These lines open a new depth of the Bishop’s character.  We have learned that he holds a bitter rivalry with a deceased man named “Gandolf.” They had both sought the same woman, but the bishop had won (and is now addressing his illegitimate sons from that relationship). Gandolf had prevailed against the Bishop when it came to a place in the church for the tomb.

Now, he has something which will “Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst!” This object is identified as the ball of lapis lazuli, a beautiful blue stone. At this time, it would have been imported from Afghanistan, making it an exceedingly rare and expensive stone.

This particular stone is exceptionally large. For this he gives the ghastly image of a murdered man, “Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape.” In this image, another aspect of the Bishop’s character is involved: There is first the anti-Semitism. Second, the brutality that a murdered (or if brought about the Bishop’s influence, the execution) of the victim.  The Bishop does not find the image off-putting but rather description. There is something quite ghoulish about such an image.  That he could use the picture of a decapitation as easily as someone else might mention a ball of the same size is striking.

Next, the color of the stone is again telling,

Blue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast … 

The incongruity of the image is startling. The Madonna is of course the Virgin Mary. But he thinks of her in frankly physical terms, even erotic. The ease of his coupling the sacred and the profane through the poem is brought together in this single line. He is a bishop with sons. Rather than an exemplar of any holiness, he is a base, envious, immoral, covetous man.

And he is also a thief. Look again at the lines which open this section:

Draw close: that conflagration of my church 

—What then? So much was saved if aught were missed! 

My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig 

There was a fire in the church – “my church”. This is quickly brushed off with, “What then”, that is, it was not big deal. And here with have the veiled confession:

So much was saved if aught were missed! 

In the fire something was “missed”, that is lost to the church; but something was “saved”, that is to him. The Bishop stole the lapis lazuli in the fire. It was missed, but it was also saved. This explains the elaborate precaution taken to hide the stone.

My sons, ye would not be my death? Go dig 

The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, 35

Drop water gently till the surface sink, 

And if ye find

These are marvelously ironic lines. “If you would not see me dead,” “ye would not be my death.” But he is dying. He talking with them preciously because he is dying. What then is the death he is describing: His heart has been set upon this stone, which will be the capstone of his victory over Gandolf:

For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! 

But the victory he has over Gandolf can never be had: Gandolf will never know that the Bishop got the stone. Gandolf is dead and died prior to coming to knowledge of the stone.  The Bishop will be spared a kind of death by having this victory over his rival. And yet, it is too late, by hiding the stone from Gandolf, Gandolf never learned that the Bishop had the stone. And so by the Bishop’s logic, he is dead and can never not be dead.

How are they to spare him from death? By digging, which is what you must do to bury a body. He incoherently thinks that digging will save him.

Now look at back the lines which run to the image of the man’s head:

Go dig 

The white-grape vineyard where the oil-press stood, 35

Drop water gently till the surface sink, 

And if ye find . . . Ah God, I know not, I! … 

Bedded in store of rotten fig-leaves soft, 

And corded up in a tight olive-frail, 

Some lump, ah God, of lapis lazuli,                            40

Big as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape, 

In an abandoned portion of a garden (where the oil press used to stand), look for something buried and wrapped up and you will find a head (collapsing the stone and the description into one) They will be digging for corpse.

Moreover, this find will prove the Bishop’s crime. He had hid because it was stolen. But now in his triumph – which will be his death – he confesses to the crime and exhibits the corpse.

This rises a crescendo of joy: If you give me this stone on my tomb, I will give you a beautiful villa:

Sons, all have I bequeathed you, villas, all, 

That brave Frascati villa with its bath, 

So, let the blue lump poise between my knees,         45

Like God the Father’s globe on both His hands  

We then have yet another grotesque incongruity: The stone is like the blue earth, which God the Father holds in his hands. Therefore, I want you to let me hold this globe, too. But rather than in his hands, he will hold it between his knees.

They then will worship in joy because Gandolf will be in a fit of envy:

Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay, 

For Gandolf shall not choose but see and burst! 

They can have light hearts, because their father’s rival will be bested for all eternity. Which is not worship of God at all; but rather completely the opposite in every way.  This will then give to another round of incongruity, mixing sacred and pagan.

Then begins his demand that his tomb be made of “peach-blossom marble”:

Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe 

As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. 

—Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,                  30

Put me where I may look at him! True peach, 

Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize! 

Things to note in this short section. First, note how Browning ties the passage together by sound, here, the use of “R” and “P” ending with the word “prize”:

Peach-blossom marble all, the rare, the ripe 

As fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse. 

—Old Gandolf with his paltry onion-stone,                  30

Put me where I may look at him! True peach, 

Rosy and flawless: how I earned the prize! 

Second, his choice of stone is meant to be more valuable than Gandolf’s tomb.

Third, there is the absurdity of his desire: “Put me where I may look at him!” If he were alive, he would not be able to some beneath the tomb. But being dead, he could see nothing no matter where his body was stationed.

Fourth, it is an interesting play on concept that the peach marble is called “ripe”; which would be correct for a fruit but not the stone. This section will then lead into another section on the stone ornamentation for his tomb.