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.