Monologue: The Last Judgment

       Table of Contents

       MICHAEL ANGELO's Studio. He is at work on the cartoon of the Last Judgment.

       MICHAEL ANGELO.

       Why did the Pope and his ten Cardinals

       Come here to lay this heavy task upon me?

       Were not the paintings on the Sistine ceiling

       Enough for them? They saw the Hebrew leader

       Waiting, and clutching his tempestuous beard,

       But heeded not. The bones of Julius

       Shook in their sepulchre. I heard the sound;

       They only heard the sound of their own voices.

      Are there no other artists here in Rome

       To do this work, that they must needs seek me?

       Fra Bastian, my Era Bastian, might have done it;

       But he is lost to art. The Papal Seals,

       Like leaden weights upon a dead man's eyes,

       Press down his lids; and so the burden falls

       On Michael Angelo, Chief Architect

       And Painter of the Apostolic Palace.

       That is the title they cajole me with,

       To make me do their work and leave my own;

       But having once begun, I turn not back.

       Blow, ye bright angels, on your golden trumpets

       To the four corners of the earth, and wake

       The dead to judgment! Ye recording angels,

       Open your books and read? Ye dead awake!

       Rise from your graves, drowsy and drugged with death,

       As men who suddenly aroused from sleep

       Look round amazed, and know not where they are!

      In happy hours, when the imagination

       Wakes like a wind at midnight, and the soul

       Trembles in all its leaves, it is a joy

       To be uplifted on its wings, and listen

       To the prophetic voices in the air

       That call us onward. Then the work we do

       Is a delight, and the obedient hand

       Never grows weary. But how different is it

       En the disconsolate, discouraged hours,

       When all the wisdom of the world appears

       As trivial as the gossip of a nurse

       In a sick-room, and all our work seems useless,

      What is it guides my hand, what thoughts possess me,

       That I have drawn her face among the angels,

       Where she will be hereafter? O sweet dreams,

       That through the vacant chambers of my heart

       Walk in the silence, as familiar phantoms

       Frequent an ancient house, what will ye with me?

       'T is said that Emperors write their names in green

       When under age, but when of age in purple.

       So Love, the greatest Emperor of them all,

       Writes his in green at first, but afterwards

       In the imperial purple of our blood.

       First love or last love,--which of these two passions

       Is more omnipotent? Which is more fair,

       The star of morning or the evening star?

       The sunrise or the sunset of the heart?

       The hour when we look forth to the unknown,

       And the advancing day consumes the shadows,

       Or that when all the landscape of our lives

       Lies stretched behind us, and familiar places

       Gleam in the distance, and sweet memories

       Rise like a tender haze, and magnify

       The objects we behold, that soon must vanish?

      What matters it to me, whose countenance

       Is like the Laocoon's, full of pain; whose forehead

       Is a ploughed harvest-field, where three-score years

       Have sown in sorrow and have reaped in anguish;

       To me, the artisan, to whom all women

       Have been as if they were not, or at most

       A sudden rush of pigeons in the air,

       A flutter of wings, a sound, and then a silence?

       I am too old for love; I am too old

       To flatter and delude myself with visions

       Of never-ending friendship with fair women,

       Imaginations, fantasies, illusions,

       In which the things that cannot be take shape,

       And seem to be, and for the moment are.

       [Convent bells ring.

      Distant and near and low and loud the bells,

       Dominican, Benedictine, and Franciscan,

       Jangle and wrangle in their airy towers,

       Discordant as the brotherhoods themselves

       In their dim cloisters. The descending sun

       Seems to caress the city that he loves,

       And crowns it with the aureole of a saint.

       I will go forth and breathe