Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.
Lines 85-101
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,
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,
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,
And marble's language, Latin pure, discreet,
—Aha, ELUCESCEBAT quoth our friend?
No Tully, said I, Ulpian at the best!
Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage.
- The bishop tells his sons/nephews that he's dying slowly. As he does, he lies in bed very still, approaching death (a "mortcloth"—line 89—is a death shroud).
- It's almost as if he himself is becoming a statue or some other decoration.
- As he lies there, he thinks about his life before he became a bishop, and then he thinks about his life as a bishop.
- And then…he thinks about St. Praxed giving his sermon on the mount. Er, wait a minute. St. Praxed was a she. And Jesus was the one who gave that sermon on the mount. The bishop is really starting to lose it here.
- He thinks about these nephews'/sons' beautiful mother—which leads us to believe that these are more likely to be his sons than his "nephews." He compliments her stature, her eyes, and her…um, urns. He describes her more like a tomb than a person. It seems like the bishop's decorative obsession is getting the better of him.
- He carries on about the epitaph carved in marble. "Elucesebat" means "he was illustrious" in Latin. It's something that Cicero would say, and it could be used to refer to the bishop, too. Poor Gandolf, though. That dude could only manage to use Ulpian, after all, not Tully (Cicero) for his epitaph. Man, this bishop sure likes to hate on Gandolf.
- Then it seems like, all of a sudden, the bishop realizes something about his life. He calls his life (a "pilgrimage" is a pretty standard metaphor for the journey one takes through life) "evil and brief" (101).
- Hmm—we wonder if he's on to something here. Let's read on…