81
Oh Thou, who Man of baser
Earth didst make,
And ev'n with
Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the
Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd--Man's forgiveness give--and take!
82
As under cover of departing Day
Slunk hunger-stricken
Ramazán away,
Once more within the Potter's house alone
I stood, surrounded by the Shapes of Clay.
83
Shapes of all Sorts and Sizes, great and small,
That stood along the floor and by the wall;
And some loquacious Vessels were; and some
Listen'd perhaps, but never talk'd at all.
84
Said one among them—"Surely not in vain
My substance of the common Earth was ta'en
And to this Figure molded, to be broke,
Or trampled back to shapeless Earth again."
85
Then said a Second—"Ne'er a peevish Boy
Would break the Bowl from which he drank in joy;
And He that with his hand the Vessel made
Will surely not in after Wrath destroy."
86
After a momentary silence spake
Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make;
"They sneer at me for leaning all awry:
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?"
87
Whereat some one of the loquacious Lot--
I think a
Súfi pipkin--waxing hot--
"All this of Pot and Potter--Tell me then,
Who is the Potter, pray, and who the Pot?"
88
"Why," said another, "Some there are who tell
Of one who threatens he will toss to
Hell
The luckless Pots he marr'd in making--Pish!
He's a Good Fellow, and 'twill all be well."
89
"Well," murmured one, "Let whoso make or buy,
My Clay with long Oblivion is gone dry:
But fill me with the old familiar Juice,
Methinks I might recover by and by."
90
So while the Vessels one by one were speaking,
The little
Moon look'd in that all were seeking:
And then they jogg'd each other, "Brother! Brother!
Now for the Porter's shoulder-knot a-creaking!"
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FitzGerald’s notes
87. This Relation of Pot and Potter to Man and his Maker figures far and wide in the Literature of the World, from the time of the
Hebrew Prophets to the present; when it may finally take the name of "Pot
theism," by which Mr.
Carlyle ridiculed
Sterling's "
Pantheism." My
Sheikh, whose knowledge flows in from all quarters, writes to me--
"Apropos of old Omar's Pots, did I ever tell you the sentence I found in '
Bishop Pearson on the Creed'? 'Thus are we wholly at the disposal of His will, and our present and future condition framed and ordered by His free, but wise and just, decrees. Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? (
Rom. ix. 21.) And can that earth-artificer have a freer power over his brother potsherd (both being made of the same metal), than God hath over him, who, by the strange fecundity of His omnipotent power, first made the clay out of nothing, and then him out of that?'"
And again--from a very different quarter--"I had to refer the other day to
Aristophanes, and came by chance on a curious Speaking-pot story in the
Vespae, which I had quite forgotten.
{some text in
Greek}
"The Pot calls a bystander to be a witness to his bad treatment. The woman says, 'If, by
Proserpine, instead of all this 'testifying' (comp.
Cuddie and his mother in '
Old Mortality!') you would buy yourself a rivet, it would show more sense in you!' The
Scholiast explains
echinus as {and here’s some more Greek}."
One more illustration for the oddity's sake from the "
Autobiography of a Cornish Rector," by the late
James Hamley Tregenna.
1871.
"There was one odd Fellow in our Company--he was so like a Figure in the '
Pilgrim's Progress' that Richard always called him the '
ALLEGORY,' with a long white beard--a rare Appendage in those days--and a Face the colour of which seemed to have been baked in, like the Faces one used to see on Earthenware Jugs. In our Country- dialect Earthenware is called 'Clome'; so the Boys of the Village used to shout out after him--'Go back to the Potter, Old Clomeface, and getbaked over again.' For the 'Allegory,' though shrewd enough in most things, had the reputation of being 'saift-baked,' i.e., of weak intellect."
90. At the Close of the Fasting Month, Ramazan (which makes the
Mussulman unhealthy and unamiable), the first Glimpse of the
New Moon (who rules their division of the Year) is looked for with the utmost Anxiety, and hailed with Acclamation. Then it is that the Porter's Knot maybe heard--toward the Cellar. Omar has elsewhere a pretty
Quatrain about the same
Moon--
"Be of Good Cheer--the sullen Month will die, And a young Moon requite us by and by: Look how the Old one meagre, bent, and wan With Age and Fast, is fainting from the Sky!"