Robert Browning

Christmas Eve Robert Browning

"Christmas-Eve" is an account of a vision in which the narrator is taken to a Nonconformist church, to St. Peter's in Rome, to a Göttingen lecture theatre where a practitioner of the Higher criticism is discoursing on the Christian myth, and back to the Nonconformist church. Out of the little chapel I burstInto the fresh night-air again. Five minutes full, I waited firstIn the doorway, to escape the rainThat drove in gusts down the common's centreAt the edge of which the chapel stands, Before I plucked up heart to enter. Heaven knows how many sorts of handsReached past me, groping for the latchOf the inner door that hung on catchMore obstinate the more they fumbled, Till, giving way at last with a scoldOf the crazy hinge, in squeezed or tumbledOne sheep more to the rest in fold, And left me irresolute, standing sentryIn the sheepfold's lath-and-plaster entry, Six feet long by three feet wide, Partitioned off from the vast inside-I blocked up half of it at least. No remedy; the rain kept driving. They eyed me much as some wild beast, That congregation, still arriving, Some of them by the main road, whiteA long way past me into the night, Skirting the common, then diverging; Not a few suddenly emergingFrom the common's self thro' the paling-gaps-They house in the gravel-pits perhaps, Where the road stops short with its safeguard borderOf lamps, as tired of such disorder;-But the most turned in yet more abruptlyFrom a certain squalid knot of alleys, Where the town's bad blood once slept corruptly, Which now the little chapel ralliesAnd leads into day again, -its priestlinessLending itself to hide their beastlinessSo cleverly (thanks in part to the mason), And putting so cheery a whitewashed face onThose neophytes too much in lack of it, That, where you cross the common as I did, And meet the party thus presided,"Mount Zion" with Love-lane at the back of it, They front you as little disconcertedAs, bound for the hills, her fate averted, And her wicked people made to mind him, Lot might have marched with Gomorra