Jehu? Not you? Yet do you know that men are cursing you For wanting Naboth’s land; and feasting Naboth To-day, in public, for refusing you? And that our crowns and even our lives are threatened?
No, Queen, I do not know and cannot care. What is the raging of the fools to me Who ponder day and night upon a question, A question that goes down into the bone And burns like fire, till I cannot sleep Or eat or work, for it is always here. No, do not look like that, I am not mad, Not yet; I am not mad. But always night and day This question is about me and within me, Haunting and harsh: the question, “Am I wrong? Are these, my people who oppose my will, Right, after all, righter than I, the King? Righter throughout my twenty years of kingship?”
How can these preys to every passionate flaw Be righter than an upright mind and conscience?
No, I do not know. I wonder, if the blunt and bawdy world Be not the worse for wisdom, not the better.
Is it, my Queen? I wonder if it be. Here have I striven twenty years, for peace With Syria, and for liberty of thought Within our borders, yet with what results? Almost continual war with Syria. Almost a civil war within this land. Such being the fruits, I think the seeds were wrong.
The seeds were right, and if the fruit has failed, Blame the bad soil, the bitter weather, drought, Evil of many men hacking the plant, All things, but you who planted, and the seed.
Even if the seed were right, the ground was wrong. And then I sowed it out of season, lady. I could have smitten Syria to the dust, Yet granted terms. I risked a civil war To grant the terms. They do not keep the terms. And these my people prefer blood to quiet. And now I doubt the usefulness of wisdom, Doubt my whole life; and wonder, if the prophets, The people, and the bloody ways they love, Be not indeed God’s ways for governing. If these things be, then I have failed my country.
O King, you cannot say that things are wrong Because they fail. All good things seem to fail; The road that men make is not straight nor smooth, Nor like the perfect roadway that they planned; And yet among the thorns and broken flint, And twistings where the adder lies in wait, It is a path where no path was before. So with your Syrian pact and with these people, You have hewed out a way where men will tread. Be comforted and proud, for you have done it, As the lone artist makes the perfect thing, With every blind malignant saying “No!” You have made peace as generous as yourself And thought as free. So let the madman rave And let the savage shriek for blood, and let The blind worm of the many-creeping world Crawl its obstruction, you have conquered them.