Lazarus resurrection poem series#

The effect is to make him completely, almost stoically, resigned to God’s will. His sage that bade him “Rise” and he did rise. The reason for this seeming indifference or distraction on the part of Lazarus is the fact that he lives continually in the presence of Jesus:Īnd oft the man’s soul springs into his face In a master’s workshop, loving what they make. Or whether it be little or be much.Īs Browning describes him, Lazarus may be indifferent to what impresses most people, but he is not apathetic:Ĭontrariwise, he loves both old and young,Īnd birds-how say I? flowers of the field. Heaven opened to a soul while yet on earth,Įarth forced on a soul’s use while seeing heaven: In other words, Lazarus, having come to after having been in a coma, was under the delusion that he had died and been miraculously restored to life by Jesus, “a Nazarene physician of his tribe.” Soon, however, Karshish is struck by an extraordinary sensitivity he observes in Lazarus: Of trance prolonged unduly some three days. Karshish begins by accounting for the event in strictly rationalistic terms: Now sharply, now with sorrow,-told the case,.

Led in their friend, obedient as a sheep, Some elders of his tribe, I should premise, In the poem, as in the Gospel, Lazarus himself never speaks, although during the interview he is surrounded by town folk eager to answer Karshish’s queries: Karshish represents the sceptical, scientific mind, interested and intrigued by the story of a man raised from the dead. In the first century Arab medicine, however primitive by modern standards, was much admired and resorted to. Indirect evidence for this view can be found in the Gospel of Luke, which states that “a woman named Martha received Jesus into her house.” It seems, then, to have been a household managed by women, with little Lazarus dependent on his older sisters. 30, which is the date Jesus brought him back to life. That would make him ten years old in A.D.

Lazarus resurrection poem series#

70 as a student of medicine, sending back in a series of letters to his master, Abib, what he has been able to discover, including, e.g., “Three samples of true snakestone-rarer still,/One of the other sort, the melon-shaped.” In the course of his travels he visits Bethany, where he encounters Lazarus, then a man of fifty. We learn from the poem that Karshish is touring the Near East in A.D. How old was Lazarus? Robert Browning, in a poem written in 1855- An Epistle Containing the Strange Medical Experience of Karshish, the Arab Physician-suggests that he would have been about ten years old.