azdak

I hereby offer you the edited (extremely edited) highlights of this poem. To set the scene, since it's so very truncated: Gigadibs, a journalist, is having a kind of "working dinner" with the Catholic Bishop Blougram, in the course of which he demands to know how Blougram can be a Bishop when he doesn't believe in God. Blougram's reply is a flamboyant but lengthy monologue justifying his position, from which I have picked only my absolute favourite sections. The full version can be found here.

No more wine? then we'll push back chairs and talk.
So, you despise me, Mr. Gigadibs.
An unbelieving Pope won't do, you say.
It's like those eerie stories nurses tell,
Of how some actor on a stage played Death,
With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart,
And called himself the monarch of the world;
Then, going in the tire-room afterward,
Because the play was done, to shift himself,
Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly,
The moment he had shut the closet door,
By Death himself. Thus God might touch a Pope
At unawares, ask what his baubles mean,
And whose part he presumed to play just now?
Best be yourself, imperial, plain and true!

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