Lazarus

Lazarus is the biblical figure at the center of one of the novel’s most sustained arguments about what can be known of the past. In Randolph Henry Ash’s poem and Christabel LaMotte’s interpretation of it, the story of his return from death cannot be separated from questions of faith, historical testimony, and the imaginative act by which a life becomes real to later readers. Lazarus matters less as a character with a narrated biography than as the point at which those competing ways of knowing converge.

Identity and Biblical Context

Lazarus belongs to the Christian story of resurrection, but the evidence presents him through Ash’s poetic treatment and the correspondence in which Christabel examines that treatment. Ash calls his poem one about Lazarus, and Christabel understands its title as a riddle still awaiting an explanation from him. Her reading centers on the possibility that Lazarus has moved in and out of eternity, seeing ordinary time from a perspective beyond it. The poem’s phrase “from Time to Time” prompts her to imagine a vision that passes between temporal existence and an unchanging continuum.

That interpretation makes the particular details of the poem essential. Christabel points to the goat’s yellow-barred eye and bread on a platter beside fish waiting for the oven: small, material features that, in her reading, carry the miraculous nature of life. Lazarus’s vision does not make the everyday negligible. On the contrary, it seems to apprehend all things as valuable. The contrast is with the poem’s perplexed narrator, to whom the risen man’s gaze may appear indifferent; Christabel suggests that this apparent indifference is instead a vision in which everything has value.

The Poem and Its Competing Readings

Christabel connects the poem to both second sight and the Second Coming. Before attending a séance conducted by Mrs Lees, she took the poem’s second sight more generally as a prefiguration of the awaited return of Christ. After becoming interested in psychic phenomena with her companion and attending local lectures, she considers another possibility: Mrs Lees treats déjà vu as evidence of a circular, inhuman time, an adjacent world in which things exist eternally without change or decay, and second sight as a glimpse into that continuum. Within this account, Lazarus’s repeated movement “from Time to Time” becomes a way of seeing time from eternity.

Her interpretation does not settle whether the poem affirms Christian revelation or makes its truth available as a figure that could belong to many religions. The Roman scribe who tells the tale is, in Christabel’s account, a collector of minor facts whose official and prosaic habits are unsettled by the effect of the Man on the small community of believers. They are willing both to die for him and to live in poverty. The scribe’s puzzlement gives Christabel a way to ask whether the tale records a divine presence or the human need for one. She also sees the women of Lazarus’s household as dramatizing the absence of the loved one: Martha through household decorum, Mary through lost light, and Lazarus through what he sees from moment to moment.

Faith, Doubt, and Historical Truth

Ash replies that his poem was written when he did not question biblical certainties or the faith inherited from earlier generations. He intended it as a reaffirmation of the universal truth of the living presence of Allfather, whatever the name given to that presence, and of resurrection after disaster. In his account, the young poet meant the word whispered to the dead Baldur to be resurrection; the figure of the Norse god could prefigure, or figure, the dead Son of Christianity. Yet Ash recognizes that treating one religious tale as a figure for an eternal truth can make different tales appear equally capable of expressing that truth. The same idea therefore argues both for and against the exclusive truth of one religion.

The question becomes personal when Christabel asks whether the beloved and cruelly absent Son was more than a man. She wonders whether her response to the poem describes living truth or merely the dramatization of faith and need. Ash does not answer by claiming certainty about the historical event. Instead, he acknowledges his uncertainty about whether Lazarus truly rose or whether the story embodies human desire, as Feuerbach proposes. His questions about writing a plausible eyewitness account sharpen the distinction between imaginative reconstruction and falsehood: a poet may give truth life through fiction, or lend persuasive form to an invention.

Lazarus and the Life of Imagination

For Ash, the surest life is the life of imagination. He does not claim that poetry bestows life as Christ did on Lazarus. He compares the poet’s work instead to the biblical Elisha, who lay upon a dead body and breathed life into it, and to the Gospel poet who gave the story its enduring form. Whatever the absolute truth or untruth of the ancient event, Ash argues, poetry can make Lazarus live for as long as a reader’s faith sustains him. The claim shifts the discussion from proof of the miracle to the power and limits of representation.

Christabel’s response is therefore consequential not because it closes the religious question but because it restores Ash’s poem to him as a living problem. Ash says that her reading resuscitates work whose meaning had grown obscure even to its author. Lazarus stands between the life of the historical past, which cannot be fully recovered, and the life poetry can renew in the present. The character’s unresolved status—miraculously raised, interpreted through religious need, or made present by poetic imagination—is the source of the poem’s continuing force.