Jerome in the Morning

 The early morning sun is so bright in my bedroom these days that I have been obliged to wear an eye mask to stand a chance of staying asleep. This gave me the idea for a new morning ritual...
  Facing the bed is a smallish bookshelf containing mostly poetry books (but also my butterfly books, Pevsners and Shell Guides). Each morning I rise with the eye mask still on and grope my way to the bookshelf, where I take a volume at random, open it ditto, and read whatever it falls open at (hoping that it's a poem). This morning I struck lucky when the unseen volume turned out to be Marianne Moore's Selected Poems and it opened at this – 

Leonardo da Vinci's

Saint Jerome and his lion

in that hermitage

of walls half gone,

share sanctuary for a sage--

joint-frame for impassioned ingenious

Jerome versed in language--

and for a lion like one on the skin of which

Hercules' club made no impression.

The beast, received as a guest,

although some monks fled--

with its paw dressed

that a desert thorn had made red--

stayed as guard of the monastery ass . . .

which vanished, having fed

its guard, Jerome assumed. The guest then, like an ass,

was made carry wood and did not resist,

but before long recognized

the ass and consigned

its terrorized

thieves' whole camel-train to chagrined

Saint Jerome. The vindicated beast and

saint somehow became twinned;

and now, since they behaved and also looked alike,

their lionship seems officialized.

Pacific yet passionate--

for if not both, how

could he be great?

Jerome--reduced by what he'd been through--

with tapering waist no matter what he ate,

left us the Vulgate. That in Leo,

the Nile's rise grew food checking famine,

made lion's mouth fountains appropriate,

if not universally,

at least not obscure.

And here, though hardly a summary, astronomy--

or pale paint--makes the golden pair

in Leonardo da Vinci's sketch, seem

sun-dyed. Blaze on, picture,

saint, beast; and Lion Haile Selassie, with household

lions as symbol of sovereignty.

This ekphrastic poem was inspired by Leonardo's unfinished painting of Jerome and his attendant lion. 
This one – 

My own favourite Saint Jerome picture could hardly be more different – Carpaccio's Jerome Leading the Lion into the Monastery, with the monks panicking and fleeing at sight of the remarkably benign-looking lion. This is to be found, with other wonderful Carpaccios, in the Scuola San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice. Ah, Venice...