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‘He who is risen from the dead may really be the same,
though we can say nothing intelligible of his ambiguous
eclipse or his phase of half-existence.’

                                         F. H. Bradley: Appearance and Reality

Rising bedraggled from his ambiguous eclipse,
Lazarus was amazed that they should call him dead.
Indeed, to him, surveying the scorched hillside,
the glare of white stone, the pale and stone-like
faces of his friends, it had been, if anything,
more like a dance, though not the sort of dance
he could explain: something wilder, more free,
a huge release, a kind of intoxication.
There were trees there and a sun, a moon too,
of incredible brightness, but everything was
gathered up in a large and single rhythm to which
the stars plunged and bucked like horses,
and the voices of the sea and of the wind sung
through a huge and glittering space as notes
of music scatter from the plucked lyre, fluttering
on golden wings like butterflies, casting
their shadow on the ground. It was a dance
in which all creation rose and sang; the trees
blazed in green flame, the cornfields shimmered
like a woman shaking loose her hair. It was wild,
wild certainly, but everything within it,
from the sun to a tiny acorn, had it’s exact
and necessary place in the order of things;
so that without those small coloured singing birds
or the cups of tiny yellow flowers, no dance
would have been possible because they did not belong.
Everything belonged and partook of it — the cattle
grazing on the hill, the lark ascending on a cloud —: it was
all one; all had been redeemed in his ambiguous eclipse.