Rich Man and Lazarus - in Literature and Poetry

In Literature and Poetry

Chaucer's Summoner observes that "Dives and Lazarus lived differently, and their rewards were different."

In William Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I, Sir John Falstaff alludes to the story while insulting his friend Bardolph about his face, comparing it to a memento mori: "I never see thy face," he says "but I think upon hell-fire and Dives that lived in purple; for there he is in his robes, burning, burning" (III, 3, 30-33).

In his novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville alludes to Lazarus and Dives in Chapter Two as part of a metaphor describing a cold night in New Bedford.

"Now, that Lazarus should lie stranded there on the curbstone before the door of Dives, .." (Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. pp. 11–12. 1786)

References to Dives and Lazarus are a frequent image in socially conscious fiction of the Victorian period. For example:

"workers and masters are separate as Dives and Lazarus" "ay, as separate as Dives and Lazarus, with a great gulf betwixt" (Elizabeth Gaskell; Mary Barton a tale of Manchester life 1848)

"Between them, and a working woman full of faults, there is a deep gulf set." (Charles Dickens; Hard Times 1854)

Although Dickens' A Christmas Carol and The Chimes do not make any direct reference to the story, the introduction to the Oxford edition of the Christmas Books does do so.

Richard Crashaw wrote a metaphysical stanza for his Steps to the Temple in 1646 entitled, "Upon Lazarus His Tears":

Rich Lazarus! richer in those gems, thy tears,
Than Dives in the robes he wears:
He scorns them now, but oh they'll suit full well
With the purple he must wear in hell.

Dives and Lazarus appear in Edith Sitwell's poem "Still falls the Rain" from "The Canticle of the Rose", first published in 1941. It was written after The Blitz on London in 1940. The poem is dark, full of the disillusions of World War II. It speaks of the failure of man, but also of God's continuing involvement in the world through Christ:

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross.
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us—
On Dives and on Lazarus:
Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one.

The poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot contains the lines: 'To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all", in reference to Dives' request to have Beggar Lazarus return from the dead to tell his brothers of his fate.

Benjamin Britten set Sitwell's text to music in his third Canticle in a series of five.