Emblems Of Love, Part III Virginity And Perfection

JUDITH

I

THE BESIEGED CITY OF BETHULIA

JUDITH (at the window of an upper room of her house).

This pitiable city! - But, O God,

Strengthen me that I bend not into scorn

Of all this desperate folk; for I am weak

With pitying their lamentable souls.

Ah, when I hear the grief wail'd in the streets,

And the same breath their tears nigh strangle, used

To brag the God in them inviolate

And fighting off the hands of the heathen, - Lord,

Pardon me that I come so near to scorn;

Pardon me, soul of mine, that I have loosed

The rigour of my mind and leant towards scorn! -

Friends, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, dead

Of plague, famine, and arrows: and the houses

Battered unsafe by cannonades of stone

Hurled in by the Assyrians: the town-walls

Crumbling out of their masonry into mounds

Of foolish earth, so smitten by the rams:

The hunger-pangs, the thirst like swallowed lime

Forcing them gulp green water maggot-quick

That lurks in corners of dried cisterns: yea,

Murders done for a drink of blood, and flesh

Sodden of infants: and no hope alive

Of rescue from this heat of prisoning anguish

Until Assyrian swords drown it in death; -

These, and abandoned words like these, I hear

Daylong shrill'd and groan'd in the lanes beneath.

What needeth Holofernes more? The Jews,

The People of God, the Jews, lament their fortune;

Their souls are violated by the world;

Jewry is conquered; and the crop of men

Sown for the barns of God, is withered down,

Like feeblest grass flat-trodden by the sun,

In one short season of fear. Yea, swords and fire

Can do no more destruction on this folk:

A fierce untimely mowing now befits

This corn incapable of sacred bread,

This field unprofitable but to flame!

What should the choice of God do for a people,

But give them souls of temper to withstand

The trying of the furnace of the world? -

And they are molten, and from God's device

Unfashion'd, crazed in dismay; yea, God's skill

Fails in them, as the skill a founder put

In brass fails when the coals seize on his work.

For this fierce Holofernes and his power,

This torture poured on the city, is no more

Than a wild gust of wicked heat breathed out

Against our God-wrought souls by the world's furnace.

No new thing, this camp about the city:

Nebuchadnezzar and his hosted men

But fearfully image, like a madman's dream,

The fierce infection of the world, that waits

To soil the clean health of the soul and mix

Stooping decay into its upward nature.

Soul in the world is all besieged: for first

The dangerous body doth desire it;

And many subtle captains of the mind

Secretly wish against its fortune; next,

Circle on circle of lascivious world

Lust round the foreign purity of soul

For chance or violence to ravish it.

But the pure in the world are mastery.

Divinely do I know, when life is clean,

How like a noble shape of golden glass

The passions of the body, powers of the mind,

Chalice the sweet immortal wine of soul,

That, as a purple fragrance dwells in air

From vintage poured, fills the corrupting world

With its own savour. And here I am alone

Sound in my sweetness, incorrupt; the rest

(They noise it unashamed) are stuff gone sour;

The world has meddled with them. They have broacht

The wine that had pleas'd God to flocking thirst

Of flies and wasps, to fears and worldly sorrows.

Nay, they are poured out into the dung of the world,

And drench, pollute, the fortune of their state,

When they should have no fortune but themselves

And the God in them, and be sealed therein.

Ah, my sweet soul, that knoweth its own sweetness,

Where only love may drink, and only - alas! -

The ghost of love. But I am sweet for him,

For him and God, and for my sacred self!

But hark, a troop of new woe comes this way,

Making the street to ring and the stones wet

With cried despair and brackish agony.

CITIZENS lamenting in the street below.

They have crawled back like beasts dying of thirst,

The life all clotted in them. They went out

Soldiers, and back like beaten dogs they came

Breathing in whines, slow maimed four-footed things

On hands and knees degraded, groaning steps.

Their brains were full of battle, they were made

Of virtue, brave men; now in their brains shudder

Minds that cringe like children burnt with fever.

Often they stood to face the enemies' ranks

All upright as a flame in windless air,

Wearing their arm and the bright skill of swords

Like spirits clad in flashing fire of heaven;

And now in darken'd rooms they lie afraid

And whimper if the nurse moves suddenly. -

Ah God, that such an irresistible fiend,

Pain, in the beautiful housing of man's flesh

Should sleep, light as a leopard in its hunger,

Beside the heavenly soul; and at a wound

Leap up to mangle her, the senses' guest! -

That in God's country heathen men should do

This worse than murder on men full of God!

Judith.

What matter of new wailing do your tongues

Wear in this shivering misery of sound?

A Citizen.

The captains which were chosen to go out

And treat with Holofernes have come back.

Judith.

And did the Ninevite demon treat with them?

A Citizen.

The words they had from him were flaying knives,

And burning splinters fixt in their skinless flesh,

And stones thrown till their breasts were broken in.

Judith.

What, torture our embassage?

A Citizen.

Yea, for he means

Nothing but death to all the Jews he takes.

Another.

There was a jeering word tied round the neck

Of each tormented man: "Behold, ye Jews,

These chiefs of yours have learnt to crawl in prayer

Before the god Nebuchadnezzar; come,

Leave your city of thirst and your weak god,

And learn good worship even as these have learnt."

Another.

I saw them coming in: O horrible!

With broken limbs creeping along the ground -

Judith.

Were I a man among you, I would not stay

Behind the walls to weep this insolence;

I'ld take a sword in my hand and God in my mind,

And seek under the friendship of the night

That tent where Holofernes' crimes and hate

Sleep in his devilish brain.

A Citizen.

There is no night

Where Holofernes sleeps, as thou couldst tell.

Didst thou not shut thyself up in thine ease

Away from the noise and tears of common woe.

Come to the walls this evening, and I'll show thee

The golden place of light, the little world

Of triumphing glory framed in midst of the dark,

Pillar'd on four great bonfires fed with spice,

Enclosing in a globe of flame the tent

Wherein the sleepless lusts of Holofernes

Madden themselves all night, a revel-rout

Of naked girls luring him as he lies

Filling his blood with wine, the scented air

Injur'd marvellously with piping shrills

Of lechery made music, and small drums

That with a dancing throb drive his swell'd heart

Into desires beyond the strength of man.

Judith.

And this beast is thine enemy, God!

Another Citizen.

Nor beast,

Nor man, but one of those lascivious gods

Our lonely God detests, Chemosh or Baal

Or Peor who goes whoring among women.

Another.

And now come down braving in God's own land,

Pitching the glory of his fearful heaven

All night among God's hills.

Judith.

You fools, he is

A life our God could snap as a woman snaps

Thread of her sewing.

A Citizen.

Who shall break him off,

Who on the earth, from his huge twisted power?

Another.

For in his brain, as in a burning-glass

Wide glow of sun drawn to a pin of fire,

Are gathered into incredible fierceness all

The rays of the dark heat of heathen strength.

Another.

His eyes, they say, can kill a man.

Another.

And sure

No murder could approach his naming nights.

Another.

Unless it came as a woman at whose beauty

His lust hath never sipt; for into his flesh

To drink unknown desirable limbs as wine

Torments him still, like a thirst when fever pours

A man's life out in drenching sweats.

Judith.

Peace, peace;

The siege hath given you shameless tongues, and minds

No more your own: yea, the foul Ninevite

Hath mastered you already, for your thoughts

Dwell in his wickedness and marvel at it.

Hate not a thing too much, lest you be drawn

Wry from yourselves and close to the thing ye hate.

A Citizen.

We know thy wisdom, Judith; but our lives

Belong to death; and wisdom to a man

Dying, is water in a broken jar.

Judith.

Yea, if thou wilt die of a parching mouth.

A Citizen.

Thou art rich, and thou hast much cool store of wine.

But the town thirsts, and every beat of our blood

Hastens us on to maniac agony.

The Assyrians have our wells, and half the tanks

Are dry, and the pools shoal with baking mud:

The water left to us is pestilent.

And therefore have we asked the governors

For death: and it is granted us.

Another.

Five days

Hath Prince Ozias bidden us endure.

Another.

For there are still fools among us who dare trust

God has not made a bargain of our lives.

Another.

We are a small people, and our war is weak:

Who knows whether our God doth not desire

Armies and great plains full of spears and horses,

And cities made of bronze and hewn white stone

And scarlet awnings, throng'd with sworded men,

To shout his name up from the earth and kill

All crying at the gates of other heavens;

And hath grown tired of peaceable praise and folk

That in a warren of dry mountains dwell,

Whose few throats can make little noise in heaven.

A Young Man.

For sure God's love hath wandered to strange nations;

His pleasure in the breasts of Jerusalem

Is a delight grown old. Yea, he would change

That shepherd-woman of the earthly cities,

Whose mind is as the clear light of her hills,

Full of the sound of a hundred waters falling;

And poureth his desire out, belike,

Upon that queen the wealth of the world hath clad,

Babylon, for whose golden bed the gods

Wrangle like young men with great gifts and boasts;

Whose mind is as a carbuncle of fire,

Full of the sound of amazing flames of music.

Another.

Yea, what can Israel offer against her,

Whom the rich earth out of her mines hath shod,

And crowned with emeralds grown in secret rocks,

Who on her shoulders wears the gleam of the sea's

Purple and pearls, and the flax of Indian ground

Is linen on her limbs cool as moonlight,

And fells of golden beasts cover her throne;

Whose passion moves in her thought as in the air

Melody moves of flutes and silver horns:

What can Jerusalem the hill-city

Offer to keep God's love from Babylon?

Judith.

What but the beauty of holiness, and sound

Of music made by hearts adoring God?

You that speak lewdly of God, you yet shall see

Jerusalem treading upon her foes.

But what was that of five days one of you spoke?

A Citizen.

Ozias sware an oath: hast thou not heard?

Judith.

No, for I keep my mind away from your tongues

Wisely. Who walks in wind-blown dust of streets,

That hath a garden where the roses breathe?

A Citizen.

I have no garden where the roses breathe;

I have a city full of women crying

And babies starving and men weak with thirst

Who fight each other for a dole of water.

Another.

Not only thou hast pleasant garden-hours,

Judith, here in Bethulia; the Lord Death

Has bought the city for his garden-close,

And saunters in it watching the souls bloom

Out of their buds of flesh, and with delight

Smelling their agony.

Another.

But in five days

Either our God will turn his mind to us,

Or, if he careth not for us nor his honour,

Ozias will let open the main gate

And let the Assyrians end our dreadful lives.

Judith.

O I belong to a nation utterly lost!

God! thou hast no tribe on the earth; thy folk

Are helpless in the living places like

The ghosts that grieve in the winds under the earth.

Remember now thy glory among the living,

And let the beauty of thy renown endure

In a firm people knitted like the stone

Of hills, no mischief harms of frost or fire;

But now dust in a gale of fear they are.

They have blasphemed thee; but forgive them, God;

And let my life inhabit to its end

The spirit of a people built to God. -

So you have given God five days to come

And help you? You would make your souls as wares

Merchants hold up to bidders, and say, "God,

Pay us our price of comfort, or we sell

To death for the same coin"? Five days God hath

To find the cost of Jewry, or death buys you?

A Citizen.

Here comes Ozias: ask him.

Judith.

Hold him there.

[JUDITH comes down into the street.]

Ozias.

Judith, I came to speak with thee.

Judith.

And I

Would speak with thee. What tale is this they tell

That thou hast sworn to give this people death?

Ozias.

In five days those among us who still live

Will have no souls but the fierce anguish of thirst.

If God ere then relieves us, well. If not,

We give ourselves away from God to death.

Judith.

Darest thou do this wickedness, and set

Conditions to the mercy of our God?

Ozias.

Death hath a mercy equal unto God's. -

Look at the air above thee; is there sign

Of mercy in that naked splendour of fire?

Too Godlike! We are his: he covers us

With golden flame of air and firmament

Of white-hot gold, marvellous to see.

But whom, what heathen land hated of God,

Do his grey clouds shadow with comfort of rain?

Over our chosen heads his glory glows:

And in five days the torment in his city

Will be beyond imagining. We will go

Through swords into the quiet and cloud of death.

Judith.

Ozias, wilt thou be an infamy?

Bethulia fallen, all Judea lies

Open to the feet and hoofs of Assyria.

Ozias.

Yea, and what doth Judea but cower down

Behind us? There's no rescue comes from there.

We are alone with Holofernes' power.

Judith.

But if we hold him off, will he not grant

The meed of a brave fight, captivity? -

Or we may treat with him, make terms for yielding.

Ozias.

We know his mind: he hath written it plain

In the torn flesh of our ambassadors.

His mind to us is death; we can but choose

Between sharp swords and the slow slaying of thirst.

Judith.

He may torment us if we yield.

Ozias.

He may.

But not to yield is grisly and sure torment.

Judith.

There must be hope, if we could reckon right!

Ozias.

Well, thou and God have five days more to build

A bridge of hope over our broken world.

And, for the town even now fearfully aches

In scalding thirst, not five days had I granted,

Had it not been for somewhat I must say

Secretly to thee.

Judith.

Secretly? Then here;

Send off these men to labour at their groans

Elsewhere; for not within my house thou comest;

I'll have no thoughts against God in my house.

[OZIAS disperses the citizens.]

Ozias.

Judith, we are two upright minds in this

Herd of grovelling cowardice. We should,

To spiritual vision which can see

Stature of spirit, seem to stand in our folk

Like two unaltered stanchions in the heap

Of a house pulled down by fire. I know thy soul

Tempered by trust in God against this ruin;

But not in God, but in mortality

Thy soul stands founded; and death even now

Is digging at thy station in the world;

And as a man with ropes and windlasses

Pulls for new building columns of wreckt halls

Down with a breaking fall, so death has rigged

His skill about us, so he will break us down,

Ruin our height and courage; and as stone,

Carved with the beautiful pride of kings, hath made,

Hammer'd to rubble and ground for mortar, walls

Of farms and byres, our kill'd and broken natures,

With all their beauty of passion, yea, and delight

In God, death will shape and grind up to new

Housing for souls not royal as we are,

New flesh and mind for mean souls and dull hearts:

For death is only life destroying life

To roof the coming swarms in mortal shelter

Of flesh and mind experienced in joy.

Judith.

Thy specious prologue means no good, I trow.

Thou wert to tell me wherefore for five days

We may pretend to be God's people still;

Why thou didst not make us over to death

Soon as the folk began to wail despair.

Ozias.

This reasoning will tell thee why. - No need,

I think, to bring up into speech the years

Since in the barley-field Manasses lay

Shot by the sun. I tried (nor failed, I think),

To hold thy soul up from its hurt, and be

Somewhat of sight to thee, until thy long

Blind season of disaster should be changed.

Always I have found friendship in thine eyes;

And pleasant words, and silences more pleasant,

Have made us moments wherein all the world

Left our sequester'd minds; so that I dared

Often believe our friendliness might be

The brink of love.

Judith.

Stop! for thou hast enough

Disgraced mine ears.

Ozias.

I pray thee hear me out.

The dream of loving thee and being loved

Hath been my life; yea, with it I have kept

My heart drugg'd in a long delicious night

Colour'd with candles of imagined sense,

And musical with dreamt desire. I said,

The day will surely come upon the world,

To scatter this sweet night of fantasy

With morning, pour'd on my dream-feasted heart

Out of thine eyes, Judith. And yet I still

Feared for my dream, even as a maiden fears

The body of her lover. But, in the midst

Of all this charm'd delaying, - behold Death

Leapt into our world, lording it, standing huge

In front of the future, looking at us!

Thou seest now why, when the people came

Crying wildly to be given up to death,

I bade them wait five days? - That I at last

Might stamp the image of my glorious dream

Upon the world, even though it be wax

And the fires are kindling that must melt it out.

Judith, thou hast now five days more to live

This life of beautiful passion and sweet sense:

And now my love comes to thee like an angel

To call thee out of thy visionary love

For lost Manasses, out of ghostly desire

And shadows of dreams housing thy soul, that are

Vainer than mine were, dreams of dear things which death

Hath for ever broken; and lead thy life

To a brief shadowless place, into an hour

Made splendid to affront the coming night

By passion over sense more grandly burning

Than purple lightning over golden corn,

When all the distance of the night resounds

With the approach of wind and terrible rain,

That march to torment it down to the ground.

Judith, shall we not thus together make

Death admirable, yea, and triumph through

The gates of anguish with a prouder song

Than ever lifted a king's heart, who rode

Back from his war, with nations whipt before him,

Into trumpeting Nineveh?

Judith.

Thou fool,

Death is nothing to me, and life is all.

But what foul wrong have I done to thee, Ozias,

That thou shouldst go about to put such wrong

Into my life as these defiling words?

Ozias.

Is it defilement to hear love spoken?

Judith.

Yes! thou hast soiled me: to know my beauty,

Wherewith I loved Manasses, and still love,

Has all these years dwelt in thy heart a dream

Of favourite lust, - O this is foul in my mind.

Ozias.

I meant not what thou callest lust, but love.

Judith.

What matters that? Thou hast desired me.

And knowing that, I feel my beauty clutch

About my soul with a more wicked shame

Than if I lived corrupt with leprosy.

Ozias.

Wilt thou still let the dead have claim on thee?

Judith, wilt thou be married to a grave?

Judith.

I am married to my love; and it is vile,

Yea, it is burning in me like a sin,

That when my love was absent, thy desire

Shouldst trespass where my love is single lord.

Ozias.

This is but superstition. Love belongs

To living souls. It is a light that kills

Shadows and ghosts haunting about the mind.

Yea, even now when death glooms so immense

Over the heaven of our being, Love

Would keep us white with day amid the dark

Down-coming of the storm, till the end took us.

And joy is never wasted. If we love,

Then although death shall break and bray our flesh,

The joy of love that thrilled in it shall fly

Past his destruction, subtle as fragrance, strong

And uncontrollable as fire, to dwell

In the careering onward of man's life,

Increasing it with passion and with sweetness.

Duty is on us therefore that we love

And be loved. Wert thou made to set alight

Such splendour of desire in man, and yet,

For a grave's sake, keep all thy beauty null,

And nothing be of good nor help to thy kind?

Judith.

Help? What help in me?

Ozias.

To let go forth

The joy whereof thy beauty is the sign

Into the mind of man, and be therein

Courage of golden music and loud light

Against his enemies, the eternal dark

And silence.

Judith.

Ah, not thus. Yet - could I not help? -

Why talk we? What thing should I say to thee

To pierce the pride of lust wrapping thy heart?

How show thee that, as in maidens unloved

There is virginity to make their sex

Shrink like a wound from eyes of love untimely,

So in a woman who hath learnt herself

By her own beauty sacred in the clasp

Of him whom her desire hath sacred made,

There is a fiercer and more virgin wrath

Against all eyes that come desiring her?

[A Psalm of many voices strikes their ears, and through the street pass old men chanting, followed and answered by a troop of young men.]

Chorus: Old Men.

Wilt thou not examine our hearts, O Lord God of our strength?

Wilt thou still be blindly trying us? Wilt thou not at length

Believe the crying of our words, that never our knees have bent

To foreign gods, nor any Jewish mouth or brain hath sent

Prayers to beseech the favour of abominable thrones

Worshipt by the heathen men with furnaces, wounds, and groans?

Young Men.

And what good in our lives, strength or delighted glee,

Hath God paid to purchase our purity?

Though lust starve in our flesh, still he devises fire

To prove our lives pure as his fierce desire.

With huge heathenish tribes roaring exultant here,

Jewry fights as maid with a ravisher:

Tribes who better than we deal with the gods their lords,

For they pleasantly sin, yet the gods sharpen and drive their swords.

Old Men.

Hast thou not tried us enough, Jehovah? Hast thou found any fire

Will draw from our hearts a smoke of burn'd idolatrous desire?

There is none in us, Lord: no other God in us but thee;

Only thy fires make our clean souls glitter with agony.

Pure we are, pure in our prayers, pure our souls look to thee, Lord;

And to be shewn to the world devoured by evil is our reward.

Young Men.

We whose hearts were alone giving our God renown,

Under the wheels of hell we are fallen down!

False the heaven we built, fashion'd of purity;

'Tis heathen heavens, made out of sin, stand high.

Come, make much of our God! Comfort his ears with song,

Lest his pride the gods with their laughter wrong,

Seeing, huddled as beasts held by a fearful night

Full of lions and hunger, his folk crouch to the heathen might.

Old Men.

Jehovah, still we refrain from crying to the infamous gates

That open easily into the heavens thy mind of jealousy hates.

Power is in them: hast thou no power? Wilt thou not beware

Lest thy mood now press our minds to venturous despair?

Young Men.

Fool'd, fool'd, fool'd are our lives, held by the world in jeer;

With crazed eyes we behold veils of enormous fear

Hiding dreadfully those marvellous gates and stairs

Where the heathen delighted with sin throng with their prosperous prayers.

Old Men.

Yea, hung like the front of pestilent winds, thunderous dark before

The way into the heathen heavens, terrible curtains pour,

Webs of black imagination and woven frenzy of sin;

And yet we know power on earth belongs to those within.

Young Men.

Yea, through Jehovah's jealousy,

Burning dimly at last we see

The great brass made like rigid flame,

The gates of the heavens we dare not name.

Take hold of wickedness! Yea, have heart

To tear the darkness of sin apart;

And find, beyond, our comforted sight

Flash full of a glee of fiery light, -

The gods the heathen know through sin,

The gods who give them the world to win!

Judith.

This may I not escape. My world hath need

Of me who still hold God firm in my mind.

It is no matter if I fail: I must

Send the God in me forth, and yield to him

The shaping of whatever chance befall. -

Ozias! hateful thou hast made thyself

To me; for thou hast hatefully soiled my beauty,

My preciousest, given me to attire my soul

For her long marriage festival of life.

Yet I must make request to thee, and thou

Must grant it. When the sun is down to-night,

Quietly set the main gate open: I

Will pass therethrough and treat with Holofernes.

Ozias.

What, wilt thou go to be murdered by these fiends?

Judith.

Ask nothing, but do simply my request.

Ozias.

I will: so thou shalt know the reverent heart

I have for thee, although its worship thou

So bitterly despisest; but thy will

Shall be a sacred thing for me to serve.

Thou hast thy dangerous demand, because

It is thou who askest, it is I who may

Grant it to thee, - this only! Yea, I will send

Thy heedless body among risks that thou,

Looking alone at the great shining God

Within thy mind, seest not; but I see

And sicken at them. Yet do I not require

Thy purpose; whether thy proud heart must have

The wound of death from steel that has not toucht

The peevish misery these Jews call blood;

Whether thy mind is for velvet slavery

In the desires of some Assyrian lord -

Forgive me, Judith! there my love spoke, made

Foolish with injury; and I should be

Unwise to stay here, lest it break the hold

I have it in. I go, and I am humbled.

But thou shalt have thy asking: the gate is thine.

[He goes.]

Judith.

How can it harm me more, to feel my beauty

Read by man's eyes to mean his lust set forth?

Yea, Holofernes now can bring no shame

Upon me that Ozias hath not brought.

But this is chief: what balance can there be

In my own hurt against a nation's pining?

God hath given me beauty, and I may

Snare with it him whose trap now bites my folk.

There is naught else to think of. Let me go

And set those robes in order which best pleased

Manasses' living eyes; and let me fill

My gown with jewels, such as kindle sight,

And have some stinging sweetness in my hair. -

Manasses, my Manasses, lost to me,

Gone where my love can nothing search, and hidden

Behind the vapours of these worldly years,

The many years between me and thy death;

Thine ears are sealed with immortal blessedness

Against our miserable din of living;

Through thy pure sense goeth no soil of grief.

Forgive me! for thou hast left me here to be hurt

And moved to pity by the dolour of men.

The garment of my soul is splasht with sorrow,

Sorrowful noise and sight; and like to fires

Of venom spat on me, the sorrow eats

Through the thin robe of sense into my soul.

And it is cried against me, this keen anguish,

By my own people and my God's; - and thou

Didst love them. Therefore thou must needs forgive me,

That I devise how this my beauty, this

Sacred to thy long-dead joy of desire,

May turn to weapon in the hand of God;

Such weapon as he hath taken aforetime

To sword whole nations at a stroke to their knees, -

Storms of the air and hilted fire from heaven,

And sightless edge of pestilence hugely swung

Down on the bulk of armies in the night.

Such weapon in God's hand, and wielded so,

A woman's beauty may be now, I pray;

A pestilence suddenly in this foreign blood,

A blight on the vast growth of Assyrian weed,

A knife to the stem of its main root, the heart

Of Holofernes. God! Let me hew him down,

And out of the ground of Israel wither our plague!

II

BEFORE THE TENT OF HOLOFERNES

Holofernes.

Night and her admirable stars again!

And I again envying her and questioning!

What hast thou, Night, achieved, denied to me,

That maketh thee so full of quiet stars?

What beauty has been mingled into thee

So that thy depth burns with the peace of stars? -

I now with fires of uproarious heat,

Exclaiming yellow flames and towering splendour

And a huge fragrant smoke of precious woods,

Must build against thy overlooking, Stars,

And against thy terrible eternal news

Of Beauty that burns quietly and pure,

A lodge of wild extravagant earthly fire;

Even as under passions of fleshly pleasure

I hide myself from my desiring soul.

[Enter Guards with JUDITH.]

Guard 1.

We found this woman wandering in the trenches,

And calling out, "Take me to Holofernes,

Assyrians, I am come for Holofernes."

Guard 2.

She would not, for no words of ours, unveil,

And something held us back from handling her.

Guard 1.

We think she must be beautiful, although

She is so stubborn with that veil of hers.

Guard 2.

We minded my lord's word, that he be shewn

All the seized women which are strangely fair.

Holofernes.

Take off thy veil.

Judith.

I will not.

Holofernes.

Take thy veil

From off thy face, Jewess, or thou straight goest

To entertain my soldiers.

Judith.

I will not.

Holofernes.

Am I to tear it, then?

Judith.

My lord, thou durst not.

Holofernes.

Ha, there is spirit here. I have the whim,

Jewess, almost to believe thee: I dare not!

But tell me who thou art.

Judith.

That shalt thou know

Before the night has end.

Holofernes.

Take off thy veil.

Judith.

Alone for Holofernes am I come.

Holofernes.

And there is only Holofernes here.

These fellows are but thoughts of mine; my whole

Army, that treads down all the earth and breaks

The banks of fending rivers into marsh,

Is nought but my forth-going imagination.

Where I am, there is no man else: if I

Appeared before thee in a throng of spears,

I'ld stand alone before thee, girt about

By powers of my mind made visible.

Judith.

For captured peasants or for captured kings

Such words would have the right big sound. But I

Am woman, and I hear them not: I say

I will not, before any man but thee,

Make known my face; I am only for thee.

When I have thee alone and in thy tent

I will unveil.

Holofernes (to the Guards).

What! Staring? - Hence, you dogs!

III

IN THE TENT OF HOLOFERNES

Holofernes (alone with Judith).

Thou art the woman! Thou hast come to me! -

O not as I thought! not with senses blazing

Far into my deep soul abiding calm

Within their glory of knowledge, as the vast

Of night behind her outward sense of stars.

Now am I but the place thy beauty brightens,

And of myself I have no light of sense

Nor certainty of being: I am made

Empty of all my wont of life before thee,

A vessel where thy splendour may be poured,

After the way the great vessel of air

Accepts the morning power of the sun.

Now nothing I have known of me remains,

Save that, within me, far as the world is high

Beneath this dawn that gilds my spirit's air,

Some depth, more inward even than my soul,

Troubles and flashes like the shining sea.

O Jewish woman, if thou knewest all

The hunger and the tears the punisht world

Suffers by cause of thee, and of my dream

That thou wert somewhere hidden in mankind!

I could not but obey my dream, and toil

To break the nations and to sift them fine,

Pounding them with my warfare into dust,

And searching with my many iron hands

Through their destruction as through crumbs of marl,

Until my palms should know the jewel-stone

Betwixt them, the Woman who is Beauty, -

Nature so long hath like a miser kept

Buried away from me in this heap of Jews!

Now that we twain might meet, women and men

In every land where I have felt for thee

Have taken desolation for their home,

Crying against me, - and against thee unknowing.

Ah, but I had given over to despair

The mind in me, I ground the stubborn tribes,

I quarried them like rocks and broke them small

And ground them down to flinders and to sands;

But never gleamed the jewel-stone therein,

Naught but the common flint of earth I found.

And in a dreary anger I kept on

Assailing the whole kind of man, because

Some manner of war my soul must needs inhabit.

Like a man making himself in drunken sleep

A king, my soul, drunk with its earthly war,

Kept idle all its terrible want of thee,

Believed itself managing arms with God;

Yea, when my trampling hurry through the earth

Made cloudy wind of the light human dust,

I thought myself to move in the dark danger

Of blinding God's own face with blasts of war!

Until my rage forgot his crime against me,

His hiding thee, the beauty I had dreamt.

Yea and I filled my flesh with furious pleasure,

That in the noise of it my soul should hear

No whispering thought of desperate desire.

Nevertheless, I knew well that my heart's

Sightless imagination lifted his face

Continually awake for news of thee.

But 'twas infirm and crazy waking, like

As when a starving sentry, put to guard

The sleep of a broken soldiery that flees

Through winter of wild hills from hounding foes,

Hath but the pain of frozen wounds, and fear

Feeding on his dark spirit, to watch withal.

And lo,

As suddenly, as blessedly thou comest

Now to my heart's unseeing watch for thee,

As out of the night behind him into the heart,

Drugg'd senseless with its ache, of that lost soldier

An arrow leaps, and ere the stab can hurt,

His frozen waking is the ease of death.

So I am killed by thee; all the loud pain

Of pleasure that had lockt my heart in life,

Wherein with blinded and unhearing face

My hope of thee yet stood and strained to look

And listen for thy coming, - all this life

Is killed before thee; yea, like marvellous death,

Spiritual sense invests my heart's desire;

And round the quiet and content thereof,

The striving hunger of my fleshly sense

Fails like a web of hanging cloth in fire. -

Tell me now, if thou knowest, why thou hast come!

Judith.

Sufficeth not for us that I have come? -

Let not unseemly things live in my mouth;

Yet I would praise thee as thou praisest me,

But in a manner that my people use,

Things to approach in song they list not speak.

And song, thou knowest, inwrought with chiming strings,

Sweetens with sweet delay loving desire:

Also thine eyes will feed, and thy heart wonder. -

Balkis was in her marble town,

And shadow over the world came down.

Whiteness of walls, towers and piers,

That all day dazzled eyes to tears,

Turned from being white-golden flame,

And like the deep-sea blue became.

Balkis into her garden went;

Her spirit was in discontent

Like a torch in restless air.

Joylessly she wandered there,

And saw her city's azure white

Lying under the great night,

Beautiful as the memory

Of a worshipping world would be

In the mind of a god, in the hour

When he must kill his outward power;

And, coming to a pool where trees

Grew in double greeneries,

Saw herself, as she went by

The water, walking beautifully,

And saw the stars shine in the glance

Of her eyes, and her own fair countenance

Passing, pale and wonderful,

Across the night that filled the pool.

And cruel was the grief that played

With the queen's spirit; and she said:

"What do I hear, reigning alone?

For to be unloved is to be alone.

There is no man in all my land

Dare my longing understand;

The whole folk like a peasant bows

Lest its look should meet my brows

And be harmed by this beauty of mine.

I burn their brains as I were sign

Of God's beautiful anger sent

To master them with punishment

Of beauty that must pour distress

On hearts grown dark with ugliness.

But it is I am the punisht one.

Is there no man, is there none,

In whom my beauty will but move

The lust of a delighted love;

In whom some spirit of God so thrives

That we may wed our lonely lives?

Is there no man, is there none?" -

She said, "I will go to Solomon."

Holofernes.

I shall not bear it: dreamed, it hath made my life

Fail almost, like a storm broken in heaven

By its internal fire; and now I feel

Love like a dreadful god coming to do

His pleasure on me, to tear me with his joy

And shred my flesh-wove strength with merciless

Utterance through me of inhuman bliss. -

I must have more divinity within me. -

Come to me, slave!    [Calling out to his attendants.]

Judith.

Thou callest someone? Alas!

O, where's my veil? - Cry him to stay awhile! -

Holofernes.

Thou troubled with such whimsy! - But 'tis no one,

A mere sexless thing of mine.

Judith.

He is coming!

I threw my veil - where? - I must bow my face

Close to the ground, or his eyes will find me out;

And - O my lord, hold him back with thy voice!

[She has knelt down.]

Hold him in doubt to enter a moment, while

I loosen my hair into some manner of safety

Against his prying.

Holofernes.

Slave, dost thou hear me? Come! -

I marvel, room for such a paltering mood

Should be within thy mind, now so nearly

Deified with the first sense of my love.

[A Eunuch comes in.]

Holofernes.

Wine! The mightiest wine my sutlers have;

Wine with the sun's own grandeur in it, and all

The wildness of the earth conceiving Spring

From the sun's golden lust: wine for us twain!

And when thou hast brought it, burn anear my bed

Storax and cassia; and let wealth be found

To cover my bed with such strife of colour,

Crimson and tawny and purple-inspired gold,

That eyes beholding it may take therefrom

Splendid imagination of the strife

Of love with love's implacable desire.

Judith (still kneeling).

I must lean on thee now, my God! A weight

Of pitiable weakness thou must bear

And move as it were thine own strength; tell my heart

How not to sicken in abomination,

Show me the way to loathe this vile man's rage,

Now close to seize me into the use of his pleasure,

With the loathing that is terrible delight.

So that not fainting, but refresht and astonisht

And strangely spirited and divinely angry

My body may arise out of its passion,

Out of being enjoyed by this fiend's flesh.

Then man my arm; then let mine own revenge

Utter thy vengeance, Lord, as speech doth meaning;

Yea, with hate empower me to say bravely

The glittering word that even now thy mind

Purposes, God, - the swift stroke of a falchion!

Holofernes.

Woman, beloved, why art thou fixt so long

Kneeling and downward crookt, and in thy hair

Darkened? - Ah, thy shoulders urging shape

Of loveliness into thy hair's pouring gleam!

Judith.

Needs must I pray my Jewish God for help

Against my bridal joys. For I do fear them.

Holofernes.

I also: these are the joys that fear doth own.

IV

At the Gate of Bethulia. On the walls, on either side of

the Gate, are citizens watching the Assyrian camp;

OZIAS also, standing by himself.

Ozias.

When wilt thou cure thyself, spirit of the earth,

When wilt thou cure thyself of thy long fever,

That so insanely doth ferment in thee? -

'Tis not man only: the whole blood of life

Is fever'd with desire. But as the brain,

Being lord of the body, is served by blood

So well that a hidden canker in the flesh

May send, continuous as a usury,

Its breeding venom upward, till in the brain

It vapour into enormity of dreaming:

So man is lord of life upon the earth;

And like a hastening blood his nature wells

Up out of the beasts below him, they the flesh

And he the brain, they serving him with blood;

And blood so loaden with brute lust of being

It steams the conscious leisure of man's thought

With an immense phantasma of desire,

An unsubduable dream of unknown pleasure;

Which he sends hungering forth into the world,

But never satisfied returns to him.

Who hath found beauty? Who hath not desired it?

'Tis but the feverish spirit of earthly life

Working deliriously in man, a dream

Questing the world that throngs upon man's mind

To find therein an image of herself;

And there is nothing answers her entreaty. -

I climb towards death: it is not falling down

For me to die, but up the event of the world

As up a mighty ridge I climb, and look

With lifted vision backward down on life.

So high towards death I am gone, listless I gaze

Where on the earth beneath me, into the fires

Of that Assyrian strength, our siege of fate,

Judith, the dream of my desire of beauty,

Goes daring forth, to shape herself therein,

Seeking to fashion in its turbulence

Some deed that will be likeness of herself.

For now I know her purpose: and I know

She will be murdered there. Against the world

The beauty I have lived in, my loved dream,

Goes, wild to master the world; and she will

Therefore be murdered. It is nothing now;

Wind from the heights of death is on my brow.

Talk among the other watchers.

It must be, God is for us. Such a mind

As this of Judith's could not be, unless

God had spoken it into her. She is

His special voice, to tell the Assyrians

Terrible matters.

Is she God's? I think

'Tis Holofernes hath her now.

If not,

Upon his soldiers he hath lavisht her.

Not he. Now they have known her, his filled senses

Never will leave go our wonderful Judith.

Ay, wonderful in Jewry. But there are

In Babylon women so beautiful,

They make men's spirits desperate, to know

Flesh cannot ever minister enough

Delight to ease the craving they are taskt with.

Who talks of Babylon when God even now

Is training her fierce champion, Holofernes,

Into the death a woman holds before him?

A woman killing Holofernes!

Ay;

Be she abused by him or not, I know

God means to give her marvellous hands to-night.

I know it by my heart so strangely sick

With looking out for the first drowsy stir

In that huge flaming quiet of the camp.

Now fearfuller qualm than famine eagerly

Handles my life and pulls at it, - my faith's

Hunger for being fed with sounds and visions:

The firelight mixt with a trooping bustle of shadows,

The silence suddenly shouting with surprise,

That tells of men astounded out of sleep

To find that God hath dreadfully been among them.

We have mistaken Judith.

Even as now

God is mistaken by your doubting hearts.

She that has dealt with such a pride of spirit

In all her ways of life, so that she seemed

To feel like shadow, falling on the light

Her own mind made, the common thoughts of men;

Ay, she that to-day came down into our woe

And stood among the griefs that buzz upon us,

Like one who is forced aside from a bright journey

To stoop in a small-room'd cottage, where loud flies

Pester the inmates and the windows darken;

This she, this Judith, out of her quiet pride,

And out of her guarded purity, to walk

Where God himself from violent whoredom could

Scarcely preserve her shuddering flesh! and all

For our sake, for the lives she hath in scorn,

This horrible Assyrian risk she ventures.

There should be prayer for that. Let us ask God

To bind the men, whose greed now glares upon her,

In some strange feebleness; surely he will;

Surely not with woman's worst injury

Her noble obedience he will reward!

Let us ask God to bind these men before her.

They are not his to bind: else, were they here?

They are the glorying of Nebuchadnezzar's

Heart of fury against our God, sent here

Like insolent shouting into his holy quiet.

God could not bind these bragging noises up

In Nebuchadnezzar's heart; it is not his,

But made by Babylonian gods or owned

By thrones that hold the heavens over Nineveh.

For all these outland greatnesses, these kings

Whose war goes pealing through the world, these towns

Infidel and triumphant, reaching forth

Armies to hug the world close to their lust, -

What are they but the gods making a scorn

Of our God on the earth? Then how can he

Alter these men from wicked delight? or how

Keep Judith all untoucht among their hands,

When his own quietness he could not keep

Unbroken by the god's Assyrian insult?

But with a thunder he can shatter this

Intruding noise, and make his quiet again.

And in their lust he can entangle them,

Deceiving them far into Judith's beauty,

Which is his power, and lop them from their gods.

Their outrage will be ornament upon her!

Out of the hands of the goblins she will come

Not markt with shame, but wearing their vile usage

Like one whom earthly reign covers with splendour.

The ignominy they thought of shall be turned

To shining, yea, to announcing through the world

How God hath used her to beguile the heathen.

It begins! Now it begins! Lo, how dismay

Is fallen on the camp in a strange wind:

The ground, that seemed as spread with yellow embers,

Leaps into blazing, and like cinders whirled

And scattered up among the flames, are black

Bands of frantic men flickering about!

Ozias! seest thou how our enemies

Are labouring in amazement? How they run

Flinging fuel to light them against fear?

Now they begin to roar their terror: now

They wave and beckon wordless desperate things

One to another.

Hear the iron and brass

Ringing above their voices, as they snatch

The arms that seem to fight among themselves,

Seized by their masters' anguish; dost thou hear

The clumsy terror in the camp, the men

Hasting to arm themselves against our God,

Ozias?

Ozias.

Lions have taken a sentinel.

A Citizen.

Judith hath taken Holofernes.

Judith's voice outside, under the gate.

Yea,

And brought him back with her. Open the gates.

The Citizens.

Open the gates. Bring torches. Wake, ye Jews!

Hail, Judith, marvellously chosen woman!

How bringst thou Holofernes? Show him to us.

Judith.

Dare you indeed behold him?

A Citizen.

Is he bound?

Judith.

Drugged rather, with a medicine that God

Prepared for him and gave into my hands.

Open the gates! It is a harmless thing,

The Holofernes I have made your show;

You may gaze blithely upon him. I have tamed

The man's pernicious brain. Open the gates!

What, are your hands still nerveless? But my hands,

The hands of a woman, have done notable work.

The Gates open. JUDITH appears, standing against

the night and the Assyrian fires. Torches and

shouting in the town.

Citizens.

Judith! Judith alone! Where is thy boast

Of Holofernes captured?

Judith.

I am alone,

Indeed; and you are many; yet with me

Comes Holofernes, certainly a captive.

Ozias.

What trifle is this?

Judith.

Trifle? It is the word.

A trifle, a thing of mere weight, I have brought you

From the Assyrian camp. My apron here

Is loaded now more heavily, but as meanly

As an old witch's skirt, when she comes home

From seeking camel's-dung for kindling; yet

My burden was, an hour ago, the world

Where you were ground to tortures; it was the brain

Inventing your destruction. - Look you now!

[Holding up the head of HOLOFERNES.]

This is the mouth through which commandment came

Of massacre and damnation to the Jews;

Here was the mind the gods that hate our God

Used to empower the agonies they devised

Against us; here your dangers were all made,

Your horrible starvation; and the thirst

Those wicked gods supposed would murder you,

Here a creature became, a ravenous creature;

Yea, here those mighty vigours lived which took,

Like ocean water taking frost, the hate

Those gods have for Jehovah, shaping it

Atrociously into the war that clencht

Their fury about you, frozen into iron.

Jews, here is the head of Holofernes: take it

And let it grin upon our highest wall

Over against the camp of the Assyrians.

[She throws them the head.]

Ay, you may worry it; now is the jackals' time;

Snarl on your enemy, now he is dead.

Ozias.

Judith, be not too scornful of their noise.

There are no words may turn this deed to song:

Praise cannot reach it. Only with such din,

Unmeasured yelling exultation, can

Astonishment speak of it. In me, just now,

Thought was the figure of a god, firm standing,

A dignity like carved Egyptian stone;

Thou like a blow of fire hast splinter'd it;

It is abroad like powder in a wind,

Or like heapt shingle in a furious tide,

Thou having roused the ungovernable waters

My mind is built amidst, a dangerous tower.

My spirit therein dwelling, so overwhelmed

In joy or fear, disturbance without name,

Out of the rivers it is fallen in

Can snatch no substance it may shape to words

Answerable to thy prowess and thy praise.

We are all abasht by thee, and only know

To worship thee with shouts and astounded passion.

Judith.

Yes, now the world has got a voice against me:

At last now it may howl a triumph about me.

Ozias.

This, nevertheless, my thought can seize from out

The wildness that goes pouring past it. God,

Wondrously having moved thee to this deed,

Hath shown the Jews a wondrous favouring love.

Thee it becomes not, standing though thou art

On this high action, to think scorn of men

Whom God thinks worthy of having thee for saviour.

Judith.

This is a subtle flattery. What know I

Of whom God loves, of whom God hates? I know

This only: in my home, in my soul's chamber,

A filthy verminous beast hath made his lair.

I let him in; I let this grim lust in;

Not only did not bolt my doors against

His forcing, but even put them wide and watcht

Him coming in, to make my house his stable.

What though I killed him afterward? All my place,

And all the air I live in, is foul with him.

I killed him? Truly, I am mixt with him;

Death must have me before it hath all him.

Ozias.

In thee, too, are the floods, the wild rivers,

Overrunning thy thought, the nameless mind?

How else, indeed? Nay, we are dull with joy:

Of thee we thought not, out of the hands of outrage

Coming back, although with victory coming.

But this makes surety once more of my thought,

And gives again my reason its lost station;

For it may come now in my privilege

(A thing that could cure madness in my brain)

That thou from me persuasion hast to endure

What well I know thy soul, thy upright soul,

Feels as abominable harness on it

Fastening thee unwillingly to crime, -

The wickedness that hath delighted in thee.

Judith.

Ay? Art thou there already? Tasting, art thou,

What the Assyrians may have forced on me,

Ere thou hast well swallowed thy new freedom?

Indeed, I know this is the wine of the feast

Which I have set for thee and thy Bethulia;

And 'tis the wine makes delicate the banquet.

Ozias.

Wait: listen to me. 'Tis I now must be wise

And thou the hearkener. Not without wound

(So I make out, at least, thy hurrying words)

Comest thou back to us from conquering.

And such a wound, I easily believe,

As eats into thy soul and rages there;

Yea, I that know thee, Judith, know thy soul

Worse rankling hath in it from heathen insult

Than flesh could take from steel bathed in a venom

Art magic brewed over a charcoal fire,

Blown into flame by hissing of whipt lizards.

Yet is it likely, by too much regarding,

Thy hurt is pamper'd in its poisonous sting.

Wounds in the spirit need no surgery

But a mind strong not to insist on them.

See, then, thou hast not too much horror of this;

Who that fights well in battle comes home sound? -

Much less couldst thou, who must, with seeming weakness,

Invite the power of Holofernes forth

Ere striking it, thy womanhood the ambush.

For thou didst plan, I guess, to duel him

In snares, weaving his greed about his limbs,

Drawn out and twisted winding round his strength

By ministry of thy enticing beauty;

That when he thought himself spending on thee

Malicious violence, and thou hadst made him

Languish, stupid with boasting and delight,

Thy hands might find him a tied quiet victim

Under their anger, maiming him of life.

Now, thy device accomplisht, wilt thou grudge

Its means? Wilt thou scruple to understand

Thy abus'd sex will show upon thy fame

A nobler colour of glory than a soldier's

Wounded bravery rusting his habergeon?

Nay, will not the world rejoice, thou being found

Among its women, ready such insolence

To bear as is unbearable to think on,

Thereby to serve and save God and his people?

Judith.

The world rejoice over me? Yea, I am certain.

Ozias.

Then art thou too fastidious. It is weak

To make thyself a shame of being injured;

And is it injury indeed? Nay, is it

Anything but a mere opinion hurt?

Not thou, but customary thought is here

Molested and annoyed; the only nerve

Can carry anguish from this to thy soul,

Is that credulity which ties the mind

Firmly to notional creature as to real.

Advise thee, then; dark in thyself keep hid

This grief; and thou wilt shortly find it dying.

A Citizen.

Judith,

Pardon our ecstasy. 'Tis time thou hadst

Our honour. But first tell us all the event,

That in thy proper height thou with thy deed

May stand against our worship.

Judith.

Why do you stop

Your shouts, and glare upon me? Have you need

Truly to hear my tale? I think, not so.

Ozias here, as he hath whiled at ease

Upon the walls my stay in the camp yonder,

Hath fairly fancied all that I have done,

And more exactly, and with a relishing gust,

All that was done to me. Ask him, therefore;

If he hath not already entertained

Your tedious leisure with my story told

Pat to your liking, enjoyed, and glosst with praise. -

And yet, why ask him? Why go even so far

To hear it? Ask but the clever libidinousness

Dwelling in each of your hearts, and it will surely

Imagine for you how I trained to my arms

Lewd Holofernes, and kept him plied with lust,

Until his wild blood in the end paused fainting,

And he lay twitching, drained of all his wits; -

But there was wine as well working in him,

Feebling his sinews; 'twas not all my doing,

The snoring fit that came before his death,

The routing beastly slumber that was my time.

You know it all! Why ask me for the tale?

Ozias.

Comfort her: praise her. She is strangely ashamed

Of Holofernes having evilly used her.

A Citizen.

We will contrive the triumph of our joy

Into some tune of words, and bring thee on,

Accompanied by singing, to thy house.

Judith.

I pray you, rather let me go alone.

You will do better to be searching out

All sharpen'd steel that may take weapon-use.

The Assyrians are afraid: it is your time.

[They surround JUDITH and go with her.]

CHORUS of Citizens praising JUDITH and

leading her to her house.

Over us and past us go the years;

Like wind that taketh sound from jubilee

And aloud flieth ringing,

Over us goeth the speed of the years,

Like loud noise eternally bringing

The greatness women have done.

Deborah was great; with her singing

She hearten'd the men that the horses had dismayed;

Deborah, the wife of Lapidoth, alone

Stood singing where the men were horribly afraid,

Singing of God in the midst of fear;

When archers out of Hazor were

Eating the land like grasshoppers,

And darkness at noon was plundering the air

Of the light of the sun's insulted fires,

Red darkness covering Sisera's host

As Jewry was covered by the Canaanite's boast:

For the earth was broken into dust beneath

The force of his chariots' thundering tyres,

Nine hundred chariots of iron.

Deborah was great in her prophesying;

But, though her anger moved through the Israelites,

And the loose tribes her indignant crying

Bound into song, fashion'd to an army;

And before the measure of her song went flying,

Like leaves and breakage of the woods

Fallen into pouring floods,

The iron and the men of Sisera and Jabin;

Not by her alone

God's punishment was done

On Canaan intending a monstrous crime,

On the foaming and poison of the serpent in Hazor;

Two women were the power of God that time.

Yea, and sullenly down

Into its hiding town,

Even though the lightning were still in its heart,

The broken dragon, drawing in its fury,

Had croucht to mend its shatter'd malice,

Had lifted its head again and spat against God.

But God its endlessly devising brain,

Its braving spirit, its captain Sisera,

Into the hands of another woman brought:

In nets of her persuasion

She that wild spirit caught,

She fasten'd up that uncontrollable thought.

Sisera spake, and the crops were flames;

Sisera lookt, and blood ran down the door-sills.

But weary, trusting his entertainment,

He came to Jael, the Kenite woman;

A woman who gave him death for a bed,

And with base tools nailed down his murderous head

Fast to the earth his rage had fed

With men unreckonably slain.

But than these wonderfully greater,

Judith, art thou;

The praise of both shall follow like a shadow

After thy glory now,

Who alone the measureless striding,

The high ungovern'd brow,

Of Assur upon the hills of the world

Hast tript and sent him hugely sliding,

Like a shot beast, down from his towering,

By his own lamed

Mightiness hurl'd

To lie a filth in disaster.

Deborah and Jael, famously named,

Like rich lands enriching the city their master,

Bring thee now their most golden honour.

For the beauty of thy limbs was found

By a dreadfuller enemy dreadful as the sound

Of Deborah's singing, though hers was a song

That had for its words thousands of men.

But thou thyself, looking upon them,

Didst weaken the Assyrians mortally.

They thought it terrible to see thee coming;

They falter'd in their impiousness,

Their hearts gave in to thee; they went

Backward before thee and shewed thee the tent

Where Holofernes would have thee in to him,

Yea, for his slayer waiting,

Waiting thee to entertain,

Desiring thee, his death, to enjoy, as Jael

Waited for Sisera her slain.

Judith.

Have done! Do you think I know not why your souls

Are so delighted round me? Do you think

I see not what it is you praise? - not me,

But you yourselves triumphing in me and over me.

A Citizen.

Did we kill Holofernes?

Judith.

No: nor I.

That corpse was not his death. He is alive,

And will be till there is no more a world

Filled with his hidden hunger, waiting for souls

That ford the monstrous waters of the world.

Alive in you is Holofernes now,

But fed and rejoicing; I have filled your hunger.

Yea, and alive in me: my spirit hath been

Enjoyed by the lust of the world, and I am changed

Vilely by the vile thing that clutcht on me,

Like sulphurous smoke eating into silver.

Your song is all of this, this your rejoicing;

You have good right to circle me with song!

You are the world, and you have fed on me.

A Citizen.

We are the world; yes, but the world for ever

Honouring thee.

Judith.

How am I honoured so,

If I no honour have for the world, but rather

Hold it an odious and traitorous thing,

That means no honour but to those whose spirits

Have yielded to its ancient lechery? -

Defiled, defiled!

A Citizen.

Thou wert moved by our grief:

Was that a vile thing?

Judith.

That was the cunning world.

It moved me by your grief to give myself

Into the pleasure of its ravenous love.

A Citizen.

Judith, if thy hot spirit beareth still

Indignant suffering of villainy,

Think, that thou hast no wrong from it. Such things

Are in themselves dead, and have only life

From what lives round them. And around thee glory

Lives and will force its splendour on the harm

Thy purity endured, making it shine

Like diamond in sunlight, as before

Unviolated it could not.

Judith.

Ay, to you

I doubt not I seem admirable now,

Worthy of being sung in loudest praise;

But to myself how seem I?

A Citizen.

Surely as one

Whose charity went down the stairs of hell,

And barter'd with the fiends thy sacredest

For our deliverance.

Judith.

And that you praise! -

I was a virgin spirit. Whence I come

I know not, and I care not whither I go.

One fearful knowledge holds me: that I am

A spirit walking dangerously here.

For the world covets me. I am alone,

And made of something which the world has not,

Unless its substance can devour my spirit.

And it hath devoured me! In Holofernes

It seized me, fed on me; and then gibed on me,

With show of his death scoffing at my rage, -

His death! - He lay there, drunken, glutted with me,

And his bare falchion hung beside the bed, -

Look on it, and look on the blood I made

Go pouring thunder of pleasure through his brain! -

And like a mad thing hitting at the madness

Thronging upon it in a grinning rout,

I my defilement smote, that Holofernes.

But does a maniac kill the frenzy in him,

When with his fists he beats the clambering fiends

That swarm against his limbs? No more did I

Kill my defilement; it was fast within me;

And like a frenzy can go out of me

And dress its hideous motions in my world.

For when I come back here, behold the thing

I murdered in the camp leaps up and yells!

The carrion Holofernes, my defilement,

Dances a triumph round me, roars and rejoices,

Quickened to hundreds of exulting lives.

A Citizen.

God help thee in this wildness! Are we then

As Holofernes to thee?

Judith.

You are naught

But the defilement that is in me now,

Rejoicing to be lodged safely within me.

You are the lust I entertained, rejoicing

To wreak itself upon my purity.

The stratagems of my ravishment you are,

Rejoicing that the will you serve has dealt

Its power on me. O, I hate you not.

You and your crying grief should have blown past

My heart like wind shaking a fasten'd casement.

But I must have you in. Myself I loathe

For opening to you, and thereby opening

To the demon which had set you on to whine

Pitiably in the porches of my spirit.

You are but noise; but he is the lust of the world,

The infinite wrong the spirit, the virgin spirit,

Must fasten against, or be for ever vile.

A Citizen.

But is it naught that we, the folk of God,

Are safe by thee?

Judith.

God hath his own devices.

But I would be God's helper! I would be

Known as the woman whom his strength had chosen

To ruin the Assyrians! - O my God,

How dreadfully thou punishest small sins!

If it is thou who punishest; but rather

It is that, when we slacken in perceiving

The world's intent towards us, and fatally,

Enticed out of suspicion by fair signs,

Go from ignoring its proposals, down

To parley, - thou our weakness dost permit.

In all my days I from the greed of the world

Virginal have kept my spirit's dwelling, -

Till now; yea, all my being I have maintained

Sacredly my own possession; for love

But made more beautiful and more divine

My spirit's ownership. And yet no warning,

When I infatuate went down to be

Procuress of myself to the world's desire,

Did God blaze on my blindness, no rebuke.

Therefore I am no more my virgin own,

But hatefully, unspeakably, the world's.

To these now I belong; they took me and used me.

I have no pride to live for; and why else

Should one stay living, if not joyfully proud?

For I have yielded now; mercilessly

What is makes foolish nothing of what was.

To know the world, for all its grasping hands,

For all its heat to utter its pent nature

Into the souls that must go faring through it,

Availing nothing against purity,

Made always like rebellion trodden under, -

By this was life a noble labour. Now

I have been persuaded into the world's pleasure:

And now at last I will all certainly

Contrive for myself the death of Holofernes.

[OZIAS comes behind her and catches the lifted falchion.]

Judith.

It was well done, Ozias.

Ozias.

I have watcht

Thy anguish growing, and I lookt for this.

Judith.

Thou knowest me better than I know myself.

What moves in me is strange and uncontrolled,

That once I thought was ruled: thou knew'st me better. -

Indeed thou must forgive me; what was I

To take so bitterly thy suit? What right

Had I to give thee anger, when thou wouldst

Brighten thy hopeless death with me enjoyed,

I, even from that anger, going to be

Holofernes' pleasure? - Thou knewest me better,

And therefore shalt forgive me. Ay, no doubt

My spirit answered thee so fiercely then

Because it felt thee reading me aright,

How a mere bragging was my purity.

But now to pardon askt, I must add thanks. -

I had forgot Manasses! Even love

Was driven forth of me by these loud mouths!

Whether in death he waits for me, I know not;

But it had been an unforgivable thing

To have made this the end; not to have gone

To death as unto spousals, leaving life

As one sets down a work faithfully done,

And knows oneself by service justified,

Worthy of love, whether love be or not.

But, soiled with detestation, to have thrown

Fiercely aside the garment of this light;

Proved at the last impatient, death desiring

Like a mere doffing of foul drench'd clothes;

Release from the wicked hindering mire of sorrow;

A comfortable darkness hiding me

Out of the glowing world myself have made

An insult, domineering me with splendour; -

O such a death had turned, past all forgiving,

My insult to Manasses, and searcht him out,

Even where he is quiet, with the blaze,

Ranging like din, of this contempt, this triumph.

Not crying out such hateful news should I

Flee hunted into death, unto my love.

From this, Ozias, thou hast saved me. Now

I am to learn my shame, that not amazed,

But practised in my burden, I at last,

When my time comes, may all in gladness fare

The road made sacred by Manasses' feet.

[JUDITH goes into her house.]

Ozias (addressing the citizens).

You do well to be stricken silent here.

Terrible Holofernes slain by a woman

Was something wonderful, to be noised aloud;

But this is a wonder past applauding thought,

This grief darkening Judith, in the midst

Of the new shining glory she herself

Has brought to conquer in our skies the storm.

You do well to be dumb: for you have seen

Virginity. That spirit you have seen,

Seen made wrathfully plain that secret spirit,

Whereby is man's frail scabbard filled with steel.

This, cumbered in the earthen kind of man,

Which ceaseless waters would be wearing down,

Alone giveth him stubborn substance, holds him

Upright and hard against impious fate.

All things within it would the world possess,

And have them in the tide of its desire:

Man hath his nature of the vehement world;

He is a torrent like the stars and beasts

Flowing to answer the fierce world's desire.

But like a giant wading in the sea

Stands in the rapture, and refusing it,

And looking upward out of it to find

Who knows what sign? - spirit, virginity;

A power caught by the power of the world;

The spirit in whose unknown hope doth man

Deny the mastery of his fortune here;

Virginity, whose pride, impassion'd only

To be as she herself would be, nor thence

To loosen for the world's endeavouring,

And, though all give the rash obedience, stand

Her own possession, - this virginity,

This pride of the spirit, asking no reward

But to be pride unthrown, this is the force

Whereby man hath his courage in the strange

Fearful turmoil of being conscious man.

Yea, worshipping this spirit, he will at last

Grow into high divine imagination,

Wherein the envious wildness of the world

Yieldeth its striving up to him, and takes

His mind, building the endless stars like stone

To house his towering joy of self-possessing.

This made you dumb; ignorant knowledge of this,

Blind vision of virginity's mightiness,

Did chide the exclamation in your hearts.

And think not you have seen, in Judith's grief,

Virginity drown'd in the pouring world.

For what is done is naught; what is, is all:

And Judith is virginity's appointed.

Even by her injury she showeth us,

As fire by violence may be revealed,

How sovereign is virginity. -

But let us now consult what way her grief,

Which is not to be understood by us,

May spend itself, with naught to urge its power.

Let us within our walls keep close this tale,

Close as the famine and the thirst were kept

Devouring us by the Assyrians.

Let there be no news going through the land

Out of Bethulia but this: that we

At Judith's hands had our deliverance,

But she from Holofernes and his crew

Unwilling and astonisht reverence,

As they were men with minds opprest by God.

THE ETERNAL WEDDING

He.

Even as a wind that hasteth round the world

From out cold hours fill'd with shadow of earth,

To pour alight against the risen sun;

So unto thee adoring, out of its shadow

Floweth my spirit, into the light of thee

Which Beauty is, and Joy. From my own fate,

From out the darkness wherein long I fared

Worshipping stars and morsels of the light,

Through doors of golden morning now I pass

Into the great whole light and perfect day

Of shining Beauty, open to me at last.

Yea, into thee now do I pass, beloved:

Beauty and thou are mine!

She.

And I am thine!

I am desirable to my desire:

Thence am I clean as immortality

With Beauty and Joy, the fiery power of Beauty.

He.

And by my spirit made marvellous here by thee,

Poured out all clear into the gold of thee,

Not myself only do I know; I have

Golden within me the whole fate of man:

That every flesh and soul belongs to one

Continual joyward ravishment, whose end

Is here, in this perfection. Now I know -

For all my speculation soareth up,

A bird taking eternity for air, -

Now being mixt with thee, in the burning midst

Of Beauty for my sense and mind and soul, -

That life hath highest gone which hath most joy.

For like great wings forcefully smiting air

And driving it along in rushing rivers,

Desire of joy beats mightily pulsing forward

The world's one nature, and all the loose lives therein,

Carried and greatly streaming on a gale

Of craving, swept fiercely along in beauty; -

Like a great weather of wind and shining sun,

When the airs pick up whole huge waves of sea,

Crumble them in their grasp and high aloft

Sow them glittering, a white watery dust,

To company with light: so we are driven

Onward and upward in a wind of beauty,

Until man's race be wielded by its joy

Into some high incomparable day,

Where perfectly delight may know itself, -

No longer need a strife to know itself,

Only by its prevailing over pain.

She.

Beloved, but no pain may strive with us.

He.

No, for we are flown far ahead of life:

The feet of our Spirit have wonderfully trod

The dangers of the rushing fate of life,

As summer-searching birds tread with their wings

Mountainous surges in the air. But many,

Not strongly fledge to ride the world's great rapture,

Must break, down fallen into steep confusion,

Where we climb easily and tower with joy.

Nevertheless doth life foretell in us

How it shall all make seizure at the last

Upon this height of ecstasy, this fort

Life like an army storms: Captains we are

In the great assault; and where we stand alone

Within these hours, built like establisht flames

Round us, at long last all man's life shall stand

At peace with joy, wearing delighted sense

As meadows wear their golden pleasure of flowers.

Certain my heart dwells in these builded hours,

That there is no more beauty beyond thee.

Thou art my utter beauty; and - behold

The marvel, God in Heaven! - I am thine.

Therefore we know, in this height-guarded place

Whereto the speed of our desire hath brought us;

Here in this safety crowning, like a fort

Built upon topmost peaks, the height of beauty, -

We know to be glad of life as we were gods

Timelessly glad of deity; yea, to enjoy

Fleshly, spiritual Being till the swift

Torrent of glee (as hurled star-dust can change

Dim earthly weather to a moment like the sun,)

Doth startle life to self-adoring godhead, -

Divine body of Power and divine

Burning soul of Light and self-desire.

And having given ourselves all to amazement,

We are made like a prophesying song

Of life all joy, a bride in the arms of God. -

Yea, God shall marry his people at the last;

And every man and woman who has sworn

That only joy can make this Being sacred,

Weaves at the wedding-garment.

She.

Ah, my beloved,

Feelest thou too that out of earth and time

We are transgressing into Heavenly hours?

Or, threading the dark worldly multitude

And making lightning of its path, there comes

A zeal from God posting along our lives.

He.

For some eternal pulse hath chosen us,

Some divine anger beats within our hearts.

She.

Anger? But how far off is love from anger!

He.

Nay, both belong to joy; joy's kind is twain.

And close as in the pouring of sun-flame

Are mingled glory of light and fury of heat,

Joy utters its twin radiance, love and anger;

If joy be not indeed all sacred wrath

With circumstance; indignant memory

Of what hath been, when the new lusts of God

Exulted unimaginably, before

Rigours of law fastened like creeping habit

Upon their measureless wont, and forced them drive

Their ranging music of delighted being

Through the fixt beating tune of a circling world. -

Is not love so? Amazement of an anger

Against created shape and narrowness?

The bound rage of the uncreated Spirit

Whose striving doth impassion us and the world?

A wrath that thou and I are not one being?

She.

Yes, and not only words that thou and I

Out of our sexes with a flame's escape

Are fashioned into one. The Spirit in us

Hath, like imagination in a prison,

Kindled itself free of all boundary,

So that it hath no room but its own joy,

Ample as at the first, before it fell

Into this burthenous habit of a world.

What have we now to do with the world? We are

Made one unworldly thing; we are past the world;

Yea, and unmade: we are immortality.

He.

And only fools abominably crazed,

Those who will set imagination down

As less in truth than their dim sensual wit,

Dare doubt that, while these dreams of ours, these bodies,

Still quiver in the world each with its own

Delight, the great divine wrath of our love

Hath stricken off from us the place of the world!

Yea, as we walk in spiritual freedom

Upright before the shining face of God,

Behold, as it were the shadow of our stature

Thrown by that light, we draw the world behind us, -

That world wherein, darkly I remember,

We thought we were as twain.

She.

Yet, since God means

That love should sunder our fixt separateness

And make our married spirits leap together,

As lightning out of the clouds of sexual flesh,

Into one sexless undivided joy;

Why hath he made us a divided flesh?

We being single ecstasy, now as strange

As if a shadow stained where no one stood

The ground in the noon-glare, seemeth to me

The long blind time wherein our lives and the world

Lay stretcht out dark upon the light of heaven,

Like shadow of some bulk that took the glory;

While yet there stood not over it, to shade

The splendour from it, our heaven-fronting love,

This great new soul that our two souls have kindled.

Yea, and how like, that in the world's chance-medley

This our exulting destiny had been slain,

Though here it lords the world as a man his shadow!

He.

But the world is not chance, except to those

Most feeble in desire: who needeth aught

Shall have it, if he fill his soul with the need.

While still our ignorant lives were drowned beneath

The flooding of the earthly fate, and chance

Seemed pouring mightily dark and loud between us,

Unspeakable news oft visited our hearts:

We knew each other by desire; yea, spake

Out of the strength of darkness flowing o'er us,

Across the hindering outcry of the world

One to another sweet desirable things.

Until at last we took such heavenly lust

Of those unheard messages into our lives,

We were made abler than the worldly fate.

We held its random enmity as frost

The storming Northern seas, and fastened it

In likeness of our love's imagining;

Or as a captain with his courage holds

The mutinous blood of an army aghast with fear,

And maketh it unwillingly dare his purpose,

Our lust of love struck its commandment deep

Into the froward turbulence of world

That parted us. Suddenly the dark noise

Cleft and went backward from us, and we stood

Knowing each other in a quiet light;

And like wise music made of many strings

Following and adoring underneath

Prevailing song, fate lived beneath our love,

Under the masterful excellent silence of it,

A multitudinous obedience.

She.

Yea, but not this my marvel: not that we

Should master with desire the sundering world,

We who bore in our hearts such destiny,

There was no force knew to be dangerous

Against it, but must turn its malice clean

Into obsequious favour worshipping us.

Rather hath this astonisht me, that we

Have not for ever lived in this high hour.

Only to be twin elements of joy

In this extravagance of Being, Love,

Were our divided natures shaped in twain;

And to this hour the whole world must consent.

Is it not very marvellous, our lives

Can only come to this out of a long

Strange sundering, with the years of the world between us?

He.

Shall life do more than God? for hath not God

Striven with himself, when into known delight

His unaccomplisht joy he would put forth, -

This mystery of a world sign of his striving?

Else wherefore this, a thing to break the mind

With labouring in the wonder of it, that here

Being - the world and we - is suffered to be! -

But, lying on thy breast one notable day,

Sudden exceeding agony of love

Made my mind a trance of infinite knowledge.

I was not: yet I saw the will of God

As light unfashion'd, unendurable flame,

Interminable, not to be supposed;

And there was no more creature except light, -

The dreadful burning of the lonely God's

Unutter'd joy. And then, past telling, came

Shuddering and division in the light:

Therein, like trembling, was desire to know

Its own perfect beauty; and it became

A cloven fire, a double flaming, each

Adorable to each; against itself

Waging a burning love, which was the world; -

A moment satisfied in that love-strife

I knew the world! - And when I fell from there,

Then knew I also what this life would do

In being twain, - in being man and woman!

For it would do even as its endless Master,

Making the world, had done; yea, with itself

Would strive, and for the strife would into sex

Be cloven, double burning, made thereby

Desirable to itself. Contriv'd joy

Is sex in life; and by no other thing

Than by a perfect sundering, could life

Change the dark stream of unappointed joy

To perfect praise of itself, the glee that loves

And worships its own Being. This is ours!

Yet only for that we have been so long

Sundered desire: thence is our life all praise. -

But we, well knowing by our strength of joy

There is no sundering more, how far we love

From those sad lives that know a half-love only,

Alone thereby knowing themselves for ever

Sealed in division of love, and therefore made

To pour their strength out always into their love's

Fierceness, as green wood bleeds its hissing sap

Into red heat of a fire! Not so do we:

The cloven anger, life, hath left to wage

Its flame against itself, here turned to one

Self-adoration. - Ah, what comes of this?

The joy falters a moment, with closed wings

Wearying in its upward journey, ere

Again it goes on high, bearing its song,

Its delight breathing and its vigour beating

The highest height of the air above the world.

She.

What hast thou done to me! - I would have soul,

Before I knew thee, Love, a captive held

By flesh. Now, inly delighted with desire,

My body knows itself to be nought else

But thy heart's worship of me; and my soul

Therein is sunlight held by warm gold air.

Nay, all my body is become a song

Upon the breath of spirit, a love-song.

He.

And mine is all like one rapt faculty,

As it were listening to the love in thee,

My whole mortality trembling to take

Thy body like heard singing of thy spirit.

She.

Surely by this, Beloved, we must know

Our love is perfect here, - that not as holds

The common dullard thought, we are things lost

In an amazement that is all unware;

But wonderfully knowing what we are!

Lo, now that body is the song whereof

Spirit is mood, knoweth not our delight?

Knoweth not beautifully now our love,

That Life, here to this festival bid come

Clad in his splendour of worldly day and night,

Filled and empower'd by heavenly lust, is all

The glad imagination of the Spirit?

He.

Were it not so, Love could not be at all:

Nought could be, but a yearning to fulfil

Desire of beauty, by vain reaching forth

Of sense to hold and understand the vision

Made by impassion'd body, - vision of thee!

But music mixt with music are, in love,

Bodily senses; and as flame hath light,

Spirit this nature hath imagined round it,

No way concealed therein, when love comes near,

Nor in the perfect wedding of desires

Suffering any hindrance.

She.

Ah, but now,

Now am I given love's eternal secret!

Yea, thou and I who speak, are but the joy

Of our for ever mated spirits; but now

The wisdom of my gladness even through Spirit

Looks, divinely elate. Who hath for joy

Our Spirits? Who hath imagined them

Round him in fashion'd radiance of desire,

As into light of these exulting bodies

Flaming Spirit is uttered?

He.

Yea, here the end

Of love's astonishment! Now know we Spirit,

And Who, for ease of joy, contriveth Spirit.

Now all life's loveliness and power we have

Dissolved in this one moment, and our burning

Carries all shining upward, till in us

Life is not life, but the desire of God,

Himself desiring and himself accepting.

Now what was prophecy in us is made

Fulfilment: we are the hour and we are the joy,

We in our marvellousness of single knowledge,

Of Spirit breaking down the room of fate

And drawing into his light the greeting fire

Of God, - God known in ecstasy of love

Wedding himself to utterance of himself.

MARRIAGE SONG

I

Come up, dear chosen morning, come,

Blessing the air with light,

And bid the sky repent of being dark:

Let all the spaces round the world be white,

And give the earth her green again.

Into new hours of beautiful delight,

Out of the shadow where she has lain,

Bring the earth awake for glee,

Shining with dews as fresh and clear

As my beloved's voice upon the air.

For now, O morning chosen of all days, on thee

A wondrous duty lies:

There was an evening that did loveliness foretell;

Thence upon thee, O chosen morn, it fell

To fashion into perfect destiny

The radiant prophecy.

For in an evening of young moon, that went

Filling the moist air with a rosy fire,

I and my beloved knew our love;

And knew that thou, O morning, wouldst arise

To give us knowledge of achieved desire.

For, standing stricken with astonishment,

Half terrified in the delight,

Even as the moon did into clear air move

And made a golden light,

Lo there, croucht up against it, a dark hill,

A monstrous back of earth, a spine

Of hunch'd rock, furred with great growth of pine,

Lay like a beast, snout in its paws, asleep;

Yet in its sleeping seemed it miserable,

As though strong fear must always keep

Hold of its heart, and drive its blood in dream.

Yea, for to our new love, did it not seem,

That dark and quiet length of hill,

The sleeping grief of the world? - Out of it we

Had like imaginations stept to be

Beauty and golden wonder; and for the lovely fear

Of coming perfect joy, had changed

The terror that dreamt there!

And now the golden moon had turned

To shining white, white as our souls that burned

With vision of our prophecy assured:

Suddenly white was the moon; but she

At once did on a woven modesty

Of cloud, and soon went in obscured:

And we were dark, and vanisht that strange hill.

But yet it was not long before

There opened in the sky a narrow door,

Made with pearl lintel and pearl sill;

And the earth's night seem'd pressing there, -

All as a beggar on some festival would peer, -

To gaze into a room of light beyond,

The hidden silver splendour of the moon.

Yea, and we also, we

Long gazed wistfully

Towards thee, O morning, come at last,

And towards the light that thou wilt pour upon us soon!

II

O soul who still art strange to sense,

Who often against beauty wouldst complain,

Doubting between joy and pain:

If like the startling touch of something keen

Against thee, it hath been

To follow from an upland height

The swift sun hunting rain

Across the April meadows of a plain,

Until the fields would flash into the air

Their joyous green, like emeralds alight;

Or when in the blue of night's mid-noon

The burning naked moon

Draws to a brink of cloudy weather near,

A breadth of snow, firm and soft as a wing,

Stretcht out over a wind that gently goes, -

Through the white sleep of snowy cloud there grows

An azure-border'd shining ring,

The gleaming dream of the approaching joy of her; -

What now wilt thou do, Soul? What now,

If with such things as these troubled thou wert?

How wilt thou now endure, or how

Not now be strangely hurt? -

When utter beauty must come closer to thee

Than even anger or fear could be;

When thou, like metal in a kiln, must lie

Seized by beauty's mightily able flame;

Enjoyed by beauty as by the ruthless glee

Of an unescapable power;

Obeying beauty as air obeys a cry;

Yea, one thing made of beauty and thee,

As steel and a white heat are made the same!

- Ah, but I know how this infirmity

Will fail and be not, no, not memory,

When I begin the marvellous hour.

This only is my heart's strain'd eagerness,

Long waiting for its bliss. -

But from those other fears, from those

That keep to Love so close,

From fears that are the shadow of delight,

Hide me, O joys; make them unknown to-night!

III

Thou bright God that in dream earnest to me last night,

Thou with the flesh made of a golden light,

Knew I not thee, thee and thy heart,

Knew I not well, God, who thou wert?

Yea, and my soul divinely understood

The light that was beneath thee a ground,

The golden light that cover'd thee round,

Turning my sleep to a fiery morn,

Was as a heavenly oath there sworn

Promising me an immortal good:

Well I knew thee, God of Marriages, thee and thy flame!

Ah, but wherefore beside thee came

That fearful sight of another mood?

Why in thy light, to thy hand chained,

Towards me its bondage terribly strained,

Why came with thee that dreadful hound,

The wild hound Fear, black, ravenous and gaunt?

Why him with thee should thy dear light surround?

Why broughtest thou that beast to haunt

The blissful footsteps of my golden dream? -

All shadowy black the body dread,

All frenzied fire the head, -

The hunger of its mouth a hollow crimson flame,

The hatred in its eyes a blaze

Fierce and green, stabbing the ruddy glaze,

And sharp white jetting fire the teeth snarl'd at me,

And white the dribbling rage of froth, -

A throat that gaped to bay and paws working violently,

Yet soundless all as a winging moth;

Tugging towards me, famishing for my heart; -

Even while thou, O golden god, wert still

Looking the beautiful kindness of thy will

Into my soul, even then must I be,

With thy bright promise looking at me,

Then bitterly of that hound afraid? -

Darkness, I know, attendeth bright,

And light comes not but shadow comes:

And heart must know, if it know thy light,

Thy wild hound Fear, the shadow of love's delight.

Yea, is it thus? Are we so made

Of death and darkness, that even thou,

O golden God of the joys of love,

Thy mind to us canst only prove,

The glorious devices of thy mind,

By so revealing how thy journeying here

Through this mortality, doth closely bind

Thy brightness to the shadow of dreadful Fear? -

Ah no, it shall not be! Thy joyous light

Shall hide me from the hunger of fear to-night.

IV

For wonderfully to live I now begin:

So that the darkness which accompanies

Our being here, is fasten'd up within

The power of light that holdeth me;

And from these shining chains, to see

My joy with bold misliking eyes,

The shrouded figure will not dare arise.

For henceforth, from to-night,

I am wholly gone into the bright

Safety of the beauty of love:

Not only all my waking vigours plied

Under the searching glory of love,

But knowing myself with love all satisfied

Even when my life is hidden in sleep;

As high clouds, to themselves that keep

The moon's white company, are all possest

Silverly with the presence of their guest;

Or as a darken'd room

That hath within it roses, whence the air

And quietness are taken everywhere

Deliciously by sweet perfume.

EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE

What shall we do for Love these days?

How shall we make an altar-blaze

To smite the horny eyes of men

With the renown of our Heaven,

And to the unbelievers prove

Our service to our dear god, Love?

What torches shall we lift above

The crowd that pushes through the mire,

To amaze the dark heads with strange fire?

I should think I were much to blame,

If never I held some fragrant flame

Above the noises of the world,

And openly 'mid men's hurrying stares,

Worshipt before the sacred fears

That are like flashing curtains furl'd

Across the presence of our lord Love.

Nay, would that I could fill the gaze

Of the whole earth with some great praise

Made in a marvel for men's eyes,

Some tower of glittering masonries,

Therein such a spirit flourishing

Men should see what my heart can sing:

All that Love hath done to me

Built into stone, a visible glee;

Marble carried to gleaming height

As moved aloft by inward delight;

Not as with toil of chisels hewn,

But seeming poised in a mighty tune.

For of all those who have been known

To lodge with our kind host, the sun,

I envy one for just one thing:

In Cordova of the Moors

There dwelt a passion-minded King,

Who set great bands of marble-hewers

To fashion his heart's thanksgiving

In a tall palace, shapen so

All the wondering world might know

The joy he had of his Moorish lass.

His love, that brighter and larger was

Than the starry places, into firm stone

He sent, as if the stone were glass

Fired and into beauty blown.

Solemn and invented gravely

In its bulk the fabric stood,

Even as Love, that trusteth bravely

In its own exceeding good

To be better than the waste

Of time's devices; grandly spaced,

Seriously the fabric stood.

But over it all a pleasure went

Of carven delicate ornament,

Wreathing up like ravishment,

Mentioning in sculptures twined

The blitheness Love hath in his mind;

And like delighted senses were

The windows, and the columns there

Made the following sight to ache

As the heart that did them make.

Well I can see that shining song

Flowering there, the upward throng

Of porches, pillars and windowed walls,

Spires like piercing panpipe calls,

Up to the roof's snow-cloud flight;

All glancing in the Spanish light

White as water of arctic tides,

Save an amber dazzle on sunny sides.

You had said, the radiant sheen

Of that palace might have been

A young god's fantasy, ere he came

His serious worlds and suns to frame;

Such an immortal passion

Quiver'd among the slim hewn stone.

And in the nights it seemed a jar

Cut in the substance of a star,

Wherein a wine, that will be poured

Some time for feasting Heaven, was stored.

But within this fretted shell,

The wonder of Love made visible,

The King a private gentle mood

There placed, of pleasant quietude.

For right amidst there was a court,

Where always musk'd silences

Listened to water and to trees;

And herbage of all fragrant sort, -

Lavender, lad's-love, rosemary,

Basil, tansy, centaury, -

Was the grass of that orchard, hid

Love's amazements all amid.

Jarring the air with rumour cool,

Small fountains played into a pool

With sound as soft as the barley's hiss

When its beard just sprouting is;

Whence a young stream, that trod on moss,

Prettily rimpled the court across.

And in the pool's clear idleness,

Moving like dreams through happiness,

Shoals of small bright fishes were;

In and out weed-thickets bent

Perch and carp, and sauntering went

With mounching jaws and eyes a-stare;

Or on a lotus leaf would crawl,

A brinded loach to bask and sprawl,

Tasting the warm sun ere it dipt

Into the water; but quick as fear

Back his shining brown head slipt

To crouch on the gravel of his lair,

Where the cooled sunbeams broke in wrack,

Spilt shatter'd gold about his back.

So within that green-veiled air,

Within that white-walled quiet, where

Innocent water thought aloud, -

Childish prattle that must make

The wise sunlight with laughter shake

On the leafage overbowed, -

Often the King and his love-lass

Let the delicious hours pass.

All the outer world could see

Graved and sawn amazingly

Their love's delighted riotise,

Fixt in marble for all men's eyes;

But only these twain could abide

In the cool peace that withinside

Thrilling desire and passion dwelt;

They only knew the still meaning spelt

By Love's flaming script, which is

God's word written in ecstasies.

And where is now that palace gone,

All the magical skill'd stone,

All the dreaming towers wrought

By Love as if no more than thought

The unresisting marble was?

How could such a wonder pass?

Ah, it was but built in vain

Against the stupid horns of Rome,

That pusht down into the common loam

The loveliness that shone in Spain.

But we have raised it up again!

A loftier palace, fairer far,

Is ours, and one that fears no war.

Safe in marvellous walls we are;

Wondering sense like builded fires,

High amazement of desires,

Delight and certainty of love,

Closing around, roofing above

Our unapproacht and perfect hour

Within the splendours of love's power.