VII.

Penitent! give me back

Angels, and Heaven;

Render your stolen self,

And be forgiven!

How frontier Heaven from you?

For my soul prays, Sweet,

Still to your face in Heaven,

Heaven in your face, Sweet!

_Seraphim_,

_Her to hymn_,

_Might leave their portals_;

_And at my feet learn_

_The harping of mortals_!

V.

SCALA JACOBI PORTAQUE EBURNEA.

HER soul from earth to Heaven lies,

Like the ladder of the vision,

Whereon go

To and fro,

In ascension and demission,

Star-flecked feet of Paradise.

Now she is drawn up from me,

All my angels, wet-eyed, tristful,

Gaze from great

Heaven’s gate

Like pent children, very wistful,

That below a playmate see.

Dream-dispensing face of hers!

Ivory port which loosed upon me

Wings, I wist,

Whose amethyst

Trepidations have forgone me,—

Hesper’s filmy traffickers!

VI.

GILDED GOLD.

THOU dost to rich attire a grace,

To let it deck itself with thee,

And teachest pomp strange cunning ways

To be thought simplicity.

But lilies, stolen from grassy mold,

No more curlèd state unfold

Translated to a vase of gold;

In burning throne though they keep still

Serenities unthawed and chill.

Therefore, albeit thou’rt stately so,

In statelier state thou us’dst to go.

Though jewels should phosphoric burn

Through those night-waters of thine hair,

A flower from its translucid urn

Poured silver flame more lunar-fair.

These futile trappings but recall

Degenerate worshippers who fall

In purfled kirtle and brocade

To ’parel the white Mother-Maid.

For, as her image stood arrayed

In vests of its self-substance wrought

To measure of the sculptor’s thought—

Slurred by those added braveries;

So for thy spirit did devise

Its Maker seemly garniture,

Of its own essence parcel pure,—

From grave simplicities a dress,

And reticent demurenesses,

And love encinctured with reserve;

Which the woven vesture should subserve.

For outward robes in their ostents

Should show the soul’s habiliments.

Therefore I say,—Thou’rt fair even so,

But better Fair I use to know.

The violet would thy dusk hair deck

With graces like thine own unsought.

Ah! but such place would daze and wreck

Its simple, lowly rustic thought.

For so advancèd, dear, to thee,

It would unlearn humility!

Yet do not, with an altered look,

In these weak numbers read rebuke;

Which are but jealous lest too much

God’s master-piece thou shouldst retouch.

Where a sweetness is complete,

Add not sweets unto the sweet!

Or, as thou wilt, for others so

In unfamiliar richness go;

But keep for mine acquainted eyes

The fashions of thy Paradise.

VII.

HER PORTRAIT.

OH, but the heavenly grammar did I hold

Of that high speech which angels’ tongues turn gold!

So should her deathless beauty take no wrong,

Praised in her own great kindred’s fit and cognate tongue.

Or if that language yet with us abode.

Which Adam in the garden talked with God!

But our untempered speech descends—poor heirs!

Grimy and rough-cast still from Babel’s bricklayers:

Curse on the brutish jargon we inherit,

Strong but to damn, not memorise, a spirit!

A cheek, a lip, a limb, a bosom, they

Move with light ease in speech of working-day;

And women we do use to praise even so.

But here the gates we burst, and to the temple go.

Their praise were her dispraise; who dare, who dare,

Adulate the seraphim for their burning hair?

How, if with them I dared, here should I dare it?

How praise the woman, who but know the spirit?

How praise the colour of her eyes, uncaught

While they were coloured with her varying thought

How her mouth’s shape, who only use to know

What tender shape her speech will fit it to?

Or her lips’ redness, when their joinèd veil

Song’s fervid hand has parted till it wore them pale?

If I would praise her soul (temerarious if!),

All must be mystery and hieroglyph.

Heaven, which not oft is prodigal of its more

To singers, in their song too great before;

By which the hierarch of large poesy is

Restrained to his once sacred benefice;

Only for her the salutary awe

Relaxes and stern canon of its law;

To her alone concedes pluralities,

In her alone to reconcile agrees

The Muse, the Graces, and the Charities;

To her, who can the trust so well conduct

To her it gives the use, to us the usufruct.

What of the dear administress then may

I utter, though I spoke her own carved perfect way?

What of her daily gracious converse known,

Whose heavenly despotism must needs dethrone

And subjugate all sweetness but its own?

Deep in my heart subsides the infrequent word,

And there dies slowly throbbing like a wounded bird.

What of her silence, that outsweetens speech?

What of her thoughts, high marks for mine own thoughts to reach?

Yet (Chaucer’s antique sentence so to turn),

Most gladly will she teach, and gladly learn;

And teaching her, by her enchanting art,

The master threefold learns for all he can impart.

Now all is said, and all being said,—aye me!

There yet remains unsaid the very She.

Nay, to conclude (so to conclude I dare),

If of her virtues you evade the snare,

Then for her faults you’ll fall in love with her.

Alas, and I have spoken of her Muse—

Her Muse, that died with her auroral dews!

Learn, the wise cherubim from harps of gold

Seduce a trepidating music manifold;

But the superior seraphim do know

None other music but to flame and glow.

So she first lighted on our frosty earth,

A sad musician, of cherubic birth,

Playing to alien ears—which did not prize

The uncomprehended music of the skies—

The exiled airs of her far Paradise.

But soon from her own harpings taking fire,

In love and light her melodies expire.

Now Heaven affords her, for her silenced hymn,

A double portion of the seraphim.

At the rich odours from her heart that rise,

My soul remembers its lost Paradise,

And antenatal gales blow from Heaven’s shores of spice;

I grow essential all, uncloaking me

From this encumbering virility,

And feel the primal sex of heaven and poetry:

And parting from her, in me linger on

Vague snatches of Uranian antiphon.

How to the petty prison could she shrink

Of femineity?—Nay, but I think

In a dear courtesy her spirit would

Woman assume, for grace to womanhood.

Or, votaress to the virgin Sanctitude

Of reticent withdrawal’s sweet, courted pale,

She took the cloistral flesh, the sexual veil,

Of her sad, aboriginal sisterhood;

The habit of cloistral flesh which founding Eve indued.

Thus do I know her: but for what men call

Beauty—the loveliness corporeal,

Its most just praise a thing unproper were

To singer or to listener, me or her.

She wears that body but as one indues

A robe, half careless, for it is the use;

Although her soul and it so fair agree,

We sure may, unattaint of heresy,

Conceit it might the soul’s begetter be.

The immortal could we cease to contemplate,

The mortal part suggests its every trait.

God laid His fingers on the ivories

Of her pure members as on smoothèd keys,

And there out-breathed her spirit’s harmonies

I’ll speak a little proudly:—I disdain

To count the beauty worth my wish or gaze,

Which the dull daily fool can covet or obtain.

I do confess the fairness of the spoil,

But from such rivalry it takes a soil.

For her I’ll proudlier speak:—how could it be

That I should praise the gilding on the psaltery?

’Tis not for her to hold that prize a prize,

Or praise much praise, though proudest in its wise,

To which even hopes of merely women rise.

Such strife would to the vanquished laurels yield,

Against _her_ suffered to have lost a field.

Herself must with herself be sole compeer,

Unless the people of her distant sphere

Some gold migration send to melodise the year.

But first our hearts must burn in larger guise,

To reformate the uncharitable skies,

And so the deathless plumage to acclimatise:

Since this, their sole congener in our clime,

Droops her sad, ruffled thoughts for half the shivering time.

Yet I have felt what terrors may consort

In women’s cheeks, the Graces’ soft resort;

My hand hath shook at gentle hands’ access,

And trembled at the waving of a tress;

My blood known panic fear, and fled dismayed,

Where ladies’ eyes have set their ambuscade.

The rustle of a robe hath been to me

The very rattle of love’s musketry;

Although my heart hath beat the loud advance,

I have recoiled before a challenging glance,

Proved gay alarms where warlike ribbons dance.

And from it all, this knowledge have I got,—

The whole that others have, is less than they have not;

All which makes other women noted fair,

Unnoted would remain and overshone in her.

How should I gauge what beauty is her dole,

Who cannot see her countenance for her soul;

As birds see not the casement for the sky?

And as ’tis check they prove its presence by,

I know not of her body till I find

My flight debarred the heaven of her mind.

Hers is the face whence all should copied be,

Did God make replicas of such as she;

Its presence felt by what it does abate,

Because the soul shines through tempered and mitigate:

Where—as a figure labouring at night

Beside the body of a splendid light—

Dark Time works hidden by its luminousness;

And every line he labours to impress

Turns added beauty, like the veins that run

Athwart a leaf which hangs against the sun.

There regent Melancholy wide controls;

There Earth- and Heaven-Love play for aureoles;

There Sweetness out of Sadness breaks at fits,

Like bubbles on dark water, or as flits

A sudden silver fin through its deep infinites;

There amorous Thought has sucked pale Fancy’s breath,

And Tenderness sits looking toward the lands of death

There Feeling stills her breathing with her hand,

And Dream from Melancholy part wrests the wand

And on this lady’s heart, looked you so deep,

Poor Poetry has rocked himself to sleep:

Upon the heavy blossom of her lips

Hangs the bee Musing; nigh her lids eclipse

Each half-occulted star beneath that lies;

And in the contemplation of those eyes,

Passionless passion, wild tranquillities.

* * * * *