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 drenchèd 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. Contrivèd 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 hunchèd 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 muskèd 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.
_The "Hymn to Love"
is reprinted by permission from "The Vineyard."_
End of Project Gutenberg's Emblems Of Love, by Lascelles Abercrombie