s a fire lit unto God,
And many thoughts colour the sacred flame;
But the air for him, the draught wherein he glows,
The breathing spirit that has turned mere life
Into the hot vehement being of man
Lambent upon the altar of the world,
Is woman and desire of her, nought else.
Behold, we know not what we do at all
When we love women: is it we who love,
Or Destiny rather visiting our souls
In passion?--How shall I name thee what thou art,
Woman, thou dream of man's desire that God
Caught out of man's first sleep and fashioned real?
Deliverance art thou from his own strait thought,
Wind come from beyond the stars
To blow away like mist all the disgrace
Of reasonable bars,
The forgery of time and place,
Whereinto soul was narrowly brought
When it was gridded close behind
The workings of man's mind.
But Woman comes to bless
With an immoderateness,
With a divine excess,
Lust of life and yearn of flesh,
Till there seems naught hindering our souls:
Else we should crawl along the years
Labour'd with measurable joys
No greater than our life,
Things carefully devised against tears;
And as snails harden their sweat
To brittle safety, a carried shell,
So we might build out of our woe of toil
Serious delight.
But to see and hear and touch Woman
Breaks our shell of this accursed world,
And turns our measured days to measureless gleam.
Up in a sudden burning flares
The dark tent of nature pitched about our souls;
And light, like a stound of golden din,
A shadowless light like weather of infinite plains,
Light not narrowed into place,
Amazes the naked nerves of the soul;
And like the pouring of immortal airs
Out of a flowery season,
Over us blows the inordinate desire.--
Ah, who from Hell did the wisdom bring
That would make life a formal thing?
Who has invented all the manner and wont,
The customary ways,
That harness into evil scales
Of malady our living?
But how they shrivel and craze
If love but glance on them!
And as a bowl of glass to shattering
Shivers at a sounding string,
The brittle glittering self of man
At beauty of Woman throbs apieces,
And seems into Eternity spilled
The being it contained.
Let it touch Woman and flesh becomes
Finer and more thrilled
Than air contrived in tune,
Lighter round the soul
Than flame is round burning.
She is God's bribery to man
That he the world endure,
His wage for carrying the weight of being.
Nay, she is rather the eternal lure
Out of form and things that en