The Unknown Eros

II.  THE CONTRACT

 
   Twice thirty centuries and more ago,
All in a heavenly Abyssinian vale,
Man first met woman; and the ruddy snow
On many-ridgëd Abora turn’d pale,
And the song choked within the nightingale.
A mild white furnace in the thorough blast
Of purest spirit seem’d She as she pass’d;
And of the Man enough that this be said,
He look’d her Head.
   Towards their bower
Together as they went,
With hearts conceiving torrents of content,
And linger’d prologue fit for Paradise,
He, gathering power
From dear persuasion of the dim-lit hour,
And doubted sanction of her sparkling eyes,
Thus supplicates her conjugal assent,
And thus she makes replies:
   ‘Lo, Eve, the Day burns on the snowy height,
But here is mellow night!’
   ‘Here let us rest.  The languor of the light
Is in my feet.
It is thy strength, my Love, that makes me weak;
Thy strength it is that makes my weakness sweet.
What would thy kiss’d lips speak?’
   ‘See, what a world of roses I have spread
To make the bridal bed.
Come, Beauty’s self and Love’s, thus to thy throne be led!’
   ‘My Lord, my Wisdom, nay!
Does not yon love-delighted Planet run,
(Haply against her heart,)
A space apart
For ever from her strong-persuading Sun!
O say,
Shall we no voluntary bars
Set to our drift?  I, Sister of the Stars,
And Thou, my glorious, course-compelling Day!’
   ‘Yea, yea!
Was it an echo of her coming word
Which, ere she spake, I heard?
Or through what strange distrust was I, her Head,
Not first this thing to have said?
Alway
Speaks not within my breast
The uncompulsive, great and sweet behest
Of something bright,
Not named, not known, and yet more manifest
Than is the morn,
The sun being just at point then to be born?
O Eve, take back thy “Nay.”
Trust me, Beloved, ever in all to mean
Thy blissful service, sacrificial, keen;
But bondless be that service, and let speak—’
   ‘This other world of roses in my cheek,
Which hide them in thy breast, and deepening seek
That thou decree if they mean Yea or Nay.’
   ‘Did e’er so sweet a word such sweet gainsay!’
   ‘And when I lean, Love, on you, thus, and smile
So that my Nay seems Yea,
You must the while
Thence be confirm’d that I deny you still.’
   ‘I will, I will!’
   ‘And when my arms are round your neck, like this,
And I, as now,
Melt like a golden ingot in your kiss,
Then, more than ever, shall your splendid word
Be as Archangel Michael’s severing sword!
Speak, speak!
Your might, Love, makes me weak,
Your might it is that makes my weakness sweet.’
   ‘I vow, I vow!’
   ‘And are you happy, O, my Hero and Lord;
And is your joy complete?’
   ‘Yea, with my joyful heart my body rocks,
And joy comes down from Heaven in floods and shocks,
As from Mount Abora comes the avalanche.’
   ‘My Law, my Light!
Then am I yours as your high mind may list.
No wile shall lure you, none can I resist!’
   Thus the first Eve
With much enamour’d Adam did enact
Their mutual free contract
Of virgin spousals, blissful beyond flight
Of modern thought, with great intention staunch,
Though unobliged until that binding pact.
Whether She kept her word, or He the mind
To hold her, wavering, to his own restraint,
Answer, ye pleasures faint,
Ye fiery throes, and upturn’d eyeballs blind
Of sick-at-heart Mankind,
Whom nothing succour can,
Until a heaven-caress’d and happier Eve
Be join’d with some glad Saint
In like espousals, blessed upon Earth,
And she her Fruit forth bring;
No numb, chill-hearted, shaken-witted thing,
‘Plaining his little span,
But of proud virgin joy the appropriate birth,
The Son of God and Man.
 

III.  ARBOR VITAE

 
   With honeysuckle, over-sweet, festoon’d;
With bitter ivy bound;
Terraced with funguses unsound;
Deform’d with many a boss
And closed scar, o’ercushion’d deep with moss;
Bunch’d all about with pagan mistletoe;
And thick with nests of the hoarse bird
That talks, but understands not his own word;
Stands, and so stood a thousand years ago,
A single tree.
Thunder has done its worst among its twigs,
Where the great crest yet blackens, never pruned,
But in its heart, alway
Ready to push new verdurous boughs, whene’er
The rotting saplings near it fall and leave it air,
Is all antiquity and no decay.
Rich, though rejected by the forest-pigs,
Its fruit, beneath whose rough, concealing rind
They that will break it find
Heart-succouring savour of each several meat,
And kernell’d drink of brain-renewing power,
With bitter condiment and sour,
And sweet economy of sweet,
And odours that remind
Of haunts of childhood and a different day.
Beside this tree,
Praising no Gods nor blaming, sans a wish,
Sits, Tartar-like, the Time’s civility,
And eats its dead-dog off a golden dish.
 

IV.  THE STANDARDS

 
   That last,
Blown from our Sion of the Seven Hills,
Was no uncertain blast!
Listen: the warning all the champaign fills,
And minatory murmurs, answering, mar
The Night, both near and far,
Perplexing many a drowsy citadel
Beneath whose ill-watch’d walls the Powers of Hell,
With armed jar
And angry threat, surcease
Their long-kept compact of contemptuous peace!
Lo, yonder, where our little English band,
With peace in heart and wrath in hand,
Have dimly ta’en their stand,
Sweetly the light
Shines from the solitary peak at Edgbaston,
Whence, o’er the dawning Land,
Gleam the gold blazonries of Love irate
’Gainst the black flag of Hate.³
Envy not, little band,
Your brothers under the Hohenzollern hoof
Put to the splendid proof.
Your hour is near!
The spectre-haunted time of idle Night,
Your only fear,
Thank God, is done,
And Day and War, Man’s work-time and delight,
Begun.
   Ho, ye of the van there, veterans great of cheer,
Look to your footing, when, from yonder verge,
The wish’d Sun shall emerge;
Lest once again the Flower of Sharon bloom
After a way the Stalk call heresy.
Strange splendour and strange gloom
Alike confuse the path
Of customary faith;
And when the dim-seen mountains turn to flame
And every roadside atom is a spark,
The dazzled sense, that used was to the dark,
May well doubt, ‘Is’t the safe way and the same
By which we came
From Egypt, and to Canaan mean to go?’
But know,
The clearness then so marvellously increas’d,
The light’ning shining Westward from the East,
Is the great promised sign
Of His victorious and divine
Approach, whose coming in the clouds shall be,
As erst was His humility,
A stumbling unto some, the first bid to the Feast.
   Cry, Ho!
Good speed to them that come and them that go
From either gathering host,
And, after feeble, false allegiance, now first know
Their post.
Ho, ye
Who loved our Flag
Only because there flapp’d none other rag
Which gentlemen might doff to, and such be,
‘Save your gentility!
For leagued, alas, are we
With many a faithful rogue
Discrediting bright Truth with dirt and brogue;
And flatterers, too,
That still would sniff the grass
After the ’broider’d shoe,
And swear it smelt like musk where He did pass,
Though he were Borgia or Caiaphas.
Ho, ye
Who dread the bondage of the boundless fields
Which Heaven’s allegiance yields,
And, like to house-hatch’d finches, hop not free
Unless ’tween walls of wire,
Look, there be many cages: choose to your desire!
Ho, ye,
Of God the least beloved, of Man the most,
That like not leaguing with the lesser host,
Behold the invested Mount,
And that assaulting Sea with ne’er a coast.
You need not stop to count!
   But come up, ye
Who adore, in any way,
Our God by His wide-honour’d Name of YEA.
Come up; for where ye stand ye cannot stay.
Come all
That either mood of heavenly joyance know,
And, on the ladder hierarchical,
Have seen the order’d Angels to and fro
Descending with the pride of service sweet,
Ascending, with the rapture of receipt!
Come who have felt, in soul and heart and sense,
The entire obedience
Which opes the bosom, like a blissful wife,
To the Husband of all life!
Come ye that find contentment’s very core
In the light store
And daisied path
Of Poverty,
And know how more
A small thing that the righteous hath
Availeth than the ungodly’s riches great.
Come likewise ye
Which do not yet disown as out of date
That brightest third of the dead Virtues three,
Of Love the crown elate
And daintiest glee!
Come up, come up, and join our little band.
Our time is near at hand.
The sanction of the world’s undying hate
Means more than flaunted flags in windy air.
Be ye of gathering fate
Now gladly ware.
Now from the matrix, by God’s grinding wrought,
The brilliant shall be brought;
The white stone mystic set between the eyes
Of them that get the prize;
Yea, part and parcel of that mighty Stone
Which shall be thrown
Into the Sea, and Sea shall be no more.
 

V.  SPONSA DEI

 
   What is this Maiden fair,
The laughing of whose eye
Is in man’s heart renew’d virginity;
Who yet sick longing breeds
For marriage which exceeds
The inventive guess of Love to satisfy
With hope of utter binding, and of loosing endless dear despair?
What gleams about her shine,
More transient than delight and more divine!
If she does something but a little sweet,
As gaze towards the glass to set her hair,
See how his soul falls humbled at her feet!
Her gentle step, to go or come,
Gains her more merit than a martyrdom;
And, if she dance, it doth such grace confer
As opes the heaven of heavens to more than her,
And makes a rival of her worshipper.
To die unknown for her were little cost!
So is she without guile,
Her mere refused smile
Makes up the sum of that which may be lost!
Who is this Fair
Whom each hath seen,
The darkest once in this bewailed dell,
Be he not destin’d for the glooms of hell?
Whom each hath seen
And known, with sharp remorse and sweet, as Queen
And tear-glad Mistress of his hopes of bliss,
Too fair for man to kiss?
Who is this only happy She,
Whom, by a frantic flight of courtesy,
Born of despair
Of better lodging for his Spirit fair,
He adores as Margaret, Maude, or Cecily?
And what this sigh,
That each one heaves for Earth’s last lowlihead
And the Heaven high
Ineffably lock’d in dateless bridal-bed?
Are all, then, mad, or is it prophecy?
‘Sons now we are of God,’ as we have heard,
‘But what we shall be hath not yet appear’d.’
O, Heart, remember thee,
That Man is none,
Save One.
What if this Lady be thy Soul, and He
Who claims to enjoy her sacred beauty be,
Not thou, but God; and thy sick fire
A female vanity,
Such as a Bride, viewing her mirror’d charms,
Feels when she sighs, ‘All these are for his arms!’
A reflex heat
Flash’d on thy cheek from His immense desire,
Which waits to crown, beyond thy brain’s conceit,
Thy nameless, secret, hopeless longing sweet,
Not by-and-by, but now,
Unless deny Him thou!
 

VI.  LEGEM TUAM DILEXI

 
   The ‘Infinite.’  Word horrible! at feud
With life, and the braced mood
Of power and joy and love;
Forbidden, by wise heathen ev’n, to be
Spoken of Deity,
Whose Name, on popular altars, was ‘The Unknown,’
Because, or ere It was reveal’d as One
Confined in Three,
The people fear’d that it might prove
Infinity,
The blazon which the devils desired to gain;
And God, for their confusion, laugh’d consent;
Yet did so far relent,
That they might seek relief, and not in vain,
In dashing of themselves against the shores of pain.
Nor bides alone in hell
The bond-disdaining spirit boiling to rebel.
But for compulsion of strong grace,
The pebble in the road
Would straight explode,
And fill the ghastly boundlessness of space.
The furious power,
To soft growth twice constrain’d in leaf and flower,
Protests, and longs to flash its faint self far
Beyond the dimmest star.
The same
Seditious flame,
Beat backward with reduplicated might,
Struggles alive within its stricter term,
And is the worm.
And the just Man does on himself affirm
God’s limits, and is conscious of delight,
Freedom and right;
And so His Semblance is, Who, every hour,
By day and night,
Buildeth new bulwarks ’gainst the Infinite.
For, ah, who can express
How full of bonds and simpleness
Is God,
How narrow is He,
And how the wide, waste field of possibility
Is only trod
Straight to His homestead in the human heart,
And all His art
Is as the babe’s that wins his Mother to repeat
Her little song so sweet!
What is the chief news of the Night?
Lo, iron and salt, heat, weight and light
In every star that drifts on the great breeze!
And these
Mean Man,
Darling of God, Whose thoughts but live and move
Round him; Who woos his will
To wedlock with His own, and does distil
To that drop’s span
The atta of all rose-fields of all love!
Therefore the soul select assumes the stress
Of bonds unbid, which God’s own style express
Better than well,
And aye hath, cloister’d, borne,
To the Clown’s scorn,
The fetters of the threefold golden chain:
Narrowing to nothing all his worldly gain;
(Howbeit in vain;
For to have nought
Is to have all things without care or thought!)
Surrendering, abject, to his equal’s rule,
As though he were a fool,
The free wings of the will;
(More vainly still;
For none knows rightly what ’tis to be free
But only he
Who, vow’d against all choice, and fill’d with awe
Of the ofttimes dumb or clouded Oracle,
Does wiser than to spell,
In his own suit, the least word of the Law!)
And, lastly, bartering life’s dear bliss for pain;
But evermore in vain;
For joy (rejoice ye Few that tasted have!)
Is Love’s obedience
Against the genial laws of natural sense,
Whose wide, self-dissipating wave,
Prison’d in artful dykes,
Trembling returns and strikes
Thence to its source again,
In backward billows fleet,
Crest crossing crest ecstatic as they greet,
Thrilling each vein,
Exploring every chasm and cove
Of the full heart with floods of honied love,
And every principal street
And obscure alley and lane
Of the intricate brain
With brimming rivers of light and breezes sweet
Of the primordial heat;
Till, unto view of me and thee,
Lost the intense life be,
Or ludicrously display’d, by force
Of distance; as a soaring eagle, or a horse
On far-off hillside shewn,
May seem a gust-driv’n rag or a dead stone.
Nor by such bonds alone—
But more I leave to say,
Fitly revering the Wild Ass’s bray,
Also his hoof,
Of which, go where you will, the marks remain
Where the religious walls have hid the bright reproof.
 

VII.  TO THE BODY

 
   Creation’s and Creator’s crowning good;
Wall of infinitude;
Foundation of the sky,
In Heaven forecast
And long’d for from eternity,
Though laid the last;
Reverberating dome,
Of music cunningly built home
Against the void and indolent disgrace
Of unresponsive space;
Little, sequester’d pleasure-house
For God and for His Spouse;
Elaborately, yea, past conceiving, fair,
Since, from the graced decorum of the hair,
Ev’n to the tingling, sweet
Soles of the simple, earth-confiding feet,
And from the inmost heart
Outwards unto the thin
Silk curtains of the skin,
Every least part
Astonish’d hears
And sweet replies to some like region of the spheres;
Form’d for a dignity prophets but darkly name,
Lest shameless men cry ‘Shame!’
So rich with wealth conceal’d
That Heaven and Hell fight chiefly for this field;
Clinging to everything that pleases thee
With indefectible fidelity;
Alas, so true
To all thy friendships that no grace
Thee from thy sin can wholly disembrace;
Which thus ’bides with thee as the Jebusite,
That, maugre all God’s promises could do,
The chosen People never conquer’d quite;
Who therefore lived with them,
And that by formal truce and as of right,
In metropolitan Jerusalem.
For which false fealty
Thou needs must, for a season, lie
In the grave’s arms, foul and unshriven,
Albeit, in Heaven,
Thy crimson-throbbing Glow
Into its old abode aye pants to go,
And does with envy see
Enoch, Elijah, and the Lady, she
Who left the roses in her body’s lieu.
O, if the pleasures I have known in thee
But my poor faith’s poor first-fruits be,
What quintessential, keen, ethereal bliss
Then shall be his
Who has thy birth-time’s consecrating dew
For death’s sweet chrism retain’d,
Quick, tender, virginal, and unprofaned!