66 ALICE: AN ADULTERY
What matter who, or how, or even when?
If we but look beyond the primal pain,
And trust the Future to write all things
plain,
Graven on brasswith the predestined pen.
This is the doom. Upon the blind blue sky
A little cloud, no larger than an hand !
Whether I live and love, or love and die,
I care not: either way I understand.
To me—to live is Christ ; to die is gain:
For I, I also, I shall come again.
THE FIFTH DAY.
‘Thine eyes, sweet lady, have infected mine.”
Richard Il.
ALL thought of work is almost cast aside.
I followed like a dog the way she went,
Speaking but seldom, very well content
To day-dream, oft imagining a bride,
A wife, a lover, even a sister, tied
By some soft bond of twinning: thus
I blent
A real joy with a brighter element
Of fancy free to wander far and wide.
For as I followed by the shore and bended
Over her footsteps in the wood, my will
Rose to high strength assertive and
transcended.
The petty forms of the seducer’s skill.
Chaste love strode forth, a warrior’s
stern and splendid
Determined footsteps on the Arcadian
Hill.
THE SIXTH DAY.
‘* Are there not charms
By which the property of youth and maidhood
May be abuséd ?”’
Othello,
I DREW a hideous talisman of lust
In many colours where strong sigils
shone ;
- Cronk’d mystic language of oblivion,
Fitted to crack and scorch the terrene
crust
And bring the sulphur steaming from the
thrust |
Of Satan’s winepress, was ill written on
The accurséd margin, and the orison
Scrawled backwards, as a bad magician
must.
By these vile tricks, abominable spells,
_ I drew foul horrors from a many hells—
Though I had fathomed Fate; though
I had seen
Chastity charm-proof arm the sea-gray eyes
And sweet clean body of my spirit’s
queen,
Where nothing dwells that God did not
devise.
THE SEVENTH DAY.
‘This word ‘love,’ which greybeards call
divine,
Be resident in men like one another
And not in me: I am myself alone.”
3 Henry VI,
THEREFORE I burnt the wicked pantacle,
And cast my love behind me once
again.
I mused upon the mystery of pain,
Where the Gods ‘taught me by another
spell
Not chosen from the armoury of Hell,
But given of Mercury to cleanse the
stain
Of the old planet: thus I wrote me
plain
Secrets divine—tremendous, terrible !
Thus I forgot my soul and dwelt alone
In the strong fortress of the active
mind
Whose steady flame burned eager in the
night ;
Yet was some shadow on the starry throne,
Some imperfection playing hoodman-
blind
So that I saw not perfectly aright.