Part 2

She reads him when his humbled manhood weeps To her invoked: distraction is implored. A smile, and he is up on godlike leaps Above, with his bright Goddess owned the adored. His tales of her declare she condescends; Can share his fires, not always goads and rends: Moreover, quits a throne, and must enclose A queenlier gem than woman's wayside rose. She bends, he quickens; she breathes low, he springs Enraptured; low she laughs, his woes disperse; Aloud she laughs and sweeps his varied strings. 'Tis taught him how for touch of mournful verse Rarely the music made of two ascends, And Beauty's Queen some other way is won. Or it may solve the riddle, that she lends Herself to all, and yields herself to none, Save heavenliest: though claims by men are raised In hot assurance under shade of doubt: And numerous are the images bepraised As Beauty's Queen, should passion head the rout.

Be sure the ruddy hue is Love's: to woo Love's Fountain we must mount the ruddy hue. That is her garden's precept, seen where shines Her blood-flower, and its unsought neighbour pines. Daughter of light, the joyful light, She bids her couples face full East, Reflecting radiance, even when from her feast Their outstretched arms brown deserts disunite, The lion-haunted thickets hold apart. In love the ruddy hue declares great heart; High confidence in her whose aid is lent To lovers lifting the tuned instrument, Not one of rippled strings and funeral tone. And doth the man pursue a tightened zone, Then be it as the Laurel God he runs, Confirmed to win, with countenance the Sun's.

Should pity bless the tremulous voice of woe He lifts for pity, limp his offspring show. For him requiring woman's arts to please Infantile tastes with babe reluctances, No race of giants! In the woman's veins Persuasion ripely runs, through hers the pains. Her choice of him, should kind occasion nod, Aspiring blends the Titan with the God; Yet unto dwarf and mortal, she, submiss In her high Lady's mandate, yields the kiss; And is it needed that Love's daintier brute Be snared as hunter, she will tempt pursuit. She is great Nature's ever intimate In breast, and doth as ready handmaid wait, Until perverted by her senseless male, She plays the winding snake, the shrinking snail, The flying deer, all tricks of evil fame, Elusive to allure, since he grew tame.

Hence has the Goddess, Nature's earliest Power, And greatest and most present, with her dower Of the transcendent beauty, gained repute For meditated guile. She laughs to hear A charge her garden's labyrinths scarce confute, Her garden's histories tell of to all near. Let it be said, But less upon her guile Doth she rely for her immortal smile. Still let the rumour spread, and terror screens To push her conquests by the simplest means. While man abjures not lustihead, nor swerves From earth's good labours, Beauty's Queen he serves.

Her spacious garden and her garden's grant She offers in reward for handsome cheer: Choice of the nymphs whose looks will slant The secret down a dewy leer Of corner eyelids into haze: Many a fair Aphrosyne Like flower-bell to honey-bee: And here they flicker round the maze Bewildering him in heart and head: And here they wear the close demure, With subtle peeps to reassure: Others parade where love has bled, And of its crimson weave their mesh: Others to snap of fingers leap, As bearing breast with love asleep. These are her laughters in the flesh. Or would she fit a warrior mood, She lights her seeming unsubdued, And indicates the fortress-key. Or is it heart for heart that craves, She flecks along a run of waves The one to promise deeper sea.

Bands of her limpid primitives, Or patterned in the curious braid, Are the blest man's; and whatsoever he gives, For what he gives is he repaid. Good is it if by him 'tis held He wins the fairest ever welled From Nature's founts: she whispers it: Even I Not fairer! and forbids him to deny, Else little is he lover. Those he clasps, Intent as tempest, worshipful as prayer,-- And be they doves or be they asps,-- Must seem to him the sovereignty fair; Else counts he soon among life's wholly tamed. Him whom from utter savage she reclaimed, Half savage must he stay, would he be crowned The lover. Else, past ripeness, deathward bound, He reasons; and the totterer Earth detests, Love shuns, grim logic screws in grasp, is he. Doth man divide divine Necessity From Joy, between the Queen of Beauty's breasts A sword is driven; for those most glorious twain Present her; armed to bless and to constrain. Of this he perishes; not she, the throned On rocks that spout their springs to the sacred mounts. A loftier Reason out of deeper founts Earth's chosen Goddess bears: by none disowned While red blood runs to swell the pulse, she boasts, And Beauty, like her star, descends the sky; Earth's answer, heaven's consent unto man's cry, Uplifted by the innumerable hosts.

Quickened of Nature's eye and ear, When the wild sap at high tide smites Within us; or benignly clear To vision; or as the iris lights On fluctuant waters; she is ours Till set of man: the dreamed, the seen; Flushing the world with odorous flowers: A soft compulsion on terrene By heavenly: and the world is hers While hunger after Beauty spurs.

So is it sung in any space She fills, with laugh at shallow laws Forbidding love's devised embrace, The music Beauty from it draws.

THE TEST OF MANHOOD

LIKE a flood river whirled at rocky banks, An army issues out of wilderness, With battle plucking round its ragged flanks; Obstruction in the van; insane excess Oft at the heart; yet hard the onward stress Unto more spacious, where move ordered ranks, And rise hushed temples built of shapely stone, The work of hands not pledged to grind or slay. They gave our earth a dress of flesh on bone; A tongue to speak with answering heaven gave they. Then was the gracious birth of man's new day; Divided from the haunted night it shone.

That quiet dawn was Reverence; whereof sprang Ethereal Beauty in full morningtide. Another sun had risen to clasp his bride: It was another earth unto him sang.

Came Reverence from the Huntress on her heights? From the Persuader came it, in those vales Whereunto she melodiously invites, Her troops of eager servitors regales? Not far those two great Powers of Nature speed Disciple steps on earth when sole they lead; Nor either points for us the way of flame. From him predestined mightier it came; His task to hold them both in breast, and yield Their dues to each, and of their war be field.

The foes that in repulsion never ceased, Must he, who once has been the goodly beast Of one or other, at whose beck he ran, Constrain to make him serviceable man; Offending neither, nor the natural claim Each pressed, denying, for his true man's name.

Ah, what a sweat of anguish in that strife To hold them fast conjoined within him still; Submissive to his will Along the road of life! And marvel not he wavered if at whiles The forward step met frowns, the backward smiles. For Pleasure witched him her sweet cup to drain; Repentance offered ecstasy in pain. Delicious licence called it Nature's cry; Ascetic rigours crushed the fleshly sigh; A tread on shingle timed his lame advance Flung as the die of Bacchanalian Chance, He of the troubled marching army leaned On godhead visible, on godhead screened; The radiant roseate, the curtained white; Yet sharp his battle strained through day, through night.

He drank of fictions, till celestial aid Might seem accorded when he fawned and prayed; Sagely the generous Giver circumspect, To choose for grants the egregious, his elect; And ever that imagined succour slew The soul of brotherhood whence Reverence drew.

In fellowship religion has its founts: The solitary his own God reveres: Ascend no sacred Mounts Our hungers or our fears. As only for the numbers Nature's care Is shown, and she the personal nothing heeds, So to Divinity the spring of prayer From brotherhood the one way upward leads. Like the sustaining air Are both for flowers and weeds. But he who claims in spirit to be flower, Will find them both an air that doth devour.

Whereby he smelt his treason, who implored External gifts bestowed but on the sword; Beheld himself, with less and less disguise, Through those blood-cataracts which dimmed his eyes, His army's foe, condemned to strive and fail; See a black adversary's ghost prevail; Never, though triumphs hailed him, hope to win While still the conflict tore his breast within.

Out of that agony, misread for those Imprisoned Powers warring unappeased, The ghost of his black adversary rose, To smother light, shut heaven, show earth diseased. And long with him was wrestling ere emerged A mind to read in him the reflex shade Of its fierce torment; this way, that way urged; By craven compromises hourly swayed.

Crouched as a nestling, still its wings untried, The man's mind opened under weight of cloud. To penetrate the dark was it endowed; Stood day before a vision shooting wide. Whereat the spectral enemy lost form; The traversed wilderness exposed its track. He felt the far advance in looking back; Thence trust in his foot forward through the storm.

Under the low-browed tempest's eye of ire, That ere it lightened smote a coward heart, Earth nerved her chastened son to hail athwart All ventures perilous his shrouded Sire; A stranger still, religiously divined; Not yet with understanding read aright. But when the mind, the cherishable mind, The multitude's grave shepherd, took full flight, Himself as mirror raised among his kind, He saw, and first of brotherhood had sight: Knew that his force to fly, his will to see, His heart enlarged beyond its ribbed domain, Had come of many a grip in mastery, Which held conjoined the hostile rival twain, And of his bosom made him lord, to keep The starry roof of his unruffled frame Awake to earth, to heaven, and plumb the deep Below, above, aye with a wistful aim.

The mastering mind in him, by tempests blown, By traitor inmates baited, upward burned; Perforce of growth, the Master mind discerned, The Great Unseen, nowise the Dark Unknown. To whom unwittingly did he aspire In wilderness, where bitter was his need: To whom in blindness, as an earthy seed For light and air, he struck through crimson mire. But not ere he upheld a forehead lamp, And viewed an army, once the seeming doomed, All choral in its fruitful garden camp, The spiritual the palpable illumed.

This gift of penetration and embrace, His prize from tidal battles lost or won, Reveals the scheme to animate his race: How that it is a warfare but begun; Unending; with no Power to interpose; No prayer, save for strength to keep his ground, Heard of the Highest; never battle's close, The victory complete and victor crowned: Nor solace in defeat, save from that sense Of strength well spent, which is the strength renewed. In manhood must he find his competence; In his clear mind the spiritual food: God being there while he his fight maintains; Throughout his mind the Master Mind being there, While he rejects the suicide despair; Accepts the spur of explicable pains; Obedient to Nature, not her slave: Her lord, if to her rigid laws he bows; Her dust, if with his conscience he plays knave, And bids the Passions on the Pleasures browse:-- Whence Evil in a world unread before; That mystery to simple springs resolved. His God the Known, diviner to adore, Shows Nature's savage riddles kindly solved. Inconscient, insensitive, she reigns In iron laws, though rapturous fair her face. Back to the primal brute shall he retrace His path, doth he permit to force her chains A soft Persuader coursing through his veins, An icy Huntress stringing to the chase: What one the flash disdains; What one so gives it grace.

But is he rightly manful in her eyes, A splendid bloodless knight to gain the skies, A blood-hot son of Earth by all her signs, Desireing and desireable he shines; As peaches, that have caught the sun's uprise And kissed warm gold till noonday, even as vines. Earth fills him with her juices, without fear That she will cast him drunken down the steeps. All woman is she to this man most dear; He sows for bread, and she in spirit reaps: She conscient, she sensitive, in him; With him enwound, his brave ambition hers: By him humaner made; by his keen spurs Pricked to race past the pride in giant limb, Her crazy adoration of big thews, Proud in her primal sons, when crags they hurled, Were thunder spitting lightnings on the world In daily deeds, and she their evening Muse.

This man, this hero, works not to destroy; This godlike--as the rock in ocean stands;-- He of the myriad eyes, the myriad hands Creative; in his edifice has joy. How strength may serve for purity is shown When he himself can scourge to make it clean. Withal his pitch of pride would not disown A sober world that walks the balanced mean Between its tempters, rarely overthrown: And such at times his army's march has been.

Near is he to great Nature in the thought Each changing Season intimately saith, That nought save apparition knows the death; To the God-lighted mind of man 'tis nought. She counts not loss a word of any weight; It may befal his passions and his greeds To lose their treasures, like the vein that bleeds, But life gone breathless will she reinstate.

Close on the heart of Earth his bosom beats, When he the mandate lodged in it obeys, Alive to breast a future wrapped in haze, Strike camp, and onward, like the wind's cloud-fleets. Unresting she, unresting he, from change To change, as rain of cloud, as fruit of rain; She feels her blood-tree throbbing in her grain, Yet skyward branched, with loftier mark and range.

No miracle the sprout of wheat from clod, She knows, nor growth of man in grisly brute; But he, the flower at head and soil at root, Is miracle, guides he the brute to God. And that way seems he bound; that way the road, With his dark-lantern mind, unled, alone, Wearifully through forest-tracts unsown, He travels, urged by some internal goad.

Dares he behold the thing he is, what thing He would become is in his mind its child; Astir, demanding birth to light and wing; For battle prompt, by pleasure unbeguiled. So moves he forth in faith, if he has made His mind God's temple, dedicate to truth. Earth's nourishing delights, no more gainsaid, He tastes, as doth the bridegroom rich in youth. Then knows he Love, that beckons and controls; The star of sky upon his footway cast; Then match in him who holds his tempters fast, The body's love and mind's, whereof the soul's. Then Earth her man for woman finds at last, To speed the pair unto her goal of goals.