No More Learning

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.