No More Learning

How can they know what thou art, if not first
I tell them what they are themselves, my king?

_Ahasuerus_.
Thou hast a night, man, not a week to tell them.
You men of words, dealers in breath, conceit
Too bravely of yourselves;--O I know why
You love to make man's life a villainous thing,
And pose his happiness with heavy words.
You mean to puff your craft into a likeness
Of what hath been in the great days of the Gods.
When Tiamat, the old foul worm from hell,
Lay coiled and nested in the unmade world,
All the loose stuff dragg'd with her rummaging tail
And packt about her belly in a form,
Where she could hutch herself and bark at Heaven,--
The god's bright soldier, Bel, fashioned a wind;
And when her jaws began her whining rage
Against him, into her guts he shot the wind
And rent the membranes of her life. So you
Wordmongers would be Bel to the life of man.
You like not that his will should heap the world
About him in a fumbled den of toil;
And set the strength of his spirit, not to joy,
But to laborious money; so you stand forth
And think with spoken wind to make such stir
And rumble in the inwards of man's life,
That he in a noble colic will leap up
Out of his cave of work and breathe sweet air.
You will not do it: man prefers his den.
Now leave mankind alone and sing of me.

_Poet_.
So; I will tell thy glory now aright.
I will not make it thy chief wonder, King,
That thou hast tied the world upon a rack;
Or that thy armies be so huge, the earth
Sways like a bridge of planks beneath their march,
And leagues about their way out of the ground
Like thunder comes the rumour of thy vengeance.
These be but shows of kingship; but one thing
Exclaims, inevitably as a word
Announced by God, thee first of the world's souls,--
That thou mayst have in thy arms Vashti the Queen. --
Princes, what looks are these?
Why are your minds astonisht so unwisely?
What, think you war the thing, or pompous fame?
See if I speak not truth of love and woman.
You will have heard how lightning's struck a man,
Shepherd or wayfarer, and when they found
The branded corpse, the rayment was torn off,
Blown into tatters and strewn wide by that
Withering death, and he birth-naked stretcht:
Bethink you, is not that now very like
How woman smites your souls? Whatever dress
Of thought you take to royalize your nature,--
Gorgeous shawls of kingship, a world's fear,
Or ample weavings of imagination,
Or the spun light of wisdom,--like a gust
Of flame, that weather of impersonal thought
You strut beneath, that hanging storm of Love,
Strikes down a terrible swift dazzling finger,
Sight of some woman, on your clothed hearts,
And plucks the winding folly off, and leaves
Bare nature there. And hear another likeness.
Look, if the priests have made an altar-fire,
They can have any flame they list, as gums
Sprinkle the fluel, or salts, or curious earths,--
Tawny or purple, green, scarlet, or blue,
Or moted with an upward rain of sparks;
But first there must be air, or else no fire:
Man's being is 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!