No More Learning

And what am I to know? --This must, no doubt,
Content me, that we are as wine, and men
By us have senses drunk against his toil
Of knowing himself, for all his boasting mind,
Caught by the quiet purpose of the world,
Burnt up by it at last, like something fallen
In molten iron streaming. But I know
Not drunken may man's soul master his world;
And I now make for woman a new mood,
Wherein she will not bear to know herself
A heady drug for man. --I will not come.

_Poet_.
I, who have brought thy insult on the King,
Will scarce escape his judgment. But not this
My pleading. Seest thou not how wonderfully
The mean affairs of living fill with gleam,
Like pools of water lying in the sun,
Because above men's minds renown of thee,
The certain knowledge of beauty, now presides?
It must not be that thou, for a whim of scorn,
Wilt let thyself be made unseen, unheard of.
Beauty is known in thee; but, without thee,
It is a rumour buzzing hardly heard.
And without beauty men are scurrying ants,
Rapid in endless purpose unenjoyed;
Or newts in holes under the banks of ponds,
Feeding and breeding without sound or light.
For the one thing that is the god in man
Is a delight that admirably knows
Itself delighted; and it is but beauty.
And thou art beauty known.

_Vashti_.
Truly, I say,
I know not how to bear it; that for you
To feel yourselves, though in the depth of the world,
Dizzy, and thence as if elate on high,
We women are devised like drunkenness.
And what are we to make of ourselves here,
When in the joy of us you think the world
No more than your spirits crying out for joy?
Is this your love, to dream a god of man,
And women to keep as wine to make you dream? --
Now, back! or the eunuchs handle thee.

[_He goes_.

_Vashti_.
You will not hear of me after this night,
And thus I say farewell. It may be, far
In time not yet appointed, our life's spirit
Will know its fate, through all the thickets of grief,
As simply and as gladly as one's eyes
Greet the blue weather shining behind trees.
Yea, and I think there will be more than this:
Is not the world a terrible thing, a vision
Of fierce divinity that cares not for us?
Do we not seem immortal good desire,
Mortally wronged by capture in swift being
Made of a world that holds us firm for ever?
And yet is it not beautiful, the world?
How read you that? How is our wrong delightful?
Thus it is: Spirit finding the world fair,
Is spirit in dim perception of its own
Radiant desire piercing the worldly shadow.
But what is dim will become glorious clear:
All in a splendour will the Spirit at last
Stand in the world, for all will be naught else
But Spirit's own perfect knowledge of itself;
Yea, this dark mighty seeming of the world
Is but the Spirit's own power unsubdued;
And as the unruled vigours of thought in sleep
Crowd on the brain, and become dream therein;
So the strange outer forces of man's spirit
Are the appearing world. But all at last,
Subdued, becomes self-knowing ecstasy,
The whole world brightens into Spirit's desire.