No More Learning

One fearful knowledge holds me: that I am
A spirit walking dangerously here.
For the world covets me. I am alone,
And made of something which the world has not,
Unless its substance can devour my spirit.
And it hath devoured me! In Holofernes
It seized me, fed on me; and then gibed on me,
With show of his death scoffing at my rage,--
His death! --He lay there, drunken, glutted with me,
And his bare falchion hung beside the bed,--
Look on it, and look on the blood I made
Go pouring thunder of pleasure through his brain! --
And like a mad thing hitting at the madness
Thronging upon it in a grinning rout,
I my defilement smote, that Holofernes.
But does a maniac kill the frenzy in him,
When with his fists he beats the clambering fiends
That swarm against his limbs? No more did I
Kill my defilement; it was fast within me;
And like a frenzy can go out of me
And dress its hideous motions in my world.
For when I come back here, behold the thing
I murdered in the camp leaps up and yells!
The carrion Holofernes, my defilement,
Dances a triumph round me, roars and rejoices,
Quickened to hundreds of exulting lives.

_A Citizen_.
God help thee in this wildness! Are we then
As Holofernes to thee?

_Judith_.
You are naught
But the defilement that is in me now,
Rejoicing to be lodged safely within me.
You are the lust I entertained, rejoicing
To wreak itself upon my purity.
The stratagems of my ravishment you are,
Rejoicing that the will you serve has dealt
Its power on me. O, I hate you not.
You and your crying grief should have blown past
My heart like wind shaking a fasten'd casement.
But I must have you in. Myself I loathe
For opening to you, and thereby opening
To the demon which had set you on to whine
Pitiably in the porches of my spirit.
You are but noise; but he is the lust of the world,
The infinite wrong the spirit, the virgin spirit,
Must fasten against, or be for ever vile.

_A Citizen_.
But is it naught that we, the folk of God,
Are safe by thee?

_Judith_.
God hath his own devices.
But I would be God's helper! I would be
Known as the woman whom his strength had chosen
To ruin the Assyrians! --O my God,
How dreadfully thou punishest small sins!
If it is thou who punishest; but rather
It is that, when we slacken in perceiving
The world's intent towards us, and fatally,
Enticed out of suspicion by fair signs,
Go from ignoring its proposals, down
To parley,--thou our weakness dost permit.