No More Learning

_Judith_.
That was the cunning world.
It moved me by your grief to give myself
Into the pleasure of its ravenous love.

_A Citizen_.
Judith, if thy hot spirit beareth still
Indignant suffering of villainy,
Think, that thou hast no wrong from it. Such things
Are in themselves dead, and have only life
From what lives round them. And around thee glory
Lives and will force its splendour on the harm
Thy purity endured, making it shine
Like diamond in sunlight, as before
Unviolated it could not.

_Judith_.
Ay, to you
I doubt not I seem admirable now,
Worthy of being sung in loudest praise;
But to myself how seem I?

_A Citizen_.
Surely as one
Whose charity went down the stairs of hell,
And barter'd with the fiends thy sacredest
For our deliverance.

_Judith_.
And that you praise! --
I was a virgin spirit. Whence I come
I know not, and I care not whither I go.
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.