No More Learning

Therefore we know, in this height-guarded place
Whereto the speed of our desire hath brought us;
Here in this safety crowning, like a fort
Built upon topmost peaks, the height of beauty,--
We know to be glad of life as we were gods
Timelessly glad of deity; yea, to enjoy
Fleshly, spiritual Being till the swift
Torrent of glee (as hurled star-dust can change
Dim earthly weather to a moment like the sun,)
Doth startle life to self-adoring godhead,--
Divine body of Power and divine
Burning soul of Light and self-desire.
And having given ourselves all to amazement,
We are made like a prophesying song
Of life all joy, a bride in the arms of God. --
Yea, God shall marry his people at the last;
And every man and woman who has sworn
That only joy can make this Being sacred,
Weaves at the wedding-garment.

_She_.
Ah, my beloved,
Feelest thou too that out of earth and time
We are transgressing into Heavenly hours?
Or, threading the dark worldly multitude
And making lightning of its path, there comes
A zeal from God posting along our lives.

_He_.
For some eternal pulse hath chosen us,
Some divine anger beats within our hearts.

_She_.
Anger? But how far off is love from anger!

_He_.
Nay, both belong to joy; joy's kind is twain.
And close as in the pouring of sun-flame
Are mingled glory of light and fury of heat,
Joy utters its twin radiance, love and anger;
If joy be not indeed all sacred wrath
With circumstance; indignant memory
Of what hath been, when the new lusts of God
Exulted unimaginably, before
Rigours of law fastened like creeping habit
Upon their measureless wont, and forced them drive
Their ranging music of delighted being
Through the fixt beating tune of a circling world. --
Is not love so?
Amazement of an anger
Against created shape and narrowness?
The bound rage of the uncreated Spirit
Whose striving doth impassion us and the world?
A wrath that thou and I are not one being?

_She_.
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_.