No More Learning

Well, thou and God have five days more to build
A bridge of hope over our broken world.
And, for the town even now fearfully aches
In scalding thirst, not five days had I granted,
Had it not been for somewhat I must say
Secretly to thee.

_Judith_.
Secretly? Then here;
Send off these men to labour at their groans
Elsewhere; for not within my house thou comest;
I'll have no thoughts against God in my house.

[OZIAS _disperses the citizens_.

_Ozias_.
Judith, we are two upright minds in this
Herd of grovelling cowardice. We should,
To spiritual vision which can see
Stature of spirit, seem to stand in our folk
Like two unaltered stanchions in the heap
Of a house pulled down by fire. I know thy soul
Tempered by trust in God against this ruin;
But not in God, but in mortality
Thy soul stands founded; and death even now
Is digging at thy station in the world;
And as a man with ropes and windlasses
Pulls for new building columns of wreckt halls
Down with a breaking fall, so death has rigged
His skill about us, so he will break us down,
Ruin our height and courage; and as stone,
Carved with the beautiful pride of kings, hath made,
Hammer'd to rubble and ground for mortar, walls
Of farms and byres, our kill'd and broken natures,
With all their beauty of passion, yea, and delight
In God, death will shape and grind up to new
Housing for souls not royal as we are,
New flesh and mind for mean souls and dull hearts:
For death is only life destroying life
To roof the coming swarms in mortal shelter
Of flesh and mind experienced in joy.

_Judith_.
Thy specious prologue means no good, I trow.
Thou wert to tell me wherefore for five days
We may pretend to be God's people still;
Why thou didst not make us over to death
Soon as the folk began to wail despair.

_Ozias_.
This reasoning will tell thee why.
--No need,
I think, to bring up into speech the years
Since in the barley-field Manasses lay
Shot by the sun. I tried (nor failed, I think),
To hold thy soul up from its hurt, and be
Somewhat of sight to thee, until thy long
Blind season of disaster should be changed.
Always I have found friendship in thine eyes;
And pleasant words, and silences more pleasant,
Have made us moments wherein all the world
Left our sequester'd minds; so that I dared
Often believe our friendliness might be
The brink of love.

_Judith_.
Stop! for thou hast enough
Disgraced mine ears.

_Ozias_.
I pray thee hear me out.
The dream of loving thee and being loved
Hath been my life; yea, with it I have kept
My heart drugg'd in a long delicious night
Colour'd with candles of imagined sense,
And musical with dreamt desire. I said,
The day will surely come upon the world,
To scatter this sweet night of fantasy
With morning, pour'd on my dream-feasted heart
Out of thine eyes, Judith. And yet I still
Feared for my dream, even as a maiden fears
The body of her lover. But, in the midst
Of all this charm'd delaying,--behold Death
Leapt into our world, lording it, standing huge
In front of the future, looking at us!
Thou seest now why, when the people came
Crying wildly to be given up to death,
I bade them wait five days? --That I at last
Might stamp the image of my glorious dream
Upon the world, even though it be wax
And the fires are kindling that must melt it out.
Judith, thou hast now five days more to live
This life of beautiful passion and sweet sense:
And now my love comes to thee like an angel
To call thee out of thy visionary love
For lost Manasses, out of ghostly desire
And shadows of dreams housing thy soul, that are
Vainer than mine were, dreams of dear things which death
Hath for ever broken; and lead thy life
To a brief shadowless place, into an hour
Made splendid to affront the coming night
By passion over sense more grandly burning
Than purple lightning over golden corn,
When all the distance of the night resounds
With the approach of wind and terrible rain,
That march to torment it down to the ground.
Judith, shall we not thus together make
Death admirable, yea, and triumph through
The gates of anguish with a prouder song
Than ever lifted a king's heart, who rode
Back from his war, with nations whipt before him,
Into trumpeting Nineveh?