No More Learning

(The knight takes the lady in his arms. )

L.
My lord, I pray you loose me from your arms
Lest that my people see how much we love.

K.
May they not see us? All of them have loved.

L.
But you have been an enemy, my lord,
With walls between us and with moss-grown moats,
Now on a sudden must I kiss your mouth?
I who was taught before I learned to speak
That all my house was hostile unto yours,
Now can I put my head against your breast
Here in the sight of all who choose to come?

K.
Are we not past the caring for their eyes
And nearer to the heaven than to earth?
Look up and see.

L.
I only see your face.

(She touches his hair with her hands.
Murmuring under the tower. )

K.
Why came we here in all the noon-day light
With only darting swallows over us
To make a speck of darkness on the sun?
Let us go down where walls will shut us round.
Your castle has a hundred quiet halls,
A hundred chambers, where the shadows lie
On things put by, forgotten long ago.
Forgotten lutes with strings that Time has slackened,
We two shall draw them close and bid them sing--
Forgotten games, forgotten books still open
Where you had laid them by at vesper-time,
And your embroidery, whereon half-worked
Weeps Amor wounded by a rose's thorn.
Shall I not see the room in which you slept,
Palpitant still and breathing of your thoughts,
Where maiden dreams adown the ways of sleep
Swept noiselessly with damosels and knights
To tourneys where the trumpet made no sound,
Blow as he might, the scarlet trumpeter,
And were the dreams not sometimes brimmed with tears
That waked you when the night was loneliest?
Will you not bring me to your oratory
Where prayers arose like little birds set free
Still upward, upward without sound of flight?
Shall I not find your turrets toward the north,
Where you defied white winter armed for war;
Your southern casements where the sun blows in
Between the leaf-bent boughs the wind has lifted?
Shall we not see the sunrise toward the east,
Watch dawn by dawn the rose of day unfolding
Its golden-hearted beauty sovereignly;
And toward the west look quietly at evening?
Shall I not see all these and all your treasures?
In carven coffers hidden in the dark
Have you not laid a sapphire lit with flame
And amethysts set round with deep-wrought gold,
Perhaps a ruby?

L.
All my gems are yours
And all my chambers curtained from the sun.
My lord shall see them all, in time, in time.


(The sun begins to sink.