No More Learning

Should I not stumble in my gait,
Were there no Vashti, and with her a welcome
I do not need to buy, since all she wants
Is that I love her? Going in unto her
I may unstrap my burdenous pack of kingship,
Shift me of reign, and escape my splendour.
Yea, and strange largeness in this power of love
For men too much limited! Now I am sick
Of knowing my greatness, now I want to be
Placed where my soul can feel vast room about me,
To be contained. Outside, among the men,
I am the room of the world; I and my rule
Contain the world; and I am sick thereof.
Vashti can remedy this; for here thy beauty
More spacious is for my senses to be in,
Than his own golden kingdom for the sun.

_Vashti_.
Thine eyes are glad with me? I please the King?

_Ahasuerus_.
Eyes? But there is no nerve thou takest not,
No way of my life thronging not with thee,
And my blood sounds at the story of thy beauty.
What thing shall be held up to woman's beauty?
Where are the bounds of it? Yea, what is all
The world, but an awning scaffolded amid
The waste perilous Eternity, to lodge
This Heaven-wander'd princess, woman's beauty?
The East and West kneel down to thee, the North
And South, and all for thee their shoulders bear
The load of fourfold place. As yellow morn
Runs on the slippery waves of the spread sea,
Thy feet are on the griefs and joys of men
That sheen to be thy causey. Out of tears,
Indeed, and blitheness, murder and lust and love,
Whatever has been passionate in clay,
Thy flesh was tempered. Behold in thy body
The yearnings of all men measured and told,
Insatiate endless agonies of desire
Given thy flesh, the meaning of thy shape!
What beauty is there, but thou makest it?
How is earth good to look on, woods and fields
The seasons' garden, and the courageous hills,
All this green raft of earth moored in the seas?
The manner of the sun to ride the air,
The stars God has imagined for the night?
What's this behind them, that we cannot near,
Secret still on the point of being blabbed,
The ghost in the world that flies from being named?
Where do they get their beauty from, all these?
They do but glaze a lantern lit for man,
And woman's beauty is the flame therein
Feeding on sacred oil, man's desire,
A golden flame possessing all the earth.
Or as a queen upon an embassage
From out some mountain-guarded far renown,
Brings caravans stockt from her slavish mines,
Her looms and forges, with a precious friendship;
So comest thou from the chambers of the stars
On thy famed visit unto man the king;
So bringing from the mints and shops of Heaven,
Where thou didst own labours of all the fates,
A shining traffic, all that man calls beauty:
There is no holding out for the heart of man
Against thee and such custom. O hard to be borne,
Often hard to be borne is woman's beauty! --
And well I guess it does but cover up
Enmity, hanging falseness between our souls,
And buy at a dishonest price the mouth
True nature hath for thee, to speak thee fair.
Were not man's thought so gilded with thy beauty,
Woman, and caught in the desire of thee,
O, there'ld be hatred in his use of thee.
You should be thankful for your pleasantness!

_Vashti_.