Is it
defilement
to hear love spoken?
Lascelle Abercrombie
(_She must not kiss me! Ah, it leaves my heart
Aghast, and stopt with pain of the joy of her;
And her loved body is like an agony
Clinging upon me. O she must not kiss me!
I will not be a thing excruciated
To please her passion, an anguish of delight! _)
PART III
VIRGINITY AND PERFECTION
JUDITH
I
THE BESIEGED CITY OF BETHULIA
JUDITH (_at the window of an upper room of her house_).
This pitiable city! --But, O God,
Strengthen me that I bend not into scorn
Of all this desperate folk; for I am weak
With pitying their lamentable souls.
Ah, when I hear the grief wail'd in the streets,
And the same breath their tears nigh strangle, used
To brag the God in them inviolate
And fighting off the hands of the heathen,--Lord,
Pardon me that I come so near to scorn;
Pardon me, soul of mine, that I have loosed
The rigour of my mind and leant towards scorn! --
Friends, wives and husbands, sons and daughters, dead
Of plague, famine, and arrows: and the houses
Battered unsafe by cannonades of stone
Hurled in by the Assyrians: the town-walls
Crumbling out of their masonry into mounds
Of foolish earth, so smitten by the rams:
The hunger-pangs, the thirst like swallowed lime
Forcing them gulp green water maggot-quick
That lurks in corners of dried cisterns: yea,
Murders done for a drink of blood, and flesh
Sodden of infants: and no hope alive
Of rescue from this heat of prisoning anguish
Until Assyrian swords drown it in death;--
These, and abandoned words like these, I hear
Daylong shrill'd and groan'd in the lanes beneath.
What needeth Holofernes more? The Jews,
The People of God, the Jews, lament their fortune;
Their souls are violated by the world;
Jewry is conquered; and the crop of men
Sown for the barns of God, is withered down,
Like feeblest grass flat-trodden by the sun,
In one short season of fear. Yea, swords and fire
Can do no more destruction on this folk:
A fierce untimely mowing now befits
This corn incapable of sacred bread,
This field unprofitable but to flame!
What should the choice of God do for a people,
But give them souls of temper to withstand
The trying of the furnace of the world? --
And they are molten, and from God's device
Unfashion'd, crazed in dismay; yea, God's skill
Fails in them, as the skill a founder put
In brass fails when the coals seize on his work.
For this fierce Holofernes and his power,
This torture poured on the city, is no more
Than a wild gust of wicked heat breathed out
Against our God-wrought souls by the world's furnace.
No new thing, this camp about the city:
Nebuchadnezzar and his hosted men
But fearfully image, like a madman's dream,
The fierce infection of the world, that waits
To soil the clean health of the soul and mix
Stooping decay into its upward nature.
Soul in the world is all besieged: for first
The dangerous body doth desire it;
And many subtle captains of the mind
Secretly wish against its fortune; next,
Circle on circle of lascivious world
Lust round the foreign purity of soul
For chance or violence to ravish it.
But the pure in the world are mastery.
Divinely do I know, when life is clean,
How like a noble shape of golden glass
The passions of the body, powers of the mind,
Chalice the sweet immortal wine of soul,
That, as a purple fragrance dwells in air
From vintage poured, fills the corrupting world
With its own savour. And here I am alone
Sound in my sweetness, incorrupt; the rest
(They noise it unashamed) are stuff gone sour;
The world has meddled with them. They have broacht
The wine that had pleas'd God to flocking thirst
Of flies and wasps, to fears and worldly sorrows.
Nay, they are poured out into the dung of the world,
And drench, pollute, the fortune of their state,
When they should have no fortune but themselves
And the God in them, and be sealed therein.
Ah, my sweet soul, that knoweth its own sweetness,
Where only love may drink, and only--alas! --
The ghost of love. But I am sweet for him,
For him and God, and for my sacred self!
But hark, a troop of new woe comes this way,
Making the street to ring and the stones wet
With cried despair and brackish agony.
CITIZENS _lamenting in the street below_.
They have crawled back like beasts dying of thirst,
The life all clotted in them. They went out
Soldiers, and back like beaten dogs they came
Breathing in whines, slow maimed four-footed things
On hands and knees degraded, groaning steps.
Their brains were full of battle, they were made
Of virtue, brave men; now in their brains shudder
Minds that cringe like children burnt with fever.
Often they stood to face the enemies' ranks
All upright as a flame in windless air,
Wearing their arm and the bright skill of swords
Like spirits clad in flashing fire of heaven;
And now in darken'd rooms they lie afraid
And whimper if the nurse moves suddenly. --
Ah God, that such an irresistible fiend,
Pain, in the beautiful housing of man's flesh
Should sleep, light as a leopard in its hunger,
Beside the heavenly soul; and at a wound
Leap up to mangle her, the senses' guest! --
That in God's country heathen men should do
This worse than murder on men full of God!
_Judith_.
What matter of new wailing do your tongues
Wear in this shivering misery of sound?
_A Citizen_.
The captains which were chosen to go out
And treat with Holofernes have come back.
_Judith_.
And did the Ninevite demon treat with them?
_A Citizen_.
The words they had from him were flaying knives,
And burning splinters fixt in their skinless flesh,
And stones thrown till their breasts were broken in.
_Judith_.
What, torture our embassage?
_A Citizen_.
Yea, for he means
Nothing but death to all the Jews he takes.
_Another_.
There was a jeering word tied round the neck
Of each tormented man: "Behold, ye Jews,
These chiefs of yours have learnt to crawl in prayer
Before the god Nebuchadnezzar; come,
Leave your city of thirst and your weak god,
And learn good worship even as these have learnt. "
_Another_.
I saw them coming in: O horrible!
With broken limbs creeping along the ground--
_Judith_.
Were I a man among you, I would not stay
Behind the walls to weep this insolence;
I'ld take a sword in my hand and God in my mind,
And seek under the friendship of the night
That tent where Holofernes' crimes and hate
Sleep in his devilish brain.
_A Citizen_.
There is no night
Where Holofernes sleeps, as thou couldst tell.
Didst thou not shut thyself up in thine ease
Away from the noise and tears of common woe.
Come to the walls this evening, and I'll show thee
The golden place of light, the little world
Of triumphing glory framed in midst of the dark,
Pillar'd on four great bonfires fed with spice,
Enclosing in a globe of flame the tent
Wherein the sleepless lusts of Holofernes
Madden themselves all night, a revel-rout
Of naked girls luring him as he lies
Filling his blood with wine, the scented air
Injur'd marvellously with piping shrills
Of lechery made music, and small drums
That with a dancing throb drive his swell'd heart
Into desires beyond the strength of man.
_Judith_.
And this beast is thine enemy, God!
_Another Citizen_.
Nor beast,
Nor man, but one of those lascivious gods
Our lonely God detests, Chemosh or Baal
Or Peor who goes whoring among women.
_Another_.
And now come down braving in God's own land,
Pitching the glory of his fearful heaven
All night among God's hills.
_Judith_.
You fools, he is
A life our God could snap as a woman snaps
Thread of her sewing.
_A Citizen_.
Who shall break him off,
Who on the earth, from his huge twisted power?
_Another_.
For in his brain, as in a burning-glass
Wide glow of sun drawn to a pin of fire,
Are gathered into incredible fierceness all
The rays of the dark heat of heathen strength.
_Another_.
His eyes, they say, can kill a man.
_Another_.
And sure
No murder could approach his naming nights.
_Another_.
Unless it came as a woman at whose beauty
His lust hath never sipt; for into his flesh
To drink unknown desirable limbs as wine
Torments him still, like a thirst when fever pours
A man's life out in drenching sweats.
_Judith_.
Peace, peace;
The siege hath given you shameless tongues, and minds
No more your own: yea, the foul Ninevite
Hath mastered you already, for your thoughts
Dwell in his wickedness and marvel at it.
Hate not a thing too much, lest you be drawn
Wry from yourselves and close to the thing ye hate.
_A Citizen_.
We know thy wisdom, Judith; but our lives
Belong to death; and wisdom to a man
Dying, is water in a broken jar.
_Judith_.
Yea, if thou wilt die of a parching mouth.
_A Citizen_.
Thou art rich, and thou hast much cool store of wine.
But the town thirsts, and every beat of our blood
Hastens us on to maniac agony.
The Assyrians have our wells, and half the tanks
Are dry, and the pools shoal with baking mud:
The water left to us is pestilent.
And therefore have we asked the governors
For death: and it is granted us.
_Another_.
Five days
Hath Prince Ozias bidden us endure.
_Another_.
For there are still fools among us who dare trust
God has not made a bargain of our lives.
_Another_.
We are a small people, and our war is weak:
Who knows whether our God doth not desire
Armies and great plains full of spears and horses,
And cities made of bronze and hewn white stone
And scarlet awnings, throng'd with sworded men,
To shout his name up from the earth and kill
All crying at the gates of other heavens;
And hath grown tired of peaceable praise and folk
That in a warren of dry mountains dwell,
Whose few throats can make little noise in heaven.
_A Young Man_.
For sure God's love hath wandered to strange nations;
His pleasure in the breasts of Jerusalem
Is a delight grown old. Yea, he would change
That shepherd-woman of the earthly cities,
Whose mind is as the clear light of her hills,
Full of the sound of a hundred waters falling;
And poureth his desire out, belike,
Upon that queen the wealth of the world hath clad,
Babylon, for whose golden bed the gods
Wrangle like young men with great gifts and boasts;
Whose mind is as a carbuncle of fire,
Full of the sound of amazing flames of music.
_Another_.
Yea, what can Israel offer against her,
Whom the rich earth out of her mines hath shod,
And crowned with emeralds grown in secret rocks,
Who on her shoulders wears the gleam of the sea's
Purple and pearls, and the flax of Indian ground
Is linen on her limbs cool as moonlight,
And fells of golden beasts cover her throne;
Whose passion moves in her thought as in the air
Melody moves of flutes and silver horns:
What can Jerusalem the hill-city
Offer to keep God's love from Babylon?
_Judith_.
What but the beauty of holiness, and sound
Of music made by hearts adoring God?
You that speak lewdly of God, you yet shall see
Jerusalem treading upon her foes.
But what was that of five days one of you spoke?
_A Citizen_.
Ozias sware an oath: hast thou not heard?
_Judith_.
No, for I keep my mind away from your tongues
Wisely. Who walks in wind-blown dust of streets,
That hath a garden where the roses breathe?
_A Citizen_.
I have no garden where the roses breathe;
I have a city full of women crying
And babies starving and men weak with thirst
Who fight each other for a dole of water.
_Another_.
Not only thou hast pleasant garden-hours,
Judith, here in Bethulia; the Lord Death
Has bought the city for his garden-close,
And saunters in it watching the souls bloom
Out of their buds of flesh, and with delight
Smelling their agony.
_Another_.
But in five days
Either our God will turn his mind to us,
Or, if he careth not for us nor his honour,
Ozias will let open the main gate
And let the Assyrians end our dreadful lives.
_Judith_.
O I belong to a nation utterly lost!
God! thou hast no tribe on the earth; thy folk
Are helpless in the living places like
The ghosts that grieve in the winds under the earth.
Remember now thy glory among the living,
And let the beauty of thy renown endure
In a firm people knitted like the stone
Of hills, no mischief harms of frost or fire;
But now dust in a gale of fear they are.
They have blasphemed thee; but forgive them, God;
And let my life inhabit to its end
The spirit of a people built to God. --
So you have given God five days to come
And help you? You would make your souls as wares
Merchants hold up to bidders, and say, "God,
Pay us our price of comfort, or we sell
To death for the same coin"? Five days God hath
To find the cost of Jewry, or death buys you?
_A Citizen_.
Here comes Ozias: ask him.
_Judith_.
Hold him there.
[JUDITH _comes down into the street_.
_Ozias_.
Judith, I came to speak with thee.
_Judith_.
And I
Would speak with thee. What tale is this they tell
That thou hast sworn to give this people death?
_Ozias_.
In five days those among us who still live
Will have no souls but the fierce anguish of thirst.
If God ere then relieves us, well. If not,
We give ourselves away from God to death.
_Judith_.
Darest thou do this wickedness, and set
Conditions to the mercy of our God?
_Ozias_.
Death hath a mercy equal unto God's. --
Look at the air above thee; is there sign
Of mercy in that naked splendour of fire?
Too Godlike! We are his: he covers us
With golden flame of air and firmament
Of white-hot gold, marvellous to see.
But whom, what heathen land hated of God,
Do his grey clouds shadow with comfort of rain?
Over our chosen heads his glory glows:
And in five days the torment in his city
Will be beyond imagining. We will go
Through swords into the quiet and cloud of death.
_Judith_.
Ozias, wilt thou be an infamy?
Bethulia fallen, all Judea lies
Open to the feet and hoofs of Assyria.
_Ozias_.
Yea, and what doth Judea but cower down
Behind us? There's no rescue comes from there.
We are alone with Holofernes' power.
_Judith_.
But if we hold him off, will he not grant
The meed of a brave fight, captivity? --
Or we may treat with him, make terms for yielding.
_Ozias_.
We know his mind: he hath written it plain
In the torn flesh of our ambassadors.
His mind to us is death; we can but choose
Between sharp swords and the slow slaying of thirst.
_Judith_.
He may torment us if we yield.
_Ozias_.
He may.
But not to yield is grisly and sure torment.
_Judith_.
There must be hope, if we could reckon right!
_Ozias_.
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?
_Judith_.
Thou fool,
Death is nothing to me, and life is all.
But what foul wrong have I done to thee, Ozias,
That thou shouldst go about to put such wrong
Into my life as these defiling words?
_Ozias_.
Is it defilement to hear love spoken?
_Judith_.
Yes! thou hast soiled me: to know my beauty,
Wherewith I loved Manasses, and still love,
Has all these years dwelt in thy heart a dream
Of favourite lust,--O this is foul in my mind.
_Ozias_.
I meant not what thou callest lust, but love.
_Judith_.
What matters that? Thou hast desired me.
And knowing that, I feel my beauty clutch
About my soul with a more wicked shame
Than if I lived corrupt with leprosy.
_Ozias_.
Wilt thou still let the dead have claim on thee?
Judith, wilt thou be married to a grave?
_Judith_.
I am married to my love; and it is vile,
Yea, it is burning in me like a sin,
That when my love was absent, thy desire
Shouldst trespass where my love is single lord.
_Ozias_.
This is but superstition. Love belongs
To living souls. It is a light that kills
Shadows and ghosts haunting about the mind.
Yea, even now when death glooms so immense
Over the heaven of our being, Love
Would keep us white with day amid the dark
Down-coming of the storm, till the end took us.
And joy is never wasted. If we love,
Then although death shall break and bray our flesh,
The joy of love that thrilled in it shall fly
Past his destruction, subtle as fragrance, strong
And uncontrollable as fire, to dwell
In the careering onward of man's life,
Increasing it with passion and with sweetness.
Duty is on us therefore that we love
And be loved. Wert thou made to set alight
Such splendour of desire in man, and yet,
For a grave's sake, keep all thy beauty null,
And nothing be of good nor help to thy kind?
_Judith_.
Help? What help in me?
_Ozias_.
To let go forth
The joy whereof thy beauty is the sign
Into the mind of man, and be therein
Courage of golden music and loud light
Against his enemies, the eternal dark
And silence.
_Judith_.
Ah, not thus. Yet--could I not help? --
Why talk we? What thing should I say to thee
To pierce the pride of lust wrapping thy heart?
How show thee that, as in maidens unloved
There is virginity to make their sex
Shrink like a wound from eyes of love untimely,
So in a woman who hath learnt herself
By her own beauty sacred in the clasp
Of him whom her desire hath sacred made,
There is a fiercer and more virgin wrath
Against all eyes that come desiring her?
[_A Psalm of many voices strikes their ears, and through
the street pass old men chanting, followed and
answered by a troop of young men_.
_Chorus: Old Men_.
Wilt thou not examine our hearts, O Lord God of our strength?
Wilt thou still be blindly trying us? Wilt thou not at length
Believe the crying of our words, that never our knees have bent
To foreign gods, nor any Jewish mouth or brain hath sent
Prayers to beseech the favour of abominable thrones
Worshipt by the heathen men with furnaces, wounds, and groans?
_Young Men_.
And what good in our lives, strength or delighted glee,
Hath God paid to purchase our purity?
Though lust starve in our flesh, still he devises fire
To prove our lives pure as his fierce desire.
With huge heathenish tribes roaring exultant here,
Jewry fights as maid with a ravisher:
Tribes who better than we deal with the gods their lords,
For they pleasantly sin, yet the gods sharpen and drive their swords.
_Old Men_.
Hast thou not tried us enough, Jehovah? Hast thou found any fire
Will draw from our hearts a smoke of burn'd idolatrous desire?
There is none in us, Lord: no other God in us but thee;
Only thy fires make our clean souls glitter with agony.
Pure we are, pure in our prayers, pure our souls look to thee, Lord;
And to be shewn to the world devoured by evil is our reward.
_Young Men_.
We whose hearts were alone giving our God renown,
Under the wheels of hell we are fallen down!
False the heaven we built, fashion'd of purity;
'Tis heathen heavens, made out of sin, stand high.
Come, make much of our God! Comfort his ears with song,
Lest his pride the gods with their laughter wrong,
Seeing, huddled as beasts held by a fearful night
Full of lions and hunger, his folk crouch to the heathen might.
_Old Men_.
Jehovah, still we refrain from crying to the infamous gates
That open easily into the heavens thy mind of jealousy hates.
Power is in them: hast thou no power? Wilt thou not beware
Lest thy mood now press our minds to venturous despair?
_Young Men_.
Fool'd, fool'd, fool'd are our lives, held by the world in jeer;
With crazed eyes we behold veils of enormous fear
Hiding dreadfully those marvellous gates and stairs
Where the heathen delighted with sin throng with their prosperous prayers.
_Old Men_.
Yea, hung like the front of pestilent winds, thunderous dark before
The way into the heathen heavens, terrible curtains pour,
Webs of black imagination and woven frenzy of sin;
And yet we know power on earth belongs to those within.
_Young Men_.
Yea, through Jehovah's jealousy,
Burning dimly at last we see
The great brass made like rigid flame,
The gates of the heavens we dare not name.
Take hold of wickedness! Yea, have heart
To tear the darkness of sin apart;
And find, beyond, our comforted sight
Flash full of a glee of fiery light,--
The gods the heathen know through sin,
The gods who give them the world to win!
_Judith_.
This may I not escape. My world hath need
Of me who still hold God firm in my mind.
It is no matter if I fail: I must
Send the God in me forth, and yield to him
The shaping of whatever chance befall. --
Ozias! hateful thou hast made thyself
To me; for thou hast hatefully soiled my beauty,
My preciousest, given me to attire my soul
For her long marriage festival of life.
Yet I must make request to thee, and thou
Must grant it. When the sun is down to-night,
Quietly set the main gate open: I
Will pass therethrough and treat with Holofernes.
_Ozias_.
What, wilt thou go to be murdered by these fiends?
_Judith_.
Ask nothing, but do simply my request.
_Ozias_.
I will: so thou shalt know the reverent heart
I have for thee, although its worship thou
So bitterly despisest; but thy will
Shall be a sacred thing for me to serve.
Thou hast thy dangerous demand, because
It is thou who askest, it is I who may
Grant it to thee,--this only! Yea, I will send
Thy heedless body among risks that thou,
Looking alone at the great shining God
Within thy mind, seest not; but I see
And sicken at them. Yet do I not require
Thy purpose; whether thy proud heart must have
The wound of death from steel that has not toucht
The peevish misery these Jews call blood;
Whether thy mind is for velvet slavery
In the desires of some Assyrian lord--
Forgive me, Judith! there my love spoke, made
Foolish with injury; and I should be
Unwise to stay here, lest it break the hold
I have it in. I go, and I am humbled.
But thou shalt have thy asking: the gate is thine.
[_He goes_.
_Judith_.
How can it harm me more, to feel my beauty
Read by man's eyes to mean his lust set forth?
Yea, Holofernes now can bring no shame
Upon me that Ozias hath not brought.
But this is chief: what balance can there be
In my own hurt against a nation's pining?
God hath given me beauty, and I may
Snare with it him whose trap now bites my folk.
There is naught else to think of. Let me go
And set those robes in order which best pleased
Manasses' living eyes; and let me fill
My gown with jewels, such as kindle sight,
And have some stinging sweetness in my hair. --
Manasses, my Manasses, lost to me,
Gone where my love can nothing search, and hidden
Behind the vapours of these worldly years,
The many years between me and thy death;
Thine ears are sealed with immortal blessedness
Against our miserable din of living;
Through thy pure sense goeth no soil of grief.
Forgive me! for thou hast left me here to be hurt
And moved to pity by the dolour of men.
The garment of my soul is splasht with sorrow,
Sorrowful noise and sight; and like to fires
Of venom spat on me, the sorrow eats
Through the thin robe of sense into my soul.
And it is cried against me, this keen anguish,
By my own people and my God's;--and thou
Didst love them. Therefore thou must needs forgive me,
That I devise how this my beauty, this
Sacred to thy long-dead joy of desire,
May turn to weapon in the hand of God;
Such weapon as he hath taken aforetime
To sword whole nations at a stroke to their knees,--
Storms of the air and hilted fire from heaven,
And sightless edge of pestilence hugely swung
Down on the bulk of armies in the night.
Such weapon in God's hand, and wielded so,
A woman's beauty may be now, I pray;
A pestilence suddenly in this foreign blood,
A blight on the vast growth of Assyrian weed,
A knife to the stem of its main root, the heart
Of Holofernes. God! Let me hew him down,
And out of the ground of Israel wither our plague!
II
BEFORE THE TENT OF HOLOFERNES
_Holofernes_.
Night and her admirable stars again!
And I again envying her and questioning!
What hast thou, Night, achieved, denied to me,
That maketh thee so full of quiet stars?
What beauty has been mingled into thee
So that thy depth burns with the peace of stars? --
I now with fires of uproarious heat,
Exclaiming yellow flames and towering splendour
And a huge fragrant smoke of precious woods,
Must build against thy overlooking, Stars,
And against thy terrible eternal news
Of Beauty that burns quietly and pure,
A lodge of wild extravagant earthly fire;
Even as under passions of fleshly pleasure
I hide myself from my desiring soul.
[_Enter Guards with_ JUDITH.
_Guard_ 1.
We found this woman wandering in the trenches,
And calling out, "Take me to Holofernes,
Assyrians, I am come for Holofernes. "
_Guard_ 2.
She would not, for no words of ours, unveil,
And something held us back from handling her.
_Guard_ 1.
We think she must be beautiful, although
She is so stubborn with that veil of hers.
_Guard_ 2.
We minded my lord's word, that he be shewn
All the seized women which are strangely fair.
_Holofernes_.
Take off thy veil.
_Judith_.
I will not.
_Holofernes_.
Take thy veil
From off thy face, Jewess, or thou straight goest
To entertain my soldiers.
_Judith_.
I will not.
_Holofernes_.
Am I to tear it, then?
_Judith_.
My lord, thou durst not.
_Holofernes_.
Ha, there is spirit here. I have the whim,
Jewess, almost to believe thee: I dare not!
But tell me who thou art.
_Judith_.
That shalt thou know
Before the night has end.
_Holofernes_.
Take off thy veil.
_Judith_.
Alone for Holofernes am I come.
_Holofernes_.
And there is only Holofernes here.
These fellows are but thoughts of mine; my whole
Army, that treads down all the earth and breaks
The banks of fending rivers into marsh,
Is nought but my forth-going imagination.
Where I am, there is no man else: if I
Appeared before thee in a throng of spears,
I'ld stand alone before thee, girt about
By powers of my mind made visible.
_Judith_.
For captured peasants or for captured kings
Such words would have the right big sound. But I
Am woman, and I hear them not: I say
I will not, before any man but thee,
Make known my face; I am only for thee.
When I have thee alone and in thy tent
I will unveil.
_Holofernes (to the Guards)_.
What! Staring? --Hence, you dogs!
III
IN THE TENT OF HOLOFERNES
_Holofernes (alone with Judith)_.
Thou art the woman! Thou hast come to me! --
O not as I thought! not with senses blazing
Far into my deep soul abiding calm
Within their glory of knowledge, as the vast
Of night behind her outward sense of stars.
Now am I but the place thy beauty brightens,
And of myself I have no light of sense
Nor certainty of being: I am made
Empty of all my wont of life before thee,
A vessel where thy splendour may be poured,
After the way the great vessel of air
Accepts the morning power of the sun.
Now nothing I have known of me remains,
Save that, within me, far as the world is high
Beneath this dawn that gilds my spirit's air,
Some depth, more inward even than my soul,
Troubles and flashes like the shining sea.
O Jewish woman, if thou knewest all
The hunger and the tears the punisht world
Suffers by cause of thee, and of my dream
That thou wert somewhere hidden in mankind!
I could not but obey my dream, and toil
To break the nations and to sift them fine,
Pounding them with my warfare into dust,
And searching with my many iron hands
Through their destruction as through crumbs of marl,
Until my palms should know the jewel-stone
Betwixt them, the Woman who is Beauty,--
Nature so long hath like a miser kept
Buried away from me in this heap of Jews!
Now that we twain might meet, women and men
In every land where I have felt for thee
Have taken desolation for their home,
Crying against me,--and against thee unknowing.
Ah, but I had given over to despair
The mind in me, I ground the stubborn tribes,
I quarried them like rocks and broke them small
And ground them down to flinders and to sands;
But never gleamed the jewel-stone therein,
Naught but the common flint of earth I found.
And in a dreary anger I kept on
Assailing the whole kind of man, because
Some manner of war my soul must needs inhabit.
Like a man making himself in drunken sleep
A king, my soul, drunk with its earthly war,
Kept idle all its terrible want of thee,
Believed itself managing arms with God;
Yea, when my trampling hurry through the earth
Made cloudy wind of the light human dust,
I thought myself to move in the dark danger
Of blinding God's own face with blasts of war!
Until my rage forgot his crime against me,
His hiding thee, the beauty I had dreamt.
Yea and I filled my flesh with furious pleasure,
That in the noise of it my soul should hear
No whispering thought of desperate desire.
Nevertheless, I knew well that my heart's
Sightless imagination lifted his face
Continually awake for news of thee.
But 'twas infirm and crazy waking, like
As when a starving sentry, put to guard
The sleep of a broken soldiery that flees
Through winter of wild hills from hounding foes,
Hath but the pain of frozen wounds, and fear
Feeding on his dark spirit, to watch withal.
And lo,
As suddenly, as blessedly thou comest
Now to my heart's unseeing watch for thee,
As out of the night behind him into the heart,
Drugg'd senseless with its ache, of that lost soldier
An arrow leaps, and ere the stab can hurt,
His frozen waking is the ease of death.
So I am killed by thee; all the loud pain
Of pleasure that had lockt my heart in life,
Wherein with blinded and unhearing face
My hope of thee yet stood and strained to look
And listen for thy coming,--all this life
Is killed before thee; yea, like marvellous death,
Spiritual sense invests my heart's desire;
And round the quiet and content thereof,
The striving hunger of my fleshly sense
Fails like a web of hanging cloth in fire. --
Tell me now, if thou knowest, why thou hast come!
_Judith_.
Sufficeth not for us that I have come? --
Let not unseemly things live in my mouth;
Yet I would praise thee as thou praisest me,
But in a manner that my people use,
Things to approach in song they list not speak.
And song, thou knowest, inwrought with chiming strings,
Sweetens with sweet delay loving desire:
Also thine eyes will feed, and thy heart wonder. --
Balkis was in her marble town,
And shadow over the world came down.
Whiteness of walls, towers and piers,
That all day dazzled eyes to tears,
Turned from being white-golden flame,
And like the deep-sea blue became.
Balkis into her garden went;
Her spirit was in discontent
Like a torch in restless air.
Joylessly she wandered there,
And saw her city's azure white
Lying under the great night,
Beautiful as the memory
Of a worshipping world would be
In the mind of a god, in the hour
When he must kill his outward power;
And, coming to a pool where trees
Grew in double greeneries,
Saw herself, as she went by
The water, walking beautifully,
And saw the stars shine in the glance
Of her eyes, and her own fair countenance
Passing, pale and wonderful,
Across the night that filled the pool.
And cruel was the grief that played
With the queen's spirit; and she said:
"What do I hear, reigning alone?
For to be unloved is to be alone.
There is no man in all my land
Dare my longing understand;
The whole folk like a peasant bows
Lest its look should meet my brows
And be harmed by this beauty of mine.
I burn their brains as I were sign
Of God's beautiful anger sent
To master them with punishment
Of beauty that must pour distress
On hearts grown dark with ugliness.
But it is I am the punisht one.
Is there no man, is there none,
In whom my beauty will but move
The lust of a delighted love;
In whom some spirit of God so thrives
That we may wed our lonely lives?
Is there no man, is there none? "--
She said, "I will go to Solomon. "
_Holofernes_.
I shall not bear it: dreamed, it hath made my life
Fail almost, like a storm broken in heaven
By its internal fire; and now I feel
Love like a dreadful god coming to do
His pleasure on me, to tear me with his joy
And shred my flesh-wove strength with merciless
Utterance through me of inhuman bliss. --
I must have more divinity within me. --
Come to me, slave! [_Calling out to his attendants_.
_Judith_.
Thou callest someone? Alas!
O, where's my veil? --Cry him to stay awhile! --
_Holofernes_.
Thou troubled with such whimsy! --But 'tis no one,
A mere sexless thing of mine.
