Then in thy conscience, Queen,
Thou feelest the King requiring thanks of thee.
Thou feelest the King requiring thanks of thee.
Lascelle Abercrombie
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_.
Yes, I am thankful. For I hope, my lord,
We women know our style. Ay, we are fooled
Sometimes with heady tampering thoughts, that come
To bother our submission, I confess.
We to ourselves have said, that when God took
The fierce beginning of the unwrought world
From out his fiery passion, and, breathing cool,
Tamed the wild molten being, with his hands
Fashion'd and workt the hot clay into world,
Then with green mercy quieted the land
And claspt it with the summer of blue seas,
With brooches of white spray along the shores,--
It was to be an equal dwelling-place
For humans that he did it, into sex
Unknowably dividing human kind.
But wickedly we say this. God made man
For his delight and praise, and then made woman
For man's delight and praise, submiss to man.
Else wherefore sex? And it is better thus,
To be man's pleasure. What noble work is ours,
To have our bodies proper for your love,
The means of your delight! Ay, and minds too,
Sometimes; we think, we women think we know
What shape of mind pleases our masters best,
And that we build up in us. A tender shyness,
A coy reluctancy,--we use these well.
Man is our master; it is best for us
Persuading him line our captivity
With wool-soft love, lest it be bitter iron.
_Ahasuerus_.
This is the marvel's head, that thou, so fair,
And loved by me, should keep so good a mind.
--They shall not see thee, when I display at large
The riches and the honour; I've enough
Possession, without thee, to stupify
The assembly of my men, my herd of kings.
I mean there shall not be a hint of doubt
About whose world this is. So I have bid,
From all the utter regions of my land,
The kings whom I allow to rule, who breathe
My air, to feast with me and for a while
Flatter their trivial lives with a brief relish
Of being king of the world's kings in Shushan.
Yea, and I will dismay their wits with splendour;
No noise shall be against me in the world.
I am more open, kinder than Lord God,
Who never shows how much he has of thunder;
Wherefore against him men presume, and go
Often out of his ways extravagant.
But all the fear I keep obedient by me
Now to the gather'd world I openly shew.
So God is spoken against, I am never,
And I have a better terror in the world;
And chiefly for the happiness built round me
Divinely firm. O all the kings, my men,
Shall fear this terrible happiness of mine!
But thee I will not shew; I'll have some wealth
Not public. I'll have no adulteries,
No eyes but mine enjoying thee. To me
The sight of thee, all as the touch of thee,
Belongeth, only my pleasure thou art:
None but my senses shall come unto thee,
And I will keep my pleasure pure as Heaven.
Happy art thou, Vashti, to have wedded
One who so dearly rates possession of thee.
Better it is to spend my heart on thee
Than on any of the women that I have.
II
THE FEAST OF KINGS: MIDNIGHT
_Ahasuerus_.
You kings, you thrones that burn about the world,
Whom yet I king, lifted higher above you
Than you are lifted up above your folks:
This is my day. I have agreed with Heaven,
My fellow in the fear of the world, to have
This day unshar'd; and it is all mine,
All that the Gods from baseless fires and steams
Have harden'd into the place and kind of the world:
The great high quiet journey of the stars,
And all the golden hours which the sun
Utters aloft in heaven;--the whole is mine
To fill with ceremonies of my throne.
This one day, I am where Heaven and I
Commonly stand together; you shall not have
Shelter from me in a worshipt God to-day,
Kings; look yonder at many-power'd night,
Telling her beauty to the sea and taking
The prone adoring waters into her blue
Desire, setting them as herself on flame
With perils of joy, lending them her achieved
Raptures, her white experiences of stars.
So shall your souls lie under me these hours;
As they were waters shall they be beneath
My burning, set alight with me, and none
Escape from utterly understanding me
And why I am so kindled in my soul.
Who has been like to me? My name travels
A hundred seven and twenty languages,
My name a ship upon them, trading fear.
My unseen power weighs upon the heads
Of nations, like the blown abasement given
By sedges when they are wretched to the wind.
Ay, and the farthest goings of the air
Can reach no land my taxes do not labour.
The fear of me is the conscience of the world.
Ahasuerus is a region large
As there is light upon the earth; when dawn
With golden duties celebrates the sun,
It does but serve to fetch the lives I own
Out of shadow flinching into the light,--
Out of sleep's mercy the sore lives that know
Only a penal sun, that are so chapt
In winds of my sent spirit: I care not, I.
For as my flesh out of my father's joy
Came, fraught from him with hunger for like joy,--
As, when roused ages of desire within me
Play with my blood as storms play with the sea,
And all my senses tug one way like sails,
My flesh obeys, and into that perilous dream,
Woman, exults;--so, but much more, my soul,
That had its faculties from far beyond
The tingling loam of flesh, obeys a need:
Conquest, and nations to enjoy with war.
For 'tis a need that rode down out of God
Upon my journeying soul into this world's
Affairs, like smouldering fire besiegers throw
Among a city's roofs, which cannot choose
But take blaze from the whole town's timber; so
My soul's desire for flame hath charred the world.
Till now, as the night full of perfect fires,
I, full of conquests, am large over you.
And you must be like waters underneath me,
Full of my burning; there's no more for me
Now, but to dwell alone in my still soul's
Hoarding of ecstasies, a great place of lusts
Achieved and shining fixt; for every man
Is mine, and every soil is mine, from here
Round to the furthest cliffs that steadfast are
To keep the hoofs of the sea from murdering
The tilled leagues of the land. And by the coasts
I am not kept. Far into the room of waters,
Into the blue middle of ocean's summer,
The white gait of my sea-going war invades.
I have a man here, one who makes with words,
And he shall be my messenger to your hearts.
Not to make much of me; but he's the speech
Of Spirit,--I the dangerous exultation,
The Spirit's sacred joy in wrath against
The heaps of its own spent kinds, melting anew
To found in another image of itself.
He is the man to shew you, withinside
The flashing and exclaim of my great moving
About the places of the world; within
The heat of my pleasure that has molten down,
Like ingots in a furnace, all your nations
Into my likeness treading on the earth;
Within the smokes that make your eyes pour grief,
This gleam of infinite purpose quietly nested,--
That I am given the world, and that my pleasure
Is plain the latest word spoken by God.
So while our senses go among these wines,
Wander in green deliciousness and crimson,
And fragrance searches the else-unsearchable brain,
Poet, tell out the glory of the king.
_The Poet_.
The glory of the king of all the kings. --
You with the golden power on your brows,
You kings, I think you know not what you are.
First you shall learn yourselves: for neither light
Understandeth itself, nor darkness light.
You see your glory; but you cannot see
That which your glory conquers; and the peoples
Know nought but that the glooming of their night
Maketh a shining scope for crowns, as he,
Even as he, your king, Ahasuerus,
Maketh your splendour a darkness for his light.
But I, neither belonging to the kings
Nor to the people, only I may know
The golden fortune of light anointing kings.
Come with me now, and take my vision awhile.
The people of this world are misery.
What doth Man here? How thinketh God on him?
Surely he was sent here as if thereby
God might forget him. Like infamous desire
A wise heart puts aside, which yet remains
A secret hated memory, man was
In God, and is vainly discarded here.
I see him coming here; I see man's life
Falling into this base and desert ground,
This world that seems an evil riddance thrown
Down by the winds of God's swift purposes;
Some shame of grossness, that would cling upon
The errand of their holy speed, and here
Heapt up and strewn into the place wherein
The mind and being of man wander darkly.
Behold him coming here! --Against my sight,
Warning aback the gleam of sacred heaven,
Is vast forbiddance raised; creatures like hills,
Or darkness surging at the coasts of light,
Stand, a great barricade behind our lives,
Rankt as Eternity had put on stature.
The sharp sides of the peaks are finger'd white
With flame, lit by the fires of God beyond;
The rest is night; the whole people of dark hills
A front of high impenetrable doom.
But lo!
Black in the blackness, is a yawn in the doom,
And out of it flows the kind of man. Behold,
It is a river, through the permission sent
As through a snarling breakage in a cliff;
Turned like a hated thing away from God;
Spat out, the water of man's life, to spill
Down bleak gullies, and thrid the gangways dark
Through the reluctant hills, pouring as if
It knew God were ashamed of it. And thence,
Rejected down the abhorring steeps, man's life
Is wasted in this country, set to run
A blind, ignorant, unremembered course,
Treading with hopeless feet of griev'd waters
Unending unblest spaces, the shameful road
Of dirt thickening into slime its flow,
An insane weather driving. For at the issue,
Hovering mightily fledge to beat it on,
A climate of demon's wings o'erarches man,
The hatred God has sent pursuing him.
Fierce hawking spirits wrong him, hungry Cold,
Crazes of Fear and sickening Want, and huge
Injurious Darkness, lord of the bad wings
That pester all the places beyond God,--
These at the door, with lust to embody themselves,
Wait for the naked journey of man's life
To seize it into ache, ravenously.
They never leave, down all its patient way,
To meddle with its waters, till they be sour
As venom, salt as weeping, foully ailing
With foreign evil,--all the sort of desires
Whoring the shuddering life unto their lust.
Behold man's river now; it has travelled far
From that divine loathing, and it is made
One with the two main fiends, the Dark and Cold,
The faithful lovers of mankind. Behold,
Broad it is now become, a plenteous water,
A roomy tide. And lo, what oars are these?
To sweet sung measure rows what happy fleet,
With at the lifted prows banners of flame,
Bravely scaring the darkness to betray
The black embarasst flood sheared by the stems?
Behold, at last God for man's misery
Hath found excuse! Behold his wretchedness
Gilded at last with beauty pleasant to God!
No longer a useless grief is man's life now;
For floating on it, for enjoying it,
A state of barges goes, the state of kings.
They bring a day with them of many lamps,
And as they move, on the black slabbed waters
Red wounds, and green, and golden, do they shoot
About them, beautiful cruelty of light;
And they throw music over the sounding river.
I too am walking on the sea of man;
I watch your singing and your lamps row past;
And under me I hear the river speaking,
The great blind water moaning to itself
For sorrow it was made. But in your blithe ships
Silverly chained with luxury of tune
Your senses lie, in a delicious gaol
Of harmony, hours of string'd enchantment.
Or if you wake your ears for the river's voice,
You hear the chime of fawning lipping water,
Trodden to chattering falsehood by the keels
Of kings' happiness. And what is it to you,
When strangely shudders the fabric of your navy
To feel the thrilling tide beneath it grieving;
Or when its timber drinks the river's mood,
The mighty mood of man's Despair, which runs
Like subtle electric blood through all the hulls,
And tips each masthead with a glimmering candle
Blue pale and flickering like a ghost? For you
Are too much lit to mark a corposant.
Nor yours the stale smell of the unhealthful stream,
Clotted with mud and sullen with its weeds,
Who carry your own air with you, blest sweet
And drencht with many scattered fragrances.
You, sailing in golden ignorance, know not
The anxious flow of life under your way:
Do you not miss half the wonder of you? --
That so your happiness in the thought of God
Stands, that he open'd man's expense of grief
To give your oars unscrupulous room, to be
The buoyancy of your delighted barges,
Sliding with fortunate lanterns and with tunes
And odorous holiday, O kings, O you
The pleasure of God, richly, joyously launcht
On this kind sea, the tame sorrow of Man?
You need poets to reckon your marvellousness----
_Ahasuerus_.
Where is he driving? I set thee not to this;
It was to tell what I, not what they, be.
_Poet_.
How can they know what thou art, if not first
I tell them what they are themselves, my king?
_Ahasuerus_.
Thou hast a night, man, not a week to tell them.
You men of words, dealers in breath, conceit
Too bravely of yourselves;--O I know why
You love to make man's life a villainous thing,
And pose his happiness with heavy words.
You mean to puff your craft into a likeness
Of what hath been in the great days of the Gods.
When Tiamat, the old foul worm from hell,
Lay coiled and nested in the unmade world,
All the loose stuff dragg'd with her rummaging tail
And packt about her belly in a form,
Where she could hutch herself and bark at Heaven,--
The god's bright soldier, Bel, fashioned a wind;
And when her jaws began her whining rage
Against him, into her guts he shot the wind
And rent the membranes of her life. So you
Wordmongers would be Bel to the life of man.
You like not that his will should heap the world
About him in a fumbled den of toil;
And set the strength of his spirit, not to joy,
But to laborious money; so you stand forth
And think with spoken wind to make such stir
And rumble in the inwards of man's life,
That he in a noble colic will leap up
Out of his cave of work and breathe sweet air.
You will not do it: man prefers his den.
Now leave mankind alone and sing of me.
_Poet_.
So; I will tell thy glory now aright.
I will not make it thy chief wonder, King,
That thou hast tied the world upon a rack;
Or that thy armies be so huge, the earth
Sways like a bridge of planks beneath their march,
And leagues about their way out of the ground
Like thunder comes the rumour of thy vengeance.
These be but shows of kingship; but one thing
Exclaims, inevitably as a word
Announced by God, thee first of the world's souls,--
That thou mayst have in thy arms Vashti the Queen. --
Princes, what looks are these?
Why are your minds astonisht so unwisely?
What, think you war the thing, or pompous fame?
See if I speak not truth of love and woman.
You will have heard how lightning's struck a man,
Shepherd or wayfarer, and when they found
The branded corpse, the rayment was torn off,
Blown into tatters and strewn wide by that
Withering death, and he birth-naked stretcht:
Bethink you, is not that now very like
How woman smites your souls? Whatever dress
Of thought you take to royalize your nature,--
Gorgeous shawls of kingship, a world's fear,
Or ample weavings of imagination,
Or the spun light of wisdom,--like a gust
Of flame, that weather of impersonal thought
You strut beneath, that hanging storm of Love,
Strikes down a terrible swift dazzling finger,
Sight of some woman, on your clothed hearts,
And plucks the winding folly off, and leaves
Bare nature there. And hear another likeness.
Look, if the priests have made an altar-fire,
They can have any flame they list, as gums
Sprinkle the fluel, or salts, or curious earths,--
Tawny or purple, green, scarlet, or blue,
Or moted with an upward rain of sparks;
But first there must be air, or else no fire:
Man's being is a fire lit unto God,
And many thoughts colour the sacred flame;
But the air for him, the draught wherein he glows,
The breathing spirit that has turned mere life
Into the hot vehement being of man
Lambent upon the altar of the world,
Is woman and desire of her, nought else.
Behold, we know not what we do at all
When we love women: is it we who love,
Or Destiny rather visiting our souls
In passion? --How shall I name thee what thou art,
Woman, thou dream of man's desire that God
Caught out of man's first sleep and fashioned real?
Deliverance art thou from his own strait thought,
Wind come from beyond the stars
To blow away like mist all the disgrace
Of reasonable bars,
The forgery of time and place,
Whereinto soul was narrowly brought
When it was gridded close behind
The workings of man's mind.
But Woman comes to bless
With an immoderateness,
With a divine excess,
Lust of life and yearn of flesh,
Till there seems naught hindering our souls:
Else we should crawl along the years
Labour'd with measurable joys
No greater than our life,
Things carefully devised against tears;
And as snails harden their sweat
To brittle safety, a carried shell,
So we might build out of our woe of toil
Serious delight.
But to see and hear and touch Woman
Breaks our shell of this accursed world,
And turns our measured days to measureless gleam.
Up in a sudden burning flares
The dark tent of nature pitched about our souls;
And light, like a stound of golden din,
A shadowless light like weather of infinite plains,
Light not narrowed into place,
Amazes the naked nerves of the soul;
And like the pouring of immortal airs
Out of a flowery season,
Over us blows the inordinate desire. --
Ah, who from Hell did the wisdom bring
That would make life a formal thing?
Who has invented all the manner and wont,
The customary ways,
That harness into evil scales
Of malady our living?
But how they shrivel and craze
If love but glance on them!
And as a bowl of glass to shattering
Shivers at a sounding string,
The brittle glittering self of man
At beauty of Woman throbs apieces,
And seems into Eternity spilled
The being it contained.
Let it touch Woman and flesh becomes
Finer and more thrilled
Than air contrived in tune,
Lighter round the soul
Than flame is round burning.
She is God's bribery to man
That he the world endure,
His wage for carrying the weight of being.
Nay, she is rather the eternal lure
Out of form and things that end,
Out of all the starry snares,
Out of the trap of years,
Into measureless desire;
Lest man be satisfied with mind,--
Be never stung into self-hate
At crouching always in the crate
Of prudent knowledge round him wrought,
And so grow small as his own thought.
Kings, think of the woman's body you love best
How the beloved lines twin and merge,
Go into rhyme and differ, swerve and kiss,
Relent to hollows or like yearning pout,--
Curves that come to wondrous doubt
Or smooth into simplicities;
Like a skill of married tunes
Curdled out of the air;
How it is all sung delivering magic
To your pent hamper'd souls!
I tell you, kings, yours are but stammer'd songs
To that enchantment fashion'd for him,
That ceremony of life's powers,
The loveliness of Vashti;
That unbelievable worship made
For King Ahasuerus.
He to whom the loveliest she is given,
Least is bound to ended things,
Belongeth most on earth to Heaven;
Hath the whitest wind of flame
To burn his soul clean of the world,
Clean of mortal imaginings,
And back to the Beauty whence he came.
Now you hear the glory of the king of kings,
That he knows Vashti, that he lives
In this pleasure always.
Ah, could you see her! But perhaps she is
Too fearful in her beauty for most men.
I think she would dismay you, and unhitch
The sinews from their purchase on your bones,
And have you spelled as a wizard spells his ghosts.
Yet 'twould be mercy so to harm your sense.
The truth does not more wonderfully walk,
Whose gestures are the stars, than in her ways
This queen's body sways.
And there is such language in her hair
As the sun's self doth talk.
King, let them see her! lest they return unwise
Of thy true kingship, and among themselves
Imagine that they are even as thou,
Save in the height of throne. Let them perceive
That, having Vashti, there is none like thee:
Others are men; but thou art he whose spirit
Is station'd in the beauty of the queen,
Whose flesh knows such amazement as before
Never beneath the lintels of man's sense
Came, an especial messenger from Heaven.
_Ahasuerus_.
Bring her! let the Queen come crowned before us!
Slaves, fetch here all your light to shine upon
My Vashti's beauty; let there be clear floor;
Make the air worthy her with camphire lit
And frankincense; and fill the hall with flames.
Then gaze, kings, and stare, hunger with your eyes
Upon her face; but within brakes of fear
Fasten your wills, and move not from your seats.
Exult, you thron'd nations, that to your sight
She shall be lent, the pleasure of the king,
She whom to visit so inflames my soul,
That I can judge how God burns to enjoy
The beauty of the Wisdom that he made
And separated from himself to be
Wife to the divine act, mother of heavens. --
Let Vashti come and stand before the kings!
III
VASHTI AND THE KING'S WOMEN AT THEIR FEAST
_1st Woman_.
Queen, is it well to be so sorrowful?
_2nd Woman_.
And when the King our lord spendeth on us
This festival out of his rich heart, to shoot
Thy looks upon us as thou wouldst rebuke us?
_Vashti_.
Your pardon: do I trouble your greed?
_1st Woman_.
Our greed?
Rather our gratitude----
_2nd Woman_.
That we have share
In these devices of the King's own cooks,
These costly breads,--
_1st Woman_.
And these delicious meats,
These sauces mixt of spicy treacle and balm.
_3rd Woman_.
And wines, purple and blue and like gold fire,
Made of the colours of the morning sea
And fragrance wild as woman's need of love.
_Vashti_.
Enjoy them then: who lets you?
_3rd Woman_.
Thou dost, Queen.
Thou sittest with hands folded in thy robe,
And in the midst of delicacies wilt fast.
_1st Woman_.
We see thine eyes upon them as they were
Wickedness.
_2nd Woman_.
'Tis rare bounty that we women
Halve with the King his festival.
_3rd Woman_.
And thou,
It seems, scarce findest it thankworthy.
_Vashti_.
Again,
Your pardon: but ye need not gaze on me. --
And yet, why am I sorrowful? In truth,
Is it a sorrow that so leans upon me?
I know not. But my soul knoweth right well
That I am watched.
_3rd Woman_.
Then in thy conscience, Queen,
Thou feelest the King requiring thanks of thee.
_Vashti_.
Be careful of thy tongue,--and of the wine. --
Who watches me? Eyes are fixt on my soul,
Eyes of desire. I think some great event
Hath pusht its spirit forward of its time,
To stand here quietly waiting, into my mind
Inflicting its strange want of me, and ready
To fetch my heart, and ready to take my hand
And lead me away shrinking: is it Death?
It is some marvellous thing: for I know surely
Behind it crowd out of their discipline
The coming hours to watch me seized, and stare
With questioning brows on me, and lift lean hands
From under gowns of shadow to point me out
One to another, saying: "This is she:
How will she bear it, think ye? "--Is it not cold?
Was there not wind just then? --The flames are steady.
_1st Woman_.
No wind at all: the air's like one closed room.
_2nd Woman_.
There is no talk like this at the King's feast,
I warrant. Were we not best be merry,
And thank the King so for these wines and sweets?
_Vashti_.
Yes, let us not forget our thankfulness;
For is not, sisters, everything we have
Mere gift?
_2nd Woman_.
My beauty pays for what I get.
_Vashti_.
I would, 'twere not so.
_2nd Woman_.
Queen, I doubt thee not.
_Vashti_.
Pert little fool, where lies thy beauty, then?
Thou hast it not: its place is not thy flesh,
But the delighting loins of men, there only.
Thy beauty! And thou knowest not that man
Hath forged in his furnace of desire our beauty
Into that chain of law which binds our lives--
Man, please thyself, and woman, please thou man.
But thou wilt have thy beauty pence, thou sayest?
And what's thy purchase? Listen, I will tell thee:
Just that thou art not whipt and drudged: the rest,
All that thou hast beyond, is gift.
_2nd Woman_.
Why not?
_Vashti_.
Truly, for thee, why not?
_2nd Woman_.
Wouldst thou, 'twere yours?
_1st Woman_.
Thou shudderest again; what ails thee, Queen?
_Vashti_.
I would have lived in beauty once.
_2nd Woman_.
In whose?
_Vashti_.
I know the King finds relish in thy looks,
Wench, and I have no care to grudge thy pride;
But when thy face is named throughout the world
For wonder, I will bear thy impudence.
_1st Woman_.
But tell us, Queen, thy thought; for we have made
An end almost of eating; and it seems
It will be somewhat strange, pleasing our mood.
_Vashti_.
Strange you will find it doubtless; but scarce pleasing,
Unless 'tis pleasing to have news of danger.
Listen! your lives are propt like a rotten house.
Your souls, that should have noble lodging here,
Have crept like peasants into huts that have
No force within their walls, but must be shored
With borrowed firmness. Yea, man's stubborn lust
To feed his heart upon your beauty, is all
The strength your lives have, all that holdeth you
Safe in the world,--propt like a rotten house.
_1st Woman_.
Shall woman then not love to have man's love?
_3rd Woman_.
To feed his heart on us, thou sayest? O yea!
And how can a woman know such might of living
As when upon her breast she feels the man,
The man of her desire, like sacrament
Feeding his heart, yea and his soul, on her?
_Vashti_.
Are we for nought but so to nourish him?
_3rd Woman_.
Thou art too proud, O Queen, too proud and lonely,
And goest apart to have thy thought too much.
'Tis known, too much thought dazes oft a mind,
Till it can learn nought of the signed evil
God hath put in the faces of evil notions,
That spiritual sight may ken them coming
Sly and demure, and safely shut the brain
Ere they be in and swell themselves to lordship.
Hence is it that an evil thought in thee
Hath dared so far, and played its wickedness
Strangely within thee, braving even into speech.
_1st Woman_.
Strangely indeed thy brain's inhabited.
What, is there aught prosperity for woman
But to be shining in the thought of man?
_Vashti_.
I wisht to prosper in the life I had,
That the Gods might approve the flourishing
Their heavenly graft of soul took from my flesh.
Therefore I wisht to love. And I did love. --
There came Ahasuerus conquering
Into my father's land. My fancying hate
Had made a man-beast of him, a thing, like man,
Tall in his walk, but in the mood of his eyes
A beast, and in the noise of his mouth a beast.
He came, and lookt at me; and, in a while,
I saw that he was speaking to me there.
And all the maiden went in me before him,
Swifter than in a moon which looks against
The morning, all the silver courage fails. --
How cam'st thou to the King?
_1st Woman_.
Sold to him, I.
_2nd Woman_.
Bought by him, I: for he had heard of me.
_Vashti_.
I also, sold or bought; nay, rather paid:
Paid like cash to him, that as servant king
My father might have life, and a throne in life.
It mattered nothing then. [_The_ QUEEN _pauses_.
Often in early summer, as I walkt
A girl singing her happiness, beside
The high green corn, holding all earth my own,
I saw, as my feet and my voice past by,
How in its hiding some croucht little beast
Startled, and filled a space of the gentle corn
With plunging quivering fear. And always then
My heart answer'd the fear that shook the corn,
With a sudden doubt in its beating; for I knew
Within my life such rousing of dismay
I myself should watch, with seizing wonder.
It was so: in the midst of my new love,
That promist such a plenty in my soul,
At last some sleeping terror leapt awake,
And made the young growth shiver and wry about
Inwardly tormented. Yea, and my heart
It was, my heart in its hiding of green love,
That took so wildly the approaching sound
Of something strangely fearful walking near.
_3rd Woman_.
A queer tale, this.
_1st Woman_.
A spectre visited you?
_Vashti_.
Indeed, a spectre.
_1st Woman_.
That have I never seen.
Was it the kind with nose and mouth grown sharp
To an eagle's bill, and claws upon its fingers,
The curve of them pasted with a bloody glue?
_Vashti_.
The spectre was--my beauty.
_3rd Woman_.
It is as I said.
O Queen, send for a wise man in the morning;
And let him leech thy spirit.
_4th Woman_.
I've heard, the best
Riddance for evil notions in the mind,
Is for a toad to sit upon the tongue;
While, breathed against the scalp, some power of spells
Loosens the clasp the notion hath digg'd deep
Into the soul; so that it passeth down,
Shaken and mastered, and creeps into the toad,--
_3rd Woman_.
Which gives a foolish kick or start to feel it,--
_4th Woman_.
Then the trapt notion may be easily burnt.
_Vashti_.
Yea? --I think mine would not burn easily.
With fire, with such indignant fire as pride
Yields, when it must destroy itself to feel
The power of the world touch it with humbling flame,--
With such a fire, whose heat you know not of,
Have I assayed this--notion, didst thou say?
And it stood upright, with its shape unquencht,
And lived within the fire.
_3rd Woman_.
Thou hast it wrong.
_4th Woman_.
Thou hast not understood the cure we meant.
_2nd Woman_.
Stop brabbling, fools; I would hear the Queen's mind.
_1st Woman_.
I too; I hate a thing I cannot skill;
And thee and all that lives in thee, O Queen,
I would keep friendly to my spirit; yet
I do suspect something amazing in thee.
_Vashti_.
And if thou seest not how slippery
Is women's place in the world of men, 'tis like
Thou wilt amazedly the vision take,
When I have led thee up my tower of thought.
_2nd Woman_.
How are we dangerous? Are we not women,
Man's endless need?
_Vashti_.
Ay, and therein the danger!
Is it not possible he hate the need?
For not as he were a beast it urges him:
He is aware of it, he knows its force,--
The kind of beasts is in their blood alone,
But man is blood and spirit. And in him,
As in all creature, is the word from God,
"Utter thyself in joy. "
_2nd Woman_.
And we his joy.
_Vashti_.
But such an one that may become, perhaps,
Something not utterance, but strict commanding,
Yea, mastery, like the dancing in the blood
Of one bitten by spiders. And it is Spirit,
Spirit enjoying woman, that hath sent
A beating poison in the blood of man,
The poison which is lust. Spirit was given
To use life as a sense for ecstasy;
Life mixt with Spirit must exult beyond
Sex-madden'd men and sex-serving women,
Into some rapture where sweet fleshly love
Is as the air wherein a music rings.
But blood hath captured Spirit; Spirit hath given
The strength of its desire of joy to make
What ecstasy it may of woman's beauty,
And of this only, doing no more than train
The joys of blood to be more keen and cunning;
As men have trained and tamed wild lives of the forests,
Breeding them to more excellent shape and size
And tireless speed, and to know the words of men.
So the wise masterful Spirit rules the joys
That come all fierce from roaming the dark blood;
They are broken to his desire, they are wily for him,
A pack of lusts wherewith the Spirit hunts
Pleasure; and the chief prey the pleasure hid
In woman.
_1st Woman_.
What joys are these?
_Vashti_.
What joys?
The joys of rutting beasts, tamed to endure,
Tamed to be always swift to answer Spirit,
Yet fiercer for their taming, wilder hungers;
So that the Spirit, if he hunt them not,
Fears to be torn by them in mutiny.
Now know you woman's beauty! 'Tis these joys,
The heat of the blood's desires, changed and mastered
By the desire of spirit, trained to serve
Spirit with lust, spirit with woman enjoy'd.
_2nd Woman_.
Queen, I am beautiful, and cannot boast
Thy subtle thinking; and to one like me,
What matters whence come beauty, so I have it?
Let it be but the witless mating of beasts,
Tamed and curiously knowing itself
And cunning in its own delight: What then?
The nightingale desires his little lass,
And that brings out of his heart a radiant song;
A man desires a woman, and for song
Out of his heart comes beauty, that like flame
Reaches towards her, and covers her limbs with light.
If it so please thee, say that neither loves
Aught but his life's desire, fashioning it
Adorably to marvellous song and beauty.
What then? Enough that the wonder lights on me,
To me is paid the worship of the wonder.
_Vashti_.
O well I know how strong we are in man;
His senses have our beauty for their god,
And his delight is built about us like
Towering adoration, housing worship. --
The spirit of man may dwell in God: the world,
From the soft delicate floor of grass to those
Rafters of light and hanging cloths of stars,
Is but the honour in God's mind for man,
Wrought into glorious imagination.
But women dwell in man; our temple is
The honour of man's sensual ecstasy,
Our safety the imagined sacredness
Fashion'd about us, fashion'd of his pleasure.
Beauty hath done this for us, and so made
Woman a kind within the kind of man.
Yea, there is more than this: a mighty need
Hath man made of his woman in the world.
Now man walks through his fate in fellowship
Of two companion spirits; ay, and these
With double mastery go on with him.
The one in black disgraceful weeds is Toil;
She sows with never-ending gesture all
The path before his feet, cursing the way
She drags him on with growth of flouting crops,
Urchin thistles, and rank flourishing nettles.
But the other has a wear of woven gleam,
And with soft hand beseeches him his face
Away from the hardships of his hurt stung feet,
That with his eyes he may desire her looks:
And she is Beauty of Woman, man's dear blessing.
And if you would be wise, be well afraid
To think you have more office than to be
A sweet delicious while amid man's hours
Of worldly labour: we are too precious, so.
Yet see you not how this that Spirit hath done
Is also dangerous? --For there are mightier needs!
There's no content for Spirit in the world
Till he has striven out of bounded fate,
And sent an infinite desire forth
Into the whole eternity of things.
Yea, spirit ails with loathing secretly
The irremediable force of being;
Unless, with free expatiate desire,
He shape into the endless burning flux
Of starry world blindly adventuring
Some steady righteous destiny for Spirit:
Even as dreaming brain fashions the fume
Of life asleep to marshall'd imagery.
But we are in the way of this: and man,
The more he needs to announce upon the world,
Over him going like a storming air,
That fashioning word which utters the divine
Imagination working in him like anger;
The more he finds his virtue caught and clogged
In the fierce luxury he hath made of woman.
Thence are we sin, thence deliciously
Persuading man refuse his highest ardour.
Too easily kindled was the ecstasy
Of fleshly passion, with a joyous flame
Too readily answering the Spirit's fire!
He burns with us alone, so fragrantly
His noblest vigour swoons delighted. Yea,
Women, I tell you, not far now is man
From hating us, so passionate the joy
Of loving us, so mightily drawing down
Into the service of his pleasure here
All forces of his being. The pleasure soon
Becomes a shame, scarce to be spoken aloud;
And in best minds, either detested doting
Man's joy in woman's beauty will become;
Or a strict binding fire, holding him down
In lust of beauty where no beauty is.
[_The_ KING'S MESSENGER _comes in_.
_Messenger_.
To Vashti, to the Queen of the world, to her
In whom the striving beauty of the world
Hath made perfection, from the King I come.
And the King bids me say, Rise from thy feast;
For thou must be to-night thyself a feast:
The vision of thy loveliness must now
Feed with astonishment my vassals' hearts.
Therefore thou art to come.
_Vashti_.
And tell the King
I will not come.
_Messenger_.
What was there in my words
Thou dost not understand? --I say, the King
Would show thy beauty to his under-kings,
That with this also they may be amazed
And utterly fear his fortune.
_Vashti_.
So. Go back,
Tell the King I have hearkened to his message,
And tell him I will not come.
_Messenger_.
What sickness shall I say has lighted on thee,
So that thou canst not come?
_Vashti_.
Thou weariest me.
Say this to the King, Vashti will not come.
Are they not plain, my words? Canst thou not learn
them?
_Messenger_.
Give me some softer speech. Must I not fear
I shall earn whipping if I take these words?
_Vashti_.
I pray thee, go. Thou art a trouble here;
Seest thou not how all these feasting women
Pause, and the pleasure is distrest in them?
Thou hast thy message: say, She will not come. --
Back to the King, now!
_Messenger_.
_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_.
Yes, I am thankful. For I hope, my lord,
We women know our style. Ay, we are fooled
Sometimes with heady tampering thoughts, that come
To bother our submission, I confess.
We to ourselves have said, that when God took
The fierce beginning of the unwrought world
From out his fiery passion, and, breathing cool,
Tamed the wild molten being, with his hands
Fashion'd and workt the hot clay into world,
Then with green mercy quieted the land
And claspt it with the summer of blue seas,
With brooches of white spray along the shores,--
It was to be an equal dwelling-place
For humans that he did it, into sex
Unknowably dividing human kind.
But wickedly we say this. God made man
For his delight and praise, and then made woman
For man's delight and praise, submiss to man.
Else wherefore sex? And it is better thus,
To be man's pleasure. What noble work is ours,
To have our bodies proper for your love,
The means of your delight! Ay, and minds too,
Sometimes; we think, we women think we know
What shape of mind pleases our masters best,
And that we build up in us. A tender shyness,
A coy reluctancy,--we use these well.
Man is our master; it is best for us
Persuading him line our captivity
With wool-soft love, lest it be bitter iron.
_Ahasuerus_.
This is the marvel's head, that thou, so fair,
And loved by me, should keep so good a mind.
--They shall not see thee, when I display at large
The riches and the honour; I've enough
Possession, without thee, to stupify
The assembly of my men, my herd of kings.
I mean there shall not be a hint of doubt
About whose world this is. So I have bid,
From all the utter regions of my land,
The kings whom I allow to rule, who breathe
My air, to feast with me and for a while
Flatter their trivial lives with a brief relish
Of being king of the world's kings in Shushan.
Yea, and I will dismay their wits with splendour;
No noise shall be against me in the world.
I am more open, kinder than Lord God,
Who never shows how much he has of thunder;
Wherefore against him men presume, and go
Often out of his ways extravagant.
But all the fear I keep obedient by me
Now to the gather'd world I openly shew.
So God is spoken against, I am never,
And I have a better terror in the world;
And chiefly for the happiness built round me
Divinely firm. O all the kings, my men,
Shall fear this terrible happiness of mine!
But thee I will not shew; I'll have some wealth
Not public. I'll have no adulteries,
No eyes but mine enjoying thee. To me
The sight of thee, all as the touch of thee,
Belongeth, only my pleasure thou art:
None but my senses shall come unto thee,
And I will keep my pleasure pure as Heaven.
Happy art thou, Vashti, to have wedded
One who so dearly rates possession of thee.
Better it is to spend my heart on thee
Than on any of the women that I have.
II
THE FEAST OF KINGS: MIDNIGHT
_Ahasuerus_.
You kings, you thrones that burn about the world,
Whom yet I king, lifted higher above you
Than you are lifted up above your folks:
This is my day. I have agreed with Heaven,
My fellow in the fear of the world, to have
This day unshar'd; and it is all mine,
All that the Gods from baseless fires and steams
Have harden'd into the place and kind of the world:
The great high quiet journey of the stars,
And all the golden hours which the sun
Utters aloft in heaven;--the whole is mine
To fill with ceremonies of my throne.
This one day, I am where Heaven and I
Commonly stand together; you shall not have
Shelter from me in a worshipt God to-day,
Kings; look yonder at many-power'd night,
Telling her beauty to the sea and taking
The prone adoring waters into her blue
Desire, setting them as herself on flame
With perils of joy, lending them her achieved
Raptures, her white experiences of stars.
So shall your souls lie under me these hours;
As they were waters shall they be beneath
My burning, set alight with me, and none
Escape from utterly understanding me
And why I am so kindled in my soul.
Who has been like to me? My name travels
A hundred seven and twenty languages,
My name a ship upon them, trading fear.
My unseen power weighs upon the heads
Of nations, like the blown abasement given
By sedges when they are wretched to the wind.
Ay, and the farthest goings of the air
Can reach no land my taxes do not labour.
The fear of me is the conscience of the world.
Ahasuerus is a region large
As there is light upon the earth; when dawn
With golden duties celebrates the sun,
It does but serve to fetch the lives I own
Out of shadow flinching into the light,--
Out of sleep's mercy the sore lives that know
Only a penal sun, that are so chapt
In winds of my sent spirit: I care not, I.
For as my flesh out of my father's joy
Came, fraught from him with hunger for like joy,--
As, when roused ages of desire within me
Play with my blood as storms play with the sea,
And all my senses tug one way like sails,
My flesh obeys, and into that perilous dream,
Woman, exults;--so, but much more, my soul,
That had its faculties from far beyond
The tingling loam of flesh, obeys a need:
Conquest, and nations to enjoy with war.
For 'tis a need that rode down out of God
Upon my journeying soul into this world's
Affairs, like smouldering fire besiegers throw
Among a city's roofs, which cannot choose
But take blaze from the whole town's timber; so
My soul's desire for flame hath charred the world.
Till now, as the night full of perfect fires,
I, full of conquests, am large over you.
And you must be like waters underneath me,
Full of my burning; there's no more for me
Now, but to dwell alone in my still soul's
Hoarding of ecstasies, a great place of lusts
Achieved and shining fixt; for every man
Is mine, and every soil is mine, from here
Round to the furthest cliffs that steadfast are
To keep the hoofs of the sea from murdering
The tilled leagues of the land. And by the coasts
I am not kept. Far into the room of waters,
Into the blue middle of ocean's summer,
The white gait of my sea-going war invades.
I have a man here, one who makes with words,
And he shall be my messenger to your hearts.
Not to make much of me; but he's the speech
Of Spirit,--I the dangerous exultation,
The Spirit's sacred joy in wrath against
The heaps of its own spent kinds, melting anew
To found in another image of itself.
He is the man to shew you, withinside
The flashing and exclaim of my great moving
About the places of the world; within
The heat of my pleasure that has molten down,
Like ingots in a furnace, all your nations
Into my likeness treading on the earth;
Within the smokes that make your eyes pour grief,
This gleam of infinite purpose quietly nested,--
That I am given the world, and that my pleasure
Is plain the latest word spoken by God.
So while our senses go among these wines,
Wander in green deliciousness and crimson,
And fragrance searches the else-unsearchable brain,
Poet, tell out the glory of the king.
_The Poet_.
The glory of the king of all the kings. --
You with the golden power on your brows,
You kings, I think you know not what you are.
First you shall learn yourselves: for neither light
Understandeth itself, nor darkness light.
You see your glory; but you cannot see
That which your glory conquers; and the peoples
Know nought but that the glooming of their night
Maketh a shining scope for crowns, as he,
Even as he, your king, Ahasuerus,
Maketh your splendour a darkness for his light.
But I, neither belonging to the kings
Nor to the people, only I may know
The golden fortune of light anointing kings.
Come with me now, and take my vision awhile.
The people of this world are misery.
What doth Man here? How thinketh God on him?
Surely he was sent here as if thereby
God might forget him. Like infamous desire
A wise heart puts aside, which yet remains
A secret hated memory, man was
In God, and is vainly discarded here.
I see him coming here; I see man's life
Falling into this base and desert ground,
This world that seems an evil riddance thrown
Down by the winds of God's swift purposes;
Some shame of grossness, that would cling upon
The errand of their holy speed, and here
Heapt up and strewn into the place wherein
The mind and being of man wander darkly.
Behold him coming here! --Against my sight,
Warning aback the gleam of sacred heaven,
Is vast forbiddance raised; creatures like hills,
Or darkness surging at the coasts of light,
Stand, a great barricade behind our lives,
Rankt as Eternity had put on stature.
The sharp sides of the peaks are finger'd white
With flame, lit by the fires of God beyond;
The rest is night; the whole people of dark hills
A front of high impenetrable doom.
But lo!
Black in the blackness, is a yawn in the doom,
And out of it flows the kind of man. Behold,
It is a river, through the permission sent
As through a snarling breakage in a cliff;
Turned like a hated thing away from God;
Spat out, the water of man's life, to spill
Down bleak gullies, and thrid the gangways dark
Through the reluctant hills, pouring as if
It knew God were ashamed of it. And thence,
Rejected down the abhorring steeps, man's life
Is wasted in this country, set to run
A blind, ignorant, unremembered course,
Treading with hopeless feet of griev'd waters
Unending unblest spaces, the shameful road
Of dirt thickening into slime its flow,
An insane weather driving. For at the issue,
Hovering mightily fledge to beat it on,
A climate of demon's wings o'erarches man,
The hatred God has sent pursuing him.
Fierce hawking spirits wrong him, hungry Cold,
Crazes of Fear and sickening Want, and huge
Injurious Darkness, lord of the bad wings
That pester all the places beyond God,--
These at the door, with lust to embody themselves,
Wait for the naked journey of man's life
To seize it into ache, ravenously.
They never leave, down all its patient way,
To meddle with its waters, till they be sour
As venom, salt as weeping, foully ailing
With foreign evil,--all the sort of desires
Whoring the shuddering life unto their lust.
Behold man's river now; it has travelled far
From that divine loathing, and it is made
One with the two main fiends, the Dark and Cold,
The faithful lovers of mankind. Behold,
Broad it is now become, a plenteous water,
A roomy tide. And lo, what oars are these?
To sweet sung measure rows what happy fleet,
With at the lifted prows banners of flame,
Bravely scaring the darkness to betray
The black embarasst flood sheared by the stems?
Behold, at last God for man's misery
Hath found excuse! Behold his wretchedness
Gilded at last with beauty pleasant to God!
No longer a useless grief is man's life now;
For floating on it, for enjoying it,
A state of barges goes, the state of kings.
They bring a day with them of many lamps,
And as they move, on the black slabbed waters
Red wounds, and green, and golden, do they shoot
About them, beautiful cruelty of light;
And they throw music over the sounding river.
I too am walking on the sea of man;
I watch your singing and your lamps row past;
And under me I hear the river speaking,
The great blind water moaning to itself
For sorrow it was made. But in your blithe ships
Silverly chained with luxury of tune
Your senses lie, in a delicious gaol
Of harmony, hours of string'd enchantment.
Or if you wake your ears for the river's voice,
You hear the chime of fawning lipping water,
Trodden to chattering falsehood by the keels
Of kings' happiness. And what is it to you,
When strangely shudders the fabric of your navy
To feel the thrilling tide beneath it grieving;
Or when its timber drinks the river's mood,
The mighty mood of man's Despair, which runs
Like subtle electric blood through all the hulls,
And tips each masthead with a glimmering candle
Blue pale and flickering like a ghost? For you
Are too much lit to mark a corposant.
Nor yours the stale smell of the unhealthful stream,
Clotted with mud and sullen with its weeds,
Who carry your own air with you, blest sweet
And drencht with many scattered fragrances.
You, sailing in golden ignorance, know not
The anxious flow of life under your way:
Do you not miss half the wonder of you? --
That so your happiness in the thought of God
Stands, that he open'd man's expense of grief
To give your oars unscrupulous room, to be
The buoyancy of your delighted barges,
Sliding with fortunate lanterns and with tunes
And odorous holiday, O kings, O you
The pleasure of God, richly, joyously launcht
On this kind sea, the tame sorrow of Man?
You need poets to reckon your marvellousness----
_Ahasuerus_.
Where is he driving? I set thee not to this;
It was to tell what I, not what they, be.
_Poet_.
How can they know what thou art, if not first
I tell them what they are themselves, my king?
_Ahasuerus_.
Thou hast a night, man, not a week to tell them.
You men of words, dealers in breath, conceit
Too bravely of yourselves;--O I know why
You love to make man's life a villainous thing,
And pose his happiness with heavy words.
You mean to puff your craft into a likeness
Of what hath been in the great days of the Gods.
When Tiamat, the old foul worm from hell,
Lay coiled and nested in the unmade world,
All the loose stuff dragg'd with her rummaging tail
And packt about her belly in a form,
Where she could hutch herself and bark at Heaven,--
The god's bright soldier, Bel, fashioned a wind;
And when her jaws began her whining rage
Against him, into her guts he shot the wind
And rent the membranes of her life. So you
Wordmongers would be Bel to the life of man.
You like not that his will should heap the world
About him in a fumbled den of toil;
And set the strength of his spirit, not to joy,
But to laborious money; so you stand forth
And think with spoken wind to make such stir
And rumble in the inwards of man's life,
That he in a noble colic will leap up
Out of his cave of work and breathe sweet air.
You will not do it: man prefers his den.
Now leave mankind alone and sing of me.
_Poet_.
So; I will tell thy glory now aright.
I will not make it thy chief wonder, King,
That thou hast tied the world upon a rack;
Or that thy armies be so huge, the earth
Sways like a bridge of planks beneath their march,
And leagues about their way out of the ground
Like thunder comes the rumour of thy vengeance.
These be but shows of kingship; but one thing
Exclaims, inevitably as a word
Announced by God, thee first of the world's souls,--
That thou mayst have in thy arms Vashti the Queen. --
Princes, what looks are these?
Why are your minds astonisht so unwisely?
What, think you war the thing, or pompous fame?
See if I speak not truth of love and woman.
You will have heard how lightning's struck a man,
Shepherd or wayfarer, and when they found
The branded corpse, the rayment was torn off,
Blown into tatters and strewn wide by that
Withering death, and he birth-naked stretcht:
Bethink you, is not that now very like
How woman smites your souls? Whatever dress
Of thought you take to royalize your nature,--
Gorgeous shawls of kingship, a world's fear,
Or ample weavings of imagination,
Or the spun light of wisdom,--like a gust
Of flame, that weather of impersonal thought
You strut beneath, that hanging storm of Love,
Strikes down a terrible swift dazzling finger,
Sight of some woman, on your clothed hearts,
And plucks the winding folly off, and leaves
Bare nature there. And hear another likeness.
Look, if the priests have made an altar-fire,
They can have any flame they list, as gums
Sprinkle the fluel, or salts, or curious earths,--
Tawny or purple, green, scarlet, or blue,
Or moted with an upward rain of sparks;
But first there must be air, or else no fire:
Man's being is a fire lit unto God,
And many thoughts colour the sacred flame;
But the air for him, the draught wherein he glows,
The breathing spirit that has turned mere life
Into the hot vehement being of man
Lambent upon the altar of the world,
Is woman and desire of her, nought else.
Behold, we know not what we do at all
When we love women: is it we who love,
Or Destiny rather visiting our souls
In passion? --How shall I name thee what thou art,
Woman, thou dream of man's desire that God
Caught out of man's first sleep and fashioned real?
Deliverance art thou from his own strait thought,
Wind come from beyond the stars
To blow away like mist all the disgrace
Of reasonable bars,
The forgery of time and place,
Whereinto soul was narrowly brought
When it was gridded close behind
The workings of man's mind.
But Woman comes to bless
With an immoderateness,
With a divine excess,
Lust of life and yearn of flesh,
Till there seems naught hindering our souls:
Else we should crawl along the years
Labour'd with measurable joys
No greater than our life,
Things carefully devised against tears;
And as snails harden their sweat
To brittle safety, a carried shell,
So we might build out of our woe of toil
Serious delight.
But to see and hear and touch Woman
Breaks our shell of this accursed world,
And turns our measured days to measureless gleam.
Up in a sudden burning flares
The dark tent of nature pitched about our souls;
And light, like a stound of golden din,
A shadowless light like weather of infinite plains,
Light not narrowed into place,
Amazes the naked nerves of the soul;
And like the pouring of immortal airs
Out of a flowery season,
Over us blows the inordinate desire. --
Ah, who from Hell did the wisdom bring
That would make life a formal thing?
Who has invented all the manner and wont,
The customary ways,
That harness into evil scales
Of malady our living?
But how they shrivel and craze
If love but glance on them!
And as a bowl of glass to shattering
Shivers at a sounding string,
The brittle glittering self of man
At beauty of Woman throbs apieces,
And seems into Eternity spilled
The being it contained.
Let it touch Woman and flesh becomes
Finer and more thrilled
Than air contrived in tune,
Lighter round the soul
Than flame is round burning.
She is God's bribery to man
That he the world endure,
His wage for carrying the weight of being.
Nay, she is rather the eternal lure
Out of form and things that end,
Out of all the starry snares,
Out of the trap of years,
Into measureless desire;
Lest man be satisfied with mind,--
Be never stung into self-hate
At crouching always in the crate
Of prudent knowledge round him wrought,
And so grow small as his own thought.
Kings, think of the woman's body you love best
How the beloved lines twin and merge,
Go into rhyme and differ, swerve and kiss,
Relent to hollows or like yearning pout,--
Curves that come to wondrous doubt
Or smooth into simplicities;
Like a skill of married tunes
Curdled out of the air;
How it is all sung delivering magic
To your pent hamper'd souls!
I tell you, kings, yours are but stammer'd songs
To that enchantment fashion'd for him,
That ceremony of life's powers,
The loveliness of Vashti;
That unbelievable worship made
For King Ahasuerus.
He to whom the loveliest she is given,
Least is bound to ended things,
Belongeth most on earth to Heaven;
Hath the whitest wind of flame
To burn his soul clean of the world,
Clean of mortal imaginings,
And back to the Beauty whence he came.
Now you hear the glory of the king of kings,
That he knows Vashti, that he lives
In this pleasure always.
Ah, could you see her! But perhaps she is
Too fearful in her beauty for most men.
I think she would dismay you, and unhitch
The sinews from their purchase on your bones,
And have you spelled as a wizard spells his ghosts.
Yet 'twould be mercy so to harm your sense.
The truth does not more wonderfully walk,
Whose gestures are the stars, than in her ways
This queen's body sways.
And there is such language in her hair
As the sun's self doth talk.
King, let them see her! lest they return unwise
Of thy true kingship, and among themselves
Imagine that they are even as thou,
Save in the height of throne. Let them perceive
That, having Vashti, there is none like thee:
Others are men; but thou art he whose spirit
Is station'd in the beauty of the queen,
Whose flesh knows such amazement as before
Never beneath the lintels of man's sense
Came, an especial messenger from Heaven.
_Ahasuerus_.
Bring her! let the Queen come crowned before us!
Slaves, fetch here all your light to shine upon
My Vashti's beauty; let there be clear floor;
Make the air worthy her with camphire lit
And frankincense; and fill the hall with flames.
Then gaze, kings, and stare, hunger with your eyes
Upon her face; but within brakes of fear
Fasten your wills, and move not from your seats.
Exult, you thron'd nations, that to your sight
She shall be lent, the pleasure of the king,
She whom to visit so inflames my soul,
That I can judge how God burns to enjoy
The beauty of the Wisdom that he made
And separated from himself to be
Wife to the divine act, mother of heavens. --
Let Vashti come and stand before the kings!
III
VASHTI AND THE KING'S WOMEN AT THEIR FEAST
_1st Woman_.
Queen, is it well to be so sorrowful?
_2nd Woman_.
And when the King our lord spendeth on us
This festival out of his rich heart, to shoot
Thy looks upon us as thou wouldst rebuke us?
_Vashti_.
Your pardon: do I trouble your greed?
_1st Woman_.
Our greed?
Rather our gratitude----
_2nd Woman_.
That we have share
In these devices of the King's own cooks,
These costly breads,--
_1st Woman_.
And these delicious meats,
These sauces mixt of spicy treacle and balm.
_3rd Woman_.
And wines, purple and blue and like gold fire,
Made of the colours of the morning sea
And fragrance wild as woman's need of love.
_Vashti_.
Enjoy them then: who lets you?
_3rd Woman_.
Thou dost, Queen.
Thou sittest with hands folded in thy robe,
And in the midst of delicacies wilt fast.
_1st Woman_.
We see thine eyes upon them as they were
Wickedness.
_2nd Woman_.
'Tis rare bounty that we women
Halve with the King his festival.
_3rd Woman_.
And thou,
It seems, scarce findest it thankworthy.
_Vashti_.
Again,
Your pardon: but ye need not gaze on me. --
And yet, why am I sorrowful? In truth,
Is it a sorrow that so leans upon me?
I know not. But my soul knoweth right well
That I am watched.
_3rd Woman_.
Then in thy conscience, Queen,
Thou feelest the King requiring thanks of thee.
_Vashti_.
Be careful of thy tongue,--and of the wine. --
Who watches me? Eyes are fixt on my soul,
Eyes of desire. I think some great event
Hath pusht its spirit forward of its time,
To stand here quietly waiting, into my mind
Inflicting its strange want of me, and ready
To fetch my heart, and ready to take my hand
And lead me away shrinking: is it Death?
It is some marvellous thing: for I know surely
Behind it crowd out of their discipline
The coming hours to watch me seized, and stare
With questioning brows on me, and lift lean hands
From under gowns of shadow to point me out
One to another, saying: "This is she:
How will she bear it, think ye? "--Is it not cold?
Was there not wind just then? --The flames are steady.
_1st Woman_.
No wind at all: the air's like one closed room.
_2nd Woman_.
There is no talk like this at the King's feast,
I warrant. Were we not best be merry,
And thank the King so for these wines and sweets?
_Vashti_.
Yes, let us not forget our thankfulness;
For is not, sisters, everything we have
Mere gift?
_2nd Woman_.
My beauty pays for what I get.
_Vashti_.
I would, 'twere not so.
_2nd Woman_.
Queen, I doubt thee not.
_Vashti_.
Pert little fool, where lies thy beauty, then?
Thou hast it not: its place is not thy flesh,
But the delighting loins of men, there only.
Thy beauty! And thou knowest not that man
Hath forged in his furnace of desire our beauty
Into that chain of law which binds our lives--
Man, please thyself, and woman, please thou man.
But thou wilt have thy beauty pence, thou sayest?
And what's thy purchase? Listen, I will tell thee:
Just that thou art not whipt and drudged: the rest,
All that thou hast beyond, is gift.
_2nd Woman_.
Why not?
_Vashti_.
Truly, for thee, why not?
_2nd Woman_.
Wouldst thou, 'twere yours?
_1st Woman_.
Thou shudderest again; what ails thee, Queen?
_Vashti_.
I would have lived in beauty once.
_2nd Woman_.
In whose?
_Vashti_.
I know the King finds relish in thy looks,
Wench, and I have no care to grudge thy pride;
But when thy face is named throughout the world
For wonder, I will bear thy impudence.
_1st Woman_.
But tell us, Queen, thy thought; for we have made
An end almost of eating; and it seems
It will be somewhat strange, pleasing our mood.
_Vashti_.
Strange you will find it doubtless; but scarce pleasing,
Unless 'tis pleasing to have news of danger.
Listen! your lives are propt like a rotten house.
Your souls, that should have noble lodging here,
Have crept like peasants into huts that have
No force within their walls, but must be shored
With borrowed firmness. Yea, man's stubborn lust
To feed his heart upon your beauty, is all
The strength your lives have, all that holdeth you
Safe in the world,--propt like a rotten house.
_1st Woman_.
Shall woman then not love to have man's love?
_3rd Woman_.
To feed his heart on us, thou sayest? O yea!
And how can a woman know such might of living
As when upon her breast she feels the man,
The man of her desire, like sacrament
Feeding his heart, yea and his soul, on her?
_Vashti_.
Are we for nought but so to nourish him?
_3rd Woman_.
Thou art too proud, O Queen, too proud and lonely,
And goest apart to have thy thought too much.
'Tis known, too much thought dazes oft a mind,
Till it can learn nought of the signed evil
God hath put in the faces of evil notions,
That spiritual sight may ken them coming
Sly and demure, and safely shut the brain
Ere they be in and swell themselves to lordship.
Hence is it that an evil thought in thee
Hath dared so far, and played its wickedness
Strangely within thee, braving even into speech.
_1st Woman_.
Strangely indeed thy brain's inhabited.
What, is there aught prosperity for woman
But to be shining in the thought of man?
_Vashti_.
I wisht to prosper in the life I had,
That the Gods might approve the flourishing
Their heavenly graft of soul took from my flesh.
Therefore I wisht to love. And I did love. --
There came Ahasuerus conquering
Into my father's land. My fancying hate
Had made a man-beast of him, a thing, like man,
Tall in his walk, but in the mood of his eyes
A beast, and in the noise of his mouth a beast.
He came, and lookt at me; and, in a while,
I saw that he was speaking to me there.
And all the maiden went in me before him,
Swifter than in a moon which looks against
The morning, all the silver courage fails. --
How cam'st thou to the King?
_1st Woman_.
Sold to him, I.
_2nd Woman_.
Bought by him, I: for he had heard of me.
_Vashti_.
I also, sold or bought; nay, rather paid:
Paid like cash to him, that as servant king
My father might have life, and a throne in life.
It mattered nothing then. [_The_ QUEEN _pauses_.
Often in early summer, as I walkt
A girl singing her happiness, beside
The high green corn, holding all earth my own,
I saw, as my feet and my voice past by,
How in its hiding some croucht little beast
Startled, and filled a space of the gentle corn
With plunging quivering fear. And always then
My heart answer'd the fear that shook the corn,
With a sudden doubt in its beating; for I knew
Within my life such rousing of dismay
I myself should watch, with seizing wonder.
It was so: in the midst of my new love,
That promist such a plenty in my soul,
At last some sleeping terror leapt awake,
And made the young growth shiver and wry about
Inwardly tormented. Yea, and my heart
It was, my heart in its hiding of green love,
That took so wildly the approaching sound
Of something strangely fearful walking near.
_3rd Woman_.
A queer tale, this.
_1st Woman_.
A spectre visited you?
_Vashti_.
Indeed, a spectre.
_1st Woman_.
That have I never seen.
Was it the kind with nose and mouth grown sharp
To an eagle's bill, and claws upon its fingers,
The curve of them pasted with a bloody glue?
_Vashti_.
The spectre was--my beauty.
_3rd Woman_.
It is as I said.
O Queen, send for a wise man in the morning;
And let him leech thy spirit.
_4th Woman_.
I've heard, the best
Riddance for evil notions in the mind,
Is for a toad to sit upon the tongue;
While, breathed against the scalp, some power of spells
Loosens the clasp the notion hath digg'd deep
Into the soul; so that it passeth down,
Shaken and mastered, and creeps into the toad,--
_3rd Woman_.
Which gives a foolish kick or start to feel it,--
_4th Woman_.
Then the trapt notion may be easily burnt.
_Vashti_.
Yea? --I think mine would not burn easily.
With fire, with such indignant fire as pride
Yields, when it must destroy itself to feel
The power of the world touch it with humbling flame,--
With such a fire, whose heat you know not of,
Have I assayed this--notion, didst thou say?
And it stood upright, with its shape unquencht,
And lived within the fire.
_3rd Woman_.
Thou hast it wrong.
_4th Woman_.
Thou hast not understood the cure we meant.
_2nd Woman_.
Stop brabbling, fools; I would hear the Queen's mind.
_1st Woman_.
I too; I hate a thing I cannot skill;
And thee and all that lives in thee, O Queen,
I would keep friendly to my spirit; yet
I do suspect something amazing in thee.
_Vashti_.
And if thou seest not how slippery
Is women's place in the world of men, 'tis like
Thou wilt amazedly the vision take,
When I have led thee up my tower of thought.
_2nd Woman_.
How are we dangerous? Are we not women,
Man's endless need?
_Vashti_.
Ay, and therein the danger!
Is it not possible he hate the need?
For not as he were a beast it urges him:
He is aware of it, he knows its force,--
The kind of beasts is in their blood alone,
But man is blood and spirit. And in him,
As in all creature, is the word from God,
"Utter thyself in joy. "
_2nd Woman_.
And we his joy.
_Vashti_.
But such an one that may become, perhaps,
Something not utterance, but strict commanding,
Yea, mastery, like the dancing in the blood
Of one bitten by spiders. And it is Spirit,
Spirit enjoying woman, that hath sent
A beating poison in the blood of man,
The poison which is lust. Spirit was given
To use life as a sense for ecstasy;
Life mixt with Spirit must exult beyond
Sex-madden'd men and sex-serving women,
Into some rapture where sweet fleshly love
Is as the air wherein a music rings.
But blood hath captured Spirit; Spirit hath given
The strength of its desire of joy to make
What ecstasy it may of woman's beauty,
And of this only, doing no more than train
The joys of blood to be more keen and cunning;
As men have trained and tamed wild lives of the forests,
Breeding them to more excellent shape and size
And tireless speed, and to know the words of men.
So the wise masterful Spirit rules the joys
That come all fierce from roaming the dark blood;
They are broken to his desire, they are wily for him,
A pack of lusts wherewith the Spirit hunts
Pleasure; and the chief prey the pleasure hid
In woman.
_1st Woman_.
What joys are these?
_Vashti_.
What joys?
The joys of rutting beasts, tamed to endure,
Tamed to be always swift to answer Spirit,
Yet fiercer for their taming, wilder hungers;
So that the Spirit, if he hunt them not,
Fears to be torn by them in mutiny.
Now know you woman's beauty! 'Tis these joys,
The heat of the blood's desires, changed and mastered
By the desire of spirit, trained to serve
Spirit with lust, spirit with woman enjoy'd.
_2nd Woman_.
Queen, I am beautiful, and cannot boast
Thy subtle thinking; and to one like me,
What matters whence come beauty, so I have it?
Let it be but the witless mating of beasts,
Tamed and curiously knowing itself
And cunning in its own delight: What then?
The nightingale desires his little lass,
And that brings out of his heart a radiant song;
A man desires a woman, and for song
Out of his heart comes beauty, that like flame
Reaches towards her, and covers her limbs with light.
If it so please thee, say that neither loves
Aught but his life's desire, fashioning it
Adorably to marvellous song and beauty.
What then? Enough that the wonder lights on me,
To me is paid the worship of the wonder.
_Vashti_.
O well I know how strong we are in man;
His senses have our beauty for their god,
And his delight is built about us like
Towering adoration, housing worship. --
The spirit of man may dwell in God: the world,
From the soft delicate floor of grass to those
Rafters of light and hanging cloths of stars,
Is but the honour in God's mind for man,
Wrought into glorious imagination.
But women dwell in man; our temple is
The honour of man's sensual ecstasy,
Our safety the imagined sacredness
Fashion'd about us, fashion'd of his pleasure.
Beauty hath done this for us, and so made
Woman a kind within the kind of man.
Yea, there is more than this: a mighty need
Hath man made of his woman in the world.
Now man walks through his fate in fellowship
Of two companion spirits; ay, and these
With double mastery go on with him.
The one in black disgraceful weeds is Toil;
She sows with never-ending gesture all
The path before his feet, cursing the way
She drags him on with growth of flouting crops,
Urchin thistles, and rank flourishing nettles.
But the other has a wear of woven gleam,
And with soft hand beseeches him his face
Away from the hardships of his hurt stung feet,
That with his eyes he may desire her looks:
And she is Beauty of Woman, man's dear blessing.
And if you would be wise, be well afraid
To think you have more office than to be
A sweet delicious while amid man's hours
Of worldly labour: we are too precious, so.
Yet see you not how this that Spirit hath done
Is also dangerous? --For there are mightier needs!
There's no content for Spirit in the world
Till he has striven out of bounded fate,
And sent an infinite desire forth
Into the whole eternity of things.
Yea, spirit ails with loathing secretly
The irremediable force of being;
Unless, with free expatiate desire,
He shape into the endless burning flux
Of starry world blindly adventuring
Some steady righteous destiny for Spirit:
Even as dreaming brain fashions the fume
Of life asleep to marshall'd imagery.
But we are in the way of this: and man,
The more he needs to announce upon the world,
Over him going like a storming air,
That fashioning word which utters the divine
Imagination working in him like anger;
The more he finds his virtue caught and clogged
In the fierce luxury he hath made of woman.
Thence are we sin, thence deliciously
Persuading man refuse his highest ardour.
Too easily kindled was the ecstasy
Of fleshly passion, with a joyous flame
Too readily answering the Spirit's fire!
He burns with us alone, so fragrantly
His noblest vigour swoons delighted. Yea,
Women, I tell you, not far now is man
From hating us, so passionate the joy
Of loving us, so mightily drawing down
Into the service of his pleasure here
All forces of his being. The pleasure soon
Becomes a shame, scarce to be spoken aloud;
And in best minds, either detested doting
Man's joy in woman's beauty will become;
Or a strict binding fire, holding him down
In lust of beauty where no beauty is.
[_The_ KING'S MESSENGER _comes in_.
_Messenger_.
To Vashti, to the Queen of the world, to her
In whom the striving beauty of the world
Hath made perfection, from the King I come.
And the King bids me say, Rise from thy feast;
For thou must be to-night thyself a feast:
The vision of thy loveliness must now
Feed with astonishment my vassals' hearts.
Therefore thou art to come.
_Vashti_.
And tell the King
I will not come.
_Messenger_.
What was there in my words
Thou dost not understand? --I say, the King
Would show thy beauty to his under-kings,
That with this also they may be amazed
And utterly fear his fortune.
_Vashti_.
So. Go back,
Tell the King I have hearkened to his message,
And tell him I will not come.
_Messenger_.
What sickness shall I say has lighted on thee,
So that thou canst not come?
_Vashti_.
Thou weariest me.
Say this to the King, Vashti will not come.
Are they not plain, my words? Canst thou not learn
them?
_Messenger_.
Give me some softer speech. Must I not fear
I shall earn whipping if I take these words?
_Vashti_.
I pray thee, go. Thou art a trouble here;
Seest thou not how all these feasting women
Pause, and the pleasure is distrest in them?
Thou hast thy message: say, She will not come. --
Back to the King, now!
_Messenger_.
