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I listen and listen but how do I know Peace Peace in the plural says please or pleads I hear the whole song divide the state as one appeals past the last centuries’ pealing bells wren under eaves ruins another wren’s heaven dying sympathies appear as a pear or peas with her territory her tune I want a nest clinging to the twine Please Please in the plural not a flag a mead hall not a circumstance puts pain’s poor plea deeper in the apparent a stable not a stability where animals dream pressure the daylily plant the possible prayer and dreaming among them I tell the stranger pulling apart the sepal petals by their dusty crease in my mind I can’t I don’t know how to sing

In those days, though, I never analysed Myself even. All analysis comes late. You catch a sight of Nature, earliest, In full front sun-face, and your eyelids wink And drop before the wonder of ‘t; you miss The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days, And wrote because I lived–unlicensed else: My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent flood Abolished bounds,–and, which my neighbour’s field, Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth. We play at leap-frog over the god Term; The love within us and the love without Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love, We scarce distinguish. So, with other power. Being acted on and acting seem the same: In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels, We know not if the forests move or we. And so, like most young poets, in a flush Of individual life, I poured myself Along the veins of others, and achieved Mere lifeless imitations of life verse, And made the living answer for the dead, Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste, Nor handle,’–we’re too legal, who write young: We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs, As if still ignorant of counterpoint; We call the Muse ... ‘O Muse, benignant Muse!’– As if we had seen her purple-braided head. With the eyes in it start between the boughs As often as a stag’s. What make-believe, With so much earnest! what effete results, From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes From such white heats!–bucolics, where the cows Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud In lashing off the flies,–didactics, driven Against the heels of what the master said; And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps A babe might blow between two straining cheeks Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh; And elegiac griefs, and songs of love, Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road, The worse for being warm: all these things, writ On happy mornings, with a morning heart, That leaps for love, is active for resolve, Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood. The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped, Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in. Spare the old bottles!–spill not the new wine. By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped In gradual progress like another man, But, turning grandly on his central self, Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years And died, not young,–(the life of a long life, Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn For ever;) by that strong excepted soul, I count it strange, and hard to understand, That nearly all young poets should write old; That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen, And beardless Byron academical, And so with others. It may be, perhaps, Such have not settled long and deep enough In trance, to attain to clairvoyance,–and still The memory mixes with the vision, spoils, And works it turbid. Or perhaps, again, In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx, The melancholy desert must sweep round, Behind you, as before.– For me, I wrote False poems, like the rest, and thought them true. Because myself was true in writing them. I, peradventure, have writ true ones since With less complacence. But I could not hide My quickening inner life from those at watch. They saw a light at a window now and then, They had not set there. Who had set it there? My father’s sister started when she caught My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say I had no business with a sort of soul, But plainly she objected,–and demurred, That souls were dangerous things to carry straight Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world. She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you done Your task this morning?–have you read that book? And are you ready for the crochet here?’– As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong, I know I have not ground you down enough To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust For household uses and proprieties, Before the rain has got into my barn And set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re green With out-door impudence? you almost grow?’ To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task, And verify my abstract of the book? And should I sit down to the crochet work? Was such her pleasure?’ ... Then I sate and teased The patient needle til it split the thread, Which oozed off from it in meandering lace From hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad; My soul was singing at a work apart Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight, In vortices of glory and blue air. And so, through forced work and spontaneous work, The inner life informed the outer life, Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms, Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams, And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks, Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows across My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass, And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong. The dogs are on us–but we will not die.’

'There it is!– You play beside a death-bed like a child, Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place To teach the living. None of all these things, Can women understand. You generalise, Oh, nothing!–not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts, So sympathetic to the personal pang, Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up A whole life at each wound; incapable Of deepening, widening a large lap of life To hold the world-full woe. The human race To you means, such a child, or such a man, You saw one morning waiting in the cold, Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes Will write of factories and of slaves, as if Your father were a negro, and your son A spinner in the mills. All's yours and you,– All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard To general suffering. Here's the world half blind With intellectual light, half brutalised With civilization, having caught the plague In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain And sin too! ... does one woman of you all, (You who weep easily) grow pale to see This tiger shake his cage?–does one of you Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls And pine and die, because of the great sum Of universal anguish?–Show me a tear Wet as Cordelia's, in eyes bright as yours, Because the world is mad? You cannot count, That you should weep for this account, not you! You weep for what you know. A red-haired child Sick in a fever, if you touch him once, Though but so little as with a finger-tip, Will set you weeping! but a million sick . . You could as soon weep for the rule of three, Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world Uncomprehended by you must remain Uninfluenced by you. Women as you are, Mere women, personal and passionate, You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives. Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you,–and verily We shall not get a poet, in my mind.' 'With which conclusion you conclude' . . 'But this– That you, Aurora, with the large live brow And steady eyelids, cannot condescend To play at art, as children play at swords, To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admired Because true action is impossible. You never can be satisfied with praise Which men give women when they judge a book Not as mere work, but as mere woman's work, Expressing the comparative respect Which means the absolute scorn. 'Oh, excellent! 'What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps! 'What delicate discernment ... almost thought! 'The book does honour to the sex, we hold. 'Among our female authors we make room 'For this fair writer, and congratulate 'The country that produces in these times 'Such women, competent to ... spell.'' 'Stop there!' I answered–burning through his thread of talk With a quick flame of emotion,–'You have read My soul, if not my book, and argue well I would not condescend ... we will not say To such a kind of praise, (a worthless end Is praise of all kinds) but to such a use Of holy art and golden life. I am young, And peradventure weak–you tell me so– Through being a woman. And, for all the rest, Take thanks for justice. I would rather dance At fairs on tight-rope, till the babies dropped Their gingerbread for joy,–than shift the types For tolerable verse, intolerable To men who act and suffer. Better far, Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means, Than a sublime art frivolously.' * Then I spoke. 'I have not stood long on the strand of life, And these salt waters have had scarcely time To creep so high up as to wet my feet. I cannot judge these tides–I shall, perhaps. A woman's always younger than a man At equal years, because she is disallowed Maturing by the outdoor sun and air, And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk. Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise! You think a woman ripens as a peach,– In the cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now; I'm young in age, and younger still, I think, As a woman. But a child may say amen To a bishop's prayer and see the way it goes; And I, incapable to loose the knot Of social questions, can approve, applaud August compassion, christian thoughts that shoot Beyond the vulgar white of personal aims. Accept my reverence.' There he glowed on me With all his face and eyes. 'No other help?' Said he–'no more than so?' 'What help?' I asked. 'You'd scorn my help,–as Nature's self, you say, Has scorned to put her music in my mouth, Because a woman's. Do you now turn round And ask for what a woman cannot give?' 'For what she only can, I turn and ask,' He answered, catching up my hands in his, And dropping on me from his high-eaved brow The full weight of his soul,–'I ask for love, And that, she can; for life in fellowship Through bitter duties–that, I know she can; For wifehood ... will she?' 'Now,' I said, 'may God Be witness 'twixt us two!' and with the word, Meseemed I floated into a sudden light Above his stature,–'am I proved too weak To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think, Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought? Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can, Yet competent to love, like HIM?' I paused: Perhaps I darkened, as the lighthouse will That turns upon the sea. 'It's always so! Anything does for a wife.' 'Aurora, dear, And dearly honoured' ... he pressed in at once With eager utterance,–'you translate me ill. I do not contradict my thought of you Which is most reverent, with another thought Found less so. If your sex is weak for art, (And I who said so, did but honour you By using truth in courtship) it is strong For life and duty. Place your fecund heart In mine, and let us blossom for the world That wants love's colour in the grey of time. With all my talk I can but set you where You look down coldly on the arena-heaps Of headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct! The Judgment-Angel scarce would find his way Through such a heap of generalised distress, To the individual man with lips and eyes– Much less Aurora. Ah, my sweet, come down, And, hand in hand, we'll go where yours shall touch These victims, one by one! till one by one, The formless, nameless trunk of every man Shall seem to wear a head, with hair you know, And every woman catch your mother's face To melt you into passion.' 'I am a girl,' I answered slowly; 'you do well to name My mother's face. Though far too early, alas, God's hand did interpose 'twixt it and me, I know so much of love, as used to shine In that face and another. Just so much; No more indeed at all. I have not seen So much love since, I pray you pardon me, As answers even to make a marriage with, In this cold land of England. What you love, Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause: You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,– A wife to help your ends ... in her no end! Your cause is noble, your ends excellent, But I, being most unworthy of these and that, Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.' 'Farewell, Aurora, you reject me thus?' He said. 'Why, sir, you are married long ago. You have a wife already whom you love, Your social theory. Bless you both, I say. For my part, I am scarcely meek enough To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse. Do I look a Hagar, think you?' 'So, you jest!' 'Nay so, I speak in earnest,' I replied. 'You treat of marriage too much like, at least, A chief apostle; you would bear with you A wife ... a sister ... shall we speak it out? A sister of charity.' 'Then, must it be Indeed farewell? And was I so far wrong In hope and in illusion, when I took The woman to be nobler than the man, Yourself the noblest woman,–in the use And comprehension of what love is,–love, That generates the likeness of itself Through all heroic duties? so far wrong In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love, 'Come, human creature, love and work with me,'– Instead of, 'Lady, thou art wondrous fair, 'And, where the Graces walk before, the Muse 'Will follow at the lighting of the eyes, 'And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep 'Turn round and love me, or I die of love.'' With quiet indignation I broke in. 'You misconceive the question like a man, Who sees a woman as the complement Of his sex merely. You forget too much That every creature, female as the male, Stands single in responsible act and thought As also in birth and death. Whoever says To a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me,' Will get fair answers, if the work and love Being good themselves, are good for her–the best She was born for. Women of a softer mood, Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life, Will sometimes only hear the first word, love, And catch up with it any kind of work, Indifferent, so that dear love go with it: I do not blame such women, though, for love, They pick much oakum; earth's fanatics make Too frequently heaven's saints. But me, your work Is not the best for,–nor your love the best, Nor able to commend the kind of work For love's sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir, To be over-bold in speaking of myself,– I, too, have my vocation,–work to do, The heavens and earth have set me, since I changed My father's face for theirs,–and though your world Were twice as wretched as you represent Most serious work, most necessary work, As any of the economists'. Reform, Make trade a Christian possibility, And individual right no general wrong; Wipe out earth's furrows of the Thine and Mine, And leave one green, for men to play at bowls; With innings for them all! ... what then, indeed, If mortals were not greater by the head Than any of their prosperities? what then, Unless the artist keep up open roads Betwixt the seen and unseen,–bursting through The best of your conventions with his best The unspeakable, imaginable best God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond Both speech and imagination? A starved man Exceeds a fat beast: we'll not barter, sir, The beautiful for barley.–And, even so, I hold you will not compass your poor ends Of barley-feeding and material ease, Without a poet's individualism To work your universal. It takes a soul, To move a body: it takes a high-souled man, To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye: It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's breadth off The dust of the actual.–ah, your Fouriers failed, Because not poets enough to understand That life develops from within.–For me, Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say, Of work like this! ... perhaps a woman's soul Aspires, and not creates! yet we aspire, And yet I'll try out your perhapses, sir; And if I fail ... why, burn me up my straw Like other false works–I'll not ask for grace, Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I Who love my art, would never wish it lower To suit my stature. I may love my art, You'll grant that even a woman may love art, Seeing that to waste true love on anything, Is womanly, past question.'

Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,– A mere, mere woman,–a mere flaccid nerve,- A kerchief left out all night in the rain, Turned soft so,–overtasked and overstrained And overlived in this close London life! And yet I should be stronger. Never burn Your letters, poor Aurora! for they stare With red seals from the table, saying each, 'Here's something that you know not.'

It began in a foyer of evenings The evenings left traces of glass in the trees A book and a footpath we followed Under throat-pipes of birds We moved through a room of leaves Thin streams of silver buried under our eyes A field of white clover buried under our eyes Or a river we stopped at to watch The wind cross it, recross it Room into room you paused Where once on a stoop we leaned back Talking late into daylight The morning trees shook off twilight Opening and closing our eyes auroras Beyond groves and flora we followed a road Dotted with polished brown bottles, Scoured furrows, a wood emptied of trees It was enough to hollow us out The evenings left grasses half-wild at our feet Branches with spaces for winds The earth changes The way we speak to each other has changed As for a long while we stood in a hall full of exits Listening for a landscape beyond us

Look, we have made a counterpoint of white chrysanthemums, a dauntless path of death-will-not-part-us petals and revering light; even here, even here before the once-wolfish ovens, the desecrating wall where you were shot, the shrike-stern cells where you were bruised and emptied of your time-bound beauty— you of the confiscated shoes and swift-shorn hair, you who left, as sobering testament, the scuffed luggage of utter hope and harrowing deception. Come back, teach us. From these fearsome barracks and inglorious fields flecked with human ash, in the russet-billowing hours of All Hallows, let the pianissimo of your truest whispering (vivid as the crunched frost of a forced march) become a slowly blossoming, ever-voluble hearth revealing to us (the baffled, the irresolute, the war torn, the living) more of the fire and attar of what it means to be human.

In siftings of chromatic sediment Shed by the winter hours as they decay, With slow descent Light settles through the lower sky in peach, Then mauve, then pale self-abnegating gray Against the water, now that day is spent At Bennetts Beach, Under the high withdrawing blueness, band On band, like layers in a decorative Bottle of sand, Enclosed beneath the heavens’ dome, as though This were the perfect realm in which to live, Preserved, unburdened by the least demand, Or wish, to know— And simply be. Along the beach convene Some silver gulls which stand around reflecting Upon the sheen That comes and goes about their scarlet feet, And crested terns fly back and forth inspecting The shallows for a last titbit to glean, And lightly treat A two-faced wind that works its way across The metal of the sea it tries to planish And to emboss, While deep in its unbalanced buffetings Gannets alternately appear and vanish, Plunge, rise, and loft and give their heads a toss. These things, these things

These water birds flew out from the minds Of fishermen and became fishing peons Wealthy sailors watched as darters emerged again To spread drenched wings in the sun And marked them as emblems for spinnakers Painters and ornithologists studied darters Until they became black-feathered arrows That pierced the souls of their creators These birds rode surf of bitter laughter And wiped out on a zoo’s concrete Key Largo To imitate darters lovers ripped off their clothes And plunged into the swiftness of estuaries Down the water column they entered brackish hell Their hair transformed to iridescent plumage Ruffled by memories of earth’s human atmosphere We can experience the lives of these feathered beings By flexing our particular despairs each morning At evening we take in the news as best we can On late nights we gaze at dead bodies of water And almost perceive those wet wings working the tide

The blessing safely lifted onto Joshua’s shoulders, Moses climbed up Mount Nebo, high above Moab. Tendons winced as he bent to retie a sandal, and haze flooded his vision, which had nothing to see (or black rock and scrub thorn only) until he stopped and said, I will wait here for the voice of the Most High. You showed him all the land— Gilead, the hills of Ephraim and Manasseh, from Judah to the western sea as far as Zoar. And said: Your eyes have seen what I promised, yet, because at Meribah-Kadesh you failed to manifest the holiness I am, you do not go in. At that distance and from the heights Moses stood and watched as the children of Israel began the westward trek. His sight strengthened and he saw each one. The mother, thin and staring, bent down to take her firstborn’s hand, who cried and then laughed. The young brothers with new beards and faces blackened by years in Sinai, strode along carrying all they had rolled up in a sheepskin. The white-haired elder and his mourning wife, whose only daughter was lost in the desert, stalked slowly forward without speaking. An orphaned girl, her cousin, and her cousin’s husband discussed it quietly and held hands. A concert of voices, murmurs, cries, laughter, rising, falling, babbling like water, the fountain of Meribah-Kadesh that sprang from a wall of rock in the desert when Moses struck it with his staff. Days of his life returned to him. One last time he saw Miriam’s serious gaze during the hours of instruction. He recalled the harp players in Pharaoh’s summer palace; white noonday and the shadow of his hand raised to strike the Egyptian overseer; Zipporah’s fear and trust when Jethro urged her forward; the brush-tree that spoke out in tongues of fire; Egypt’s plagues; blood on the doorposts for a sign; the exiles’ safe conduct across marshlands among bulrushes as seabirds called overhead; mutiny and lightning in the desert; a pillar of smoke by day, and fire by night. The moment drew near as those he was bound to and had contended with went up to a land of hills dusted with the first spring green. Sheep stopped their grazing to stare; like an intake of breath, a lull suspended the low hum hovering around hillsides in flower. His eyes filled with tears. And silver bands of sun broke from a veil of cloud overhead down to the plain of Moab, lighting the face of Joshua on one side, so that half remained in shadow. At that moment Moses was taken to his people. His body is said to be buried at Beth-Peor, yet the grave has never been found. The grave has never been found— and Joshua led the Israelites westward into Canaan.

If I speak for the dead, I must leave this animal of my body, I must write the same poem over and over, for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender. If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man who runs through rooms without touching the furniture. Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?” I can dance in my sleep and laugh in front of the mirror. Even sleep is a prayer, Lord, I will praise your madness, and in a language not mine, speak of music that wakes us, music in which we move. For whatever I say is a kind of petition, and the darkest days must I praise.