University of Virginia Library

FIRST SCENE

The Agora at Thebes. Sunset.

The Agora is empty except for the WOMAN, who is seated on a bench against the wall of a house, and the POET, who stands before her, facing the sunset.

The POET
The birds go home at sunset, and my heart
Goes home. The day closes its tired wings,
And in the violet evening there are stars
And silence ..... And the best there was to do,
The best of us we left undone to-day,
Now like a warrior worn with doubtful wars,
Waits for the morrow, heart-sick yet resolved.
The sense of life is secret and serene
At twilight, and the flame of life—

The WOMAN
Is love!

The POET turns as tho' suddenly recalled to a sense of her presence, and looks at her for a moment in silence.
The POET
Of old your eyes persuade the heart like peril .....
You are the Siren of the seas of life.
What stately ships, full-sailed for Paradise,
Captained by young, superb adventurers,
Haughty in hope, impassioned in resolve,
Thrilled with a mystic wonder in the mind,
Drawn from their course, lie shipwrecked on your shores!—
What is your wish with me? I saw your eyes
Call to my heart across the crowded square.
Now in the sunset all the crowd is gone.
We are alone. Why did you summon me?

A moment's pause.
The WOMAN
You are but newly come into the city?

The POET
Since yesterday.

The WOMAN
What race and place are yours?

The POET
In Athens was I born, and there my youth
Was spent, and there, if home there be, is home.

The WOMAN
Why are you come to Thebes? What hope of good,
What fear of ill impels your feet so far?

The POET
My hope is nameless, and the ills I dread
Are housed within me!—but the restless mind
While there is life, affords us no reprieve;
The impatient heart, eagerly and beyond
The daybreak and the dark, drives us afar
Over strange oceans and unvisited lands .....

The WOMAN
The impatient heart!—O Heart of man that yearns
After the Stranger Woman of young dreams! .....

The POET
I know! I know!—young dreams! ..... But mine are old,
Tragic and old, divine and real as life,
And dwell within me like a visitation
Of Truth's unconquerable and mystic hope
Whereof no part is the flushed heart's desire.
What tho'—as inwardly my blood believes—
You were the Stranger Woman—

The WOMAN
I am She!
And anciently and now I am the one
Inveterate quest of life's dream-haunted days.
In myriad ways you seek me, and you find
Me!—tho' you think to find a lordlier thing.
Yet, tho' you find me, you shall know me not,
And I am strange to you forever!

The POET
To me
Nothing of you is strange—unless your name!
I have had many lives before, where you
Were something more to me than life itself;
And after all my youth's vexed years with you,
I know you and your secret—and the soul
Within you, dark and undivined, I know!
I am so long possessed of you I seem
To have you as I have the voice of song,
Clear in my heart and brain. There is no phrase
Of laughter or desire or lamentation
In all the tones and tremors of your voice,
Various as wind, no silver gayeties,
No cries, tense and tear-laden, strange to me.
There is no perfume, bounty, brilliancy
Or pleasure of your body, nor the least
Stir of your subtle silks I know not of.
I know the grave, smooth silence of your brows;
And when your lips are eloquent and flushed
With hunger and with thirst of love, I know you!
I know the swift, sweet motion of your hands
When they are fain of touch and tenderness .....
And I have long explored and learned to know
The deep, dark twilights of your eyes and hair,
The young, pale profile of your breasts—and how
You are all warm and lustrous and superb!
Neither within the house of ivory,
The house of rose and pearl, am I a stranger:
Your thought is in my brain, your mighty heart
Is in my heart,—your soul is in my soul!
I know the chaste reluctance and the wild
Appeal of the indomitable desire
When life is given entire as love will! .....
And I have seen and celebrate in you
The patient, tender truth and trust and care,
The soul's perfection breathing into life
Thro' love's obscure and elemental ways .....

The WOMAN
You love me! I am she! I am the quest,
I am the goal!—You love me!

The POET
I have learned
How, in the last fulfilment of the spirit,
There is a nobler end for life than love,
There is a nobler end for love than you!

The WOMAN
You have not well beheld me, who I am,—
The Stranger Woman, even the truth of dreams,
Splendid and strong and secret .....

The POET
Fairer still
Is the celestial bride, and statelier! .....
I have so greatly loved you that my love
Is grown out of its childhood, which you are,
To more than you can welcome—more than all
Your love and you can freely welcome home!
I am alone and silent after all;
For none receive me now, none love me now .....
Time was when you received me, when your heart
Was radiant and a refuge to me!—then
I uttered and was heard!—and I devised
To set the sunset-coloured gem of song
Upon your brows, to make your raiment of
The unquiet silver of calm, moonlit seas,
To give you sandals hued like flowers, and fill
Your eyes with daybreak, and transfuse your hair
With forest-twilights when the leaves are young
And it is morning! ..... Then I said the new,
The utmost things, and all things of you; kissed
The wine-cup and your lips—straitly to feel
The sacred frenzy shake this heart that bears
The sacred flame, until I sang to you
The wonder-song of the primeval earth—
How Eros was first-born of all the Gods,
And first made Chaos pregnant of the world.
O there was that to rouse me in a woman!—
The beauty that is wanton as life is;
The candour that is crystal-clear as stars;
The love that has no other end but life,
The life that has no other end but love;
And all she is not, and the secrecy
She is,—and life's lost wisdom, pure of thought,
Which rises in her from what sunless springs! ..
But now the ecstasies of thought advance
The torch beyond the precincts of your love,
Beyond the human pale of your dominion.

The WOMAN
So does life weary when its youth is spent—
And you count weariness a kind of wisdom!
O you are wise—in words! You are a poet!
The cheat is not too plain. Yet one discerns
How you are chafed and sharpened with desire!
The thrill strikes thro'—and you make poems of it,
Since there's imagination left at least
To prove us how we are not respectable
And give to lust a lyric rapture:—Yes!
Tamed tho' he be, the animal will sing!

The POET
The animal will sing and drink and lust
And lie with you and love you—as a beast
Can love! ..... for these and all hilarities
Of the hot blood are still and anciently
The same—they share their excellence with you!
It is alone the spirit which is chaste;
Which is austere and high; which is not eased
By all old pious and pleasurable things;
Which is athirst for news!—and in the search
Is ventured out of your horizons, far
Gone past you and beyond you, to return
No more ..... whether the quest prove real or vain!
I guess myself is more than you suppose,
And excellent even beyond my dreams!—
Who shall instruct me further what I am
And shame my aspiration by their own?
Not you, indeed! I know your message to me.
You tell me nothing: for it is not I,
The lyric voice, the florid animal,
The lover, who is yours—as he must be
Who asks neither advancement nor the news!

The WOMAN
What are you more than sense and sentiment,
Like other men? I have known men enough!—
And many men your betters, and some men
Strained to a singular high attitude
Like yours,—and I have found where lust was laired
In all of them! You leave me undeceived:
The brute nurses his passions at your breast,
And at the heart of your humanity
There is the weak, wild longing of all men
Merely for love and life's companioned joys
And the mild fruit of happiness.

The POET
Not I
Am minded any more for facile things.
For the indwelling God stirs in his sleep
Within me, seeing in dreams the early light
Of dawn blur the blind casement of his room .....

The WOMAN
Poor windy man, so grandly, with God's name,
Mystic and eloquent! O you are desolate
As a dead mind! I may not well believe
Laughter stirs nowhere in you—as in me
It leaps to shatter down your dreams .....

The POET
Of all
Sad things I least can laugh with you. Despise,
Pity me as you will, yet so it is:
I have not any sense of humour in me!
I was not once so naked to the truth,
So daring and defenceless; I was keen-
Sighted to see the humour of the thing
And none outlaughed me!—but at last I felt
Something more terrible than ridicule
Strangely and stern as justice in myself!
Then your alert and cherished humour-sense
Sickened and all died out in me, died utterly
Away ..... and left me with an abject smile,
Which, like a threadbare cloak, can scarce afford
Decent concealment to me from the world,—
And something that still serves for laughter when
The wine is in me! ..... But my secret is
That I am serious! You will think me mad!
But there have lightened to my inward eye
Spacious and radiant serenities
Wherein there is a voice calling me on! .....
My heart is shaken with the power of it!
Before my citadel it sounds a challenge
To wake the audacious virtues of the soul,
Which are themselves their own sole arbiter!—
Therefore I can no longer laugh with you.
I am too tensely nerved with expectation
Still to discern and celebrate the joke,
And sort my mood with yours.
A moment's pause.
And so all's said,
And I will leave you with your life, your love,
Your laughter—which I neither serve nor share.

Night has fallen. The POET pauses a moment and then starts to go. The WOMAN rises suddenly and prepares to follow him.
The WOMAN
It shall not be—I will not leave you now.

A moment's silence while the POET looks at her intently.
The POET
Why do you follow me?

The WOMAN
I have no light.

The POET
And have I any you are witness of?—
You know not what I am nor where I go.

The WOMAN
I have discerned that you are something more
Than other men, to me. You give my life
Serious, at last, and strange significance.
And there is latent in your words to me
Expression of supreme and secret things,
Phrases of song that bring a high, swift sense
Of flight and of adventure to the soul!
And what I have received of other men
You give me not—the love, the lust, the gold,
Which are a woman's price to the whole world.
O, I am curious of the fellowship
Of one who will not love me lest he lose
The marriage-kiss of the celestial bride,—
Lest being my master he is not his own,
And gaining me he lose himself thereby.
Therefore I will not leave you—for a little .....
It may be I shall one day touch the term
And find the worth of words, as now I am
Not curious of love nor eager any more.
Then I shall leave you ..... and go on with life,
Satiated anew and hungry as of old!

The POET
Hungry?—for news! for news! ..... You know it too,
The hunger and the thirst that drive us on,
As once the gad-fly drove across the world
The paranymph of God, delirious Io?
You know the hunger?—then we'll go together,
Whither we cannot tell, nor to what end!