University of Virginia Library

CARRARA.

I am the body purified by fire;
A man shall look on me without desire,
But rather think what miracles of faith
Made me to trample without fear or scathe
The burning shares; the thick-set bristling paths
Of martyrdom; to lie on painful laths
Under the torturer's malice; to be torn
And racked and broken, all-victorious scorn
Strengthening the inward spirit to reject
The frame of flesh, with sins and lusts infect,
Whose punishment, like to the sin, was gross,
And man the executioner. I arose
Changed from those beds of pain, and shriven at last
From the whole shameful history of the past—
Of earth-bound pride and revelry; yea, shriven
From Love, at first the one sin, and forgiven:
Beauty that other, with the vanity
That set me crowned before humanity;
So I was led, a priestess or a saint,
Robed solemnly, leaving the latest taint
Of earthliness in some far desert cell
Ascetic; and the hand late used to tell
Rough rosaries, the hand for ever chilled
With fingering the death-symbol, feels unthrilled
With any passionate luxury forbidden
The world's new wedlock. Man and woman chidden
For all their life on earth wed timorously,
And full of shames, fearing lest each should see
The other's greater sin; so they unite,
Two penitential spirits, to take flight,
In one ethereal vision sanctified,
Two bodies for the grave. I am the bride
Who clings with terror, suppliant and pale,
And fears the lifting of her virgin veil,
Because the shrinking form, spite of her prayers,
Has grown to know its earthliness, and bears
The names of sins that gave up shameful ghosts
On antique crosses. Raised now amid the hosts
Of living men, my effigy is grown
Passionless, speechless through the postured stone
That holds one changeless meaning in its pose;
The murmuring myriads pass, and each man knows
And sees me with a cold thought at his heart;
For I am that from which the soul must part.