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Banners from East, from South, She hugged him in them, feared the scourge they meant, Yet blindly hugged, and hungering built his throne. So may you see the village innocent, With curtsey of shut lids and open mouth, In act to beg for sweets expect a loathly stone: See furthermore the Just in his measures weigh Her sufferings and her sins, dispense her meed. False to her bridegroom lord of the miracle day, She fell: from his ethereal home observed Through love, grown alien love, not moved to plead Against the season’s fruit for deadly Seed, But marking how she had aimed, and where she swerved, Why suffered, with a sad consenting thought. Nor would he shun her sullen look, nor monstrous hold The doer of the monstrous; she aroused, She, the long tortured, suddenly freed, distraught, More strongly the divine in him than when Joy of her as she sprang from mould Drew him the midway heavens adown To clasp her in his arms espoused Before the sight of wondering men, And put upon the day a deathless crown. The veins and arteries of her, fold in fold, His alien love laid open, to divide The martyred creature from her crimes; he knew What cowardice in her valour could reside; What strength her weakness covered; what abased Sublimity so illumining, and what raised This wallower in old slime to noblest heights, Up to the union on the midway blue:— Day that the celestial grave Recorder hangs Among dark History’s nocturnal lights, With vivid beams indicative to the quick Of all who have felt the vaulted body’s pangs Beneath a mind in hopeless soaring sick. She had forgot how, long enslaved, she yearned To the one helping hand above; Forgot her faith in the Great Undiscerned, Whereof she sprang aloft to her Angelical love That day: and he, the bright day’s husband, still with love, Though alien, though to an upper seat retired, Behold a wrangling heart, as ’twere her soul On eddies of wild waters cast; In wilderness division; fired For domination, freedom, lust, The Pleasures; lo, a witch’s snaky bowl Set at her lips; the blood-drinker’s madness fast Upon her; and therewith mistrust, Most of herself: a mouth of guile. Compassionately could he smile, To hear the mouth disclaiming God, And clamouring for the Just! Her thousand impulses, like torches, coursed City and field; and pushed abroad O’er hungry waves to thirsty sands, Flaring at further; she had grown to be The headless with the fearful hands; To slaughter, else to suicide, enforced. But he, remembering how his love began, And of what creature, pitied when was plain Another measure of captivity: The need for strap and rod; The penitential prayers again; Again the bitter bowing down to dust; The burden on the flesh for who disclaims the God, The answer when is call upon the Just. Whence her lost virtue had found refuge strode Her master, saying, ‘I only; I who can!’ And echoed round her army, now her chain. So learns the nation, closing Anarch’s reign, That she had been in travail of a Man.