by his humility:
Thou Perseus’ Shield! wherein I view secure
The mirrored Woman’s fateful-fair allure!
Whom Heaven still leaves a twofold dignity,
As girlhood gentle, and as boyhood free;
With whom no most diaphanous webs enwind
The barèd limbs of the rebukeless mind.
Wild Dryad! all unconscious of thy tree,
            With which indissolubly
The tyrannous time shall one day make thee whole;
Whose frank arms pass unfretted through its bole:
      Who wear’st thy femineity
Light as entrailèd blossoms, that shalt find
It erelong silver shackles unto thee.
Thou whose young sex is yet but in thy soul;—
      As hoarded in the vine
Hang the gold skins of undelirious wine,
As air sleeps, till it toss its limbs in breeze:—
   In whom the mystery which lures and sunders,
      Grapples and thrusts apart; endears, estranges;
—The dragon to its own Hesperides—
   Is gated under slow-revolving changes,
Manifold doors of heavy-hingèd years.
   So once, ere Heaven’s eyes were filled with wonders
      To see Laughter rise from Tears,
      Lay in beauty not yet mighty,
         Conchèd in translucencies,
      The antenatal Aphrodite,
Caved magically under magic seas;
Caved dreamlessly beneath the dreamful seas.

         “Whose sex is in thy soul!”
         What think we of thy soul?
      Which has no parts, and cannot grow,
      Unfurled not from an embryo;
Born of full stature, lineal to control;
   And yet a pigmy’s yoke must undergo.
Yet must keep pace and tarry, patient, kind,
With its unwilling scholar, the dull, tardy mind;
Must be obsequious to the body’s powers,
Whose low hands mete its paths, set ope and close its ways;
      Must do obeisance to the days,
And wait the little pleasure of the hours;
   Yea, ripe for kingship, yet must be
Captive in statuted minority!
So is all power fulfilled, as soul in thee.
So still the ruler by the ruled takes rule,
And wisdom weaves itself i’ the loom o’ the fool.
The splendent sun no splendour can display,
Till on gross things he dash his broken ray,
From cloud and tree and flower re-tossed in prismy spray.
Did not obstruction’s vessel hem it in,
Force were not force, would spill itself in vain
We know the Titan by his champèd chain.
Stay is heat’s cradle, it is rocked therein,
And by check’s hand is burnished into light;
If hate were none, would love burn lowlier bright?
God’s Fair were guessed scarce but for opposite sin;
Yea, and His Mercy, I do think it well,
Is flashed back from the brazen gates of Hell.
         The heavens decree
All power fulfil itself as soul in thee.
For supreme Spirit subject was to clay,
   And Law from its own servants learned a law,
And Light besought a lamp unto its way,
         And Awe was reined in awe,
      At one small house of Nazareth;
         And Golgotha
Saw Breath to breathlessness resign its breath,
And Life do homage for its crown to death.

So is all power, as soul in thee increased!
   But, knowing this, in knowledge’s despite
   I fret against the law severe that stains
         Thy spirit with eclipse;
   When—as a nymph’s carven head sweet water drips,
   For others oozing so the cool delight
   Which cannot steep her stiffened mouth of stone—
Thy nescient lips repeat maternal strains.
               Memnonian lips!
Smitten with singing from thy mother’s east,
   And murmurous with music not their own:
   Nay, the lips flexile, while the mind alone
         A passionless statue stands.
         Oh, pardon, innocent one!
      Pardon at thine unconscious hands!
“Murmurous with music not their own,” I say?
And in that saying how do I missay,
         When from the common sands
Of poorest common speech of common day
Thine accents sift the golden musics out!
      And ah, we poets, I misdoubt,
         Are little more than thou!
We speak a lesson taught we know not how,
      And what it is that from us flows
The hearer better than the utterer knows.

         Thou canst foreshape thy word;
         The poet is not lord
      Of the next syllable may come
      With the returning pendulum;
      And what he plans to-day in song,
To-morrow sings it in another tongue.
      Where the last leaf fell from his bough,
      He knows not if a leaf shall grow,
      Where he sows he doth not reap,
      He reapeth where he did not sow;
      He sleeps, and dreams forsake his sleep
      To meet him on his waking way.
Vision will mate him not by law and vow:
      Disguised in life’s most hodden-grey,
By the most beaten road of everyday
She waits him, unsuspected and unknown.
            The hardest pang whereon
He lays his mutinous head may be a Jacob’s stone.
In the most iron crag his foot can tread
            A Dream may strew her bed,
      And suddenly his limbs entwine,
And draw him down through rock as sea-nymphs might through brine.
But, unlike those feigned temptress-ladies who
In guerdon of a night the lover slew,
When the embrace has failed, the rapture fled,
Not he, not he, the wild sweet witch is dead!
            And, though he cherisheth
The babe most strangely born from out her death,
Some tender trick of her it hath, maybe,—
                  It is not she!

Yet, even as the air is rumorous of fray
   Before the first shafts of the sun’s onslaught
      From gloom’s black harness splinter,
      And Summer move on Winter
With the trumpet of the March, and the pennon of the May;
      As gesture outstrips thought;
So, haply, toyer with ethereal strings!
Are thy blind repetitions of high things
The murmurous gnats whose aimless hoverings
      Reveal song’s summer in the air;
The outstretched hand, which cannot thought declare,
         Yet is thought’s harbinger.
These strains the way for thine own strains prepare;
We feel the music moist upon this breeze,
And hope the congregating poesies.
      Sundered yet by thee from us
      Wait, with wild eyes luminous,
All thy wingèd things that are to be;
They flit against thee, Gate of Ivory!
They clamour on the portress Destiny,—
“Set her wide, so we may issue through!
Our vans are quick for that they have to do!”
      Suffer still your young desire;
Your plumes but bicker at the tips with fire,
Tarry their kindling; they will beat the higher.
And thou, bright girl, not long shalt thou repeat
Idly the music from thy mother