Rachel Annand Taylor

“ At Beauty's blessed doors, and by the hearts
Of sweet Delight and Agony her brother,
By bright new marriages in all great arts,
By the rare wisdom like miraculous amber
Won by the desolate grey sound of tears,
By wedding-music of the flute and tambour
Prevailing o'er Time's cruel plot of years,
By all the proud prayers granted and denied us,
Fate has no sword at all that can divide us.
LV
TREASURE
Not mine the silver ride of the redeemer,
Not mine the secret vision of the saint,
Not mine the martyrdoms of Truth's dark dreamer
Nor bitter beatitudes of Art. ”

“ She is behind all the processes of art, though she rarely becomes a conscious artist, except in delicate and impassioned modes of living. Indeed, matters are cruelly complicated for her if the entanglements of destiny drag her forward into the deliberate aesthetic effort. Strange, wistful, bitter and sweet, she troubles and quickens the soul of man, as earthly or as heavenly lover redeeming him from the spiritual sloth which is more to be dreaded than any kind of pain. ”

“ THE MIRROR-CASES
II
O treasonable heart and perverse words,
Ye darken beauty with your plots of pain!
What languors beat through me like muted chords?
I know indeed that suffering shall profane
These lovers, sweet as viols or violet-spices.
Strangely must end their dreamy chess-playing,
Strange wounds amaze their broidered Paradises,
And stain the falconry and garlanding.
Their bodies must be broken as on wheels,
Their souls be carded with implacable shame,—
Molten like wax, be crushed beneath the seals
Of sin and penance. ”

“ Their beauty's sacred unisons?—Fair things
Desire their revel-raiment be their shroud.
Yet, fierce insurgent, cease vain wars to wage!
Art thou so pure as to decline, forsooth,
These penitential usages of age
That expiate proud cruelties of youth,
And bring thee to the last and perfect art,
To love the lovely with a selfless heart? ”

“ Wise, with the uncoloured wisdom of the souls
With whom great passions have no more to do,
Serene, since ours the dusty arles Death doles,
Oblivions dim of all there is to rue!—
Peace comes to hearts of whom proud Love has tired ”

“ That strung so long the gracious lutes of love!—
Hurry to sell old magian Lamps for new,
Though beauty's moonlike domes dissolve and pass:
If all things change, ye would be changing too,
Crazed hearts that know not your desire, alas! ”

“ With frenzy, till it is a Tower of Flame
Wherein the soul shrieks burning, since the myrrhs
And music of our beauty are mixed with shame
Inextricable,—some drug of poppies give
This bitter ecstasy whereby we live! ”

“ Sometimes a marriage-chamber sweet with spice:
It is her triumph-car with flutes beset,
The altar where she lies a sacrifice.—
Cold images! The truth is not in these.
Both are alive, both quick with rhapsodies.
XXIII
THE JUSTIFICATION
Life I adore, and not Life's accidents.
A garlanded and dream-fast thurifer
My Soul comes out from beauty's purple tents
That incense-troubled Love may grieve and stir,
Be ransomed from satiety's sad graves,
And go to God up the bright stair of Wonder. ”

“ Imploring sweetnesses of hands and eyes,
To let Love through to the most secret closes
Of all his flowery Court of Paradise." . . .
Sunder the jealous gates. Thine ivory Castle
Is hung with scarlet, is the Convent of Pain.
With purple and with spice indeed the Vassal
Receives her King whom dark desires constrain.
Rejoice, rejoice!—But far from flutes and dances
The cloistered Soul lies frozen in her trances. ”

“ The verses present the moods, misconceptions, extravagances, revulsions, reveries—all the obscure crises whereby she reaches a state of illumination and reconciliation regarding the enigma of love as it is, making her transition from the purely romantic and ascetic ideal fostered by the exquisitely selective conspiracies of the art of the great love-poets, through a great darkness of disillusion, to a new vision infinitely stronger and sweeter, because unafraid of the whole truth.
Fiammetta is frankly an enthusiast of the things of art ”

“ Girl-shapes with driven raiment, conquering wings,
And smiling queens of Cnidos, turned and sought
A more inviolate beauty that should keep
Their secret dream. Their grave sweet geniuses
Of love and death, of rapture or of sleep,
Are delicately severed from all excess.—
Ah! suppliant, honey-white, the languor cleaves
About the dolorous weak body He,
The Dark Eros, with staunchless spear-thrust grieves ”

“ For the long miracle of the human soul and its expression is for her not less sacredly part of the universal process than the wheeling of suns and planets: a Greek vase is to her as intimately concerned with Nature as the growing corn—with that Nature who formed the swan and the peacock for decorative delight, and who puts ivory and ebony cunningly together on the blackthorn every patterned Spring.
The Shaksperean form of sonnet yields most readily the piercing quality of sound that helps to describe a malady of the soul. ”

“ To that fair pact. We go, gay challengers,
Beneath dark rampires of forbidden thought,
Thread life's dim gardens masked like revellers
Where dreams of roses red are dearly bought.
We shall ride haughtily as bright Crusaders,
As hooded palmers fare with humbled hearts,
And we shall find, adoring blithe invaders,
The City of Seven Towers, of Seven Arts.—
Then the Last Quest, (lead you the dreadful way!) ”

“ Down pain's dull spiral, sank she on the sod.
Close round, green dusk of dews! No more we dare
The blue inviolate castles of the air.
XXXIV
THE IDEALIST
For such an one let lovers cry, Alas!
Since passion's leaguer shall break through in vain
To that cold centre of bright adamas.—
Storm through her being, rapturous spears of pain!
Ye shall not wound that queen of gracious guile,
The soul that with immortal trance keeps troth:
For Helen is in Egypt all the while,
Learning great magic from the Wife of Thoth. ”

“ The second tradition of womanhood does not perish; but, in these present confusions of change, women of the more emotional and imaginative type are less potent than they have been and will be again. They appear equally inimical and heretical to the opposing camps of hausfrau and of suffragist. Their intellectual forces, liberated and intensified, prey upon the more instinctive part of their natures, vexing them with unanswerable questions. So Fiammetta mistakes herself to some degree, loses her keynote, becomes embittered and perplexed. The equilibrium of soul and body is disturbed ”

“ And jars of spice, and gilded ears of corn,
And wine-red roses and rose-red wine-grails
Feed her long trances while the far flutes mourn.
She lies and dreams daemonic passionate things:
Cherubim guard her gates with monstrous wings. ”

“ That seethes in consciousness, an evil wine?
I love the closing trances, howsoever
Their seals be broken: they are wise and kind.
If death can give such fumes of poppy, never
Shall I revile him. Oh! uncertain mind! ”