Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/104

Rh Three years I lived and worked. Get leave to work In this world,—’tis the best you get at all; For God, in cursing, gives us better gifts Than men in benediction. God says, ‘Sweat For foreheads;’ men say ‘crowns;’ and so we are crowned,— Ay, gashed by some tormenting circle of steel Which snaps with a secret spring. Get work, get work; Be sure ’tis better than what you work to get.

So, happy and unafraid of solitude, I worked the short days out,—and watched the sun On lurid morns or monstrous afternoons, Like some Druidic idol’s fiery brass, With fixed unflickering outline of dead heat, In which the blood of wretches pent inside Seemed oozing forth to incarnadine the air,— Push out through fog with his dilated disk, And startle the slant roofs and chimney-pots With splashes of fierce colour. Or I saw Fog only, the great tawny weltering fog, Involve the passive city, strangle it Alive, and draw it off into the void, Spires, bridges, streets, and squares, as if a sponge Had wiped out London,—or as noon and night Had clapped together and utterly struck out The intermediate time, undoing themselves In the act. Your city poets see such things, Not despicable. Mountains of the south, When, drunk and mad with elemental wines, They rend the seamless mist and stand up bare,