Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/320

Rh For that’s his specialty. What creature else Conceives the circle, and then walks the square? Loves things proved bad, and leaves a thing proved good? You think the bee makes honey half a year, To loathe the comb in winter, and desire The little ant’s food rather? But a man— Note men!—they are but women after all, As women are but Auroras!—there are men Born tender, apt to pale at a trodden worm, Who paint for pastime, in their favourite dream, Spruce auto-vestments flowered with crocus-flames: There are, too, who believe in hell, and lie: There are, who waste their souls in working out Life’s problem on these sands betwixt two tides, And end,— ‘Now give us the beast’s part, in death.’

Alas, long-suffering and most patient God, Thou need’st be surelier God to bear with us Than even to have made us! thou, aspire, aspire From henceforth for me! thou who hast, thyself, Endured this fleshhood, knowing how, as a soaked And sucking vesture, it would drag us down And choke us in the melancholy Deep, Sustain me, that, with thee, I walk these waves, Resisting!—breathe me upward, thou for me Aspiring, who art the way, the truth, the life,— That no truth henceforth seem indifferent, No way to truth laborious, and no life, Not even this life I live, intolerable!