Page:Aurora Leigh a Poem.djvu/59

Rh ‘There it is!— You play beside a death-bed like a child, Yet measure to yourself a prophet’s place To teach the living. None of all these things, Can women understand. You generalise Oh, nothing!—not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts, So sympathetic to the personal pang, Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up A whole life at each wound; incapable Of deepening, widening a large lap of life To hold the world-full woe. The human race To you means, such a child, or such a man, You saw one morning waiting in the cold, Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes Will write of factories and of slaves, as if Your father were a negro, and your son A spinner in the mills. All’s yours and you,— All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard To general suffering. Here’s the world half blind With intellectual light, half brutalised With civilization, having caught the plague In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain And sin too! . . does one woman of you all, (You who weep easily) grow pale to see This tiger shake his cage?—does one of you Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls And pine and die, because of the great sum