And which I smote upon the cheek with words, Until it turned and rent me! Young you were, That birthday, poet, but you talked the right: While I, ... I built up follies like a wall To intercept the sunshine and your face. Your face! that’s worse.’ ‘Speak wisely, cousin Leigh.’ ‘Yes, wisely, dear Aurora, though too late: But then, not wisely. I was heavy then, And stupid, and distracted with the cries Of tortured prisoners in the polished brass Of that Phalarian bull, society,— Which seems to bellow bravely like ten bulls, But, if you listen, moans and cries instead Despairingly, like victims tossed and gored And trampled by their hoofs. I heard the cries Too close: I could not hear the angels lift A fold of rustling air, nor what they said To help my pity. I beheld the world As one great famishing carnivorous mouth,— A huge, deserted, callow, black, bird Thing, With piteous open beak that hurt my heart, Till down upon the filthy ground I dropped, And tore the violets up to get the worms. Worms, worms, was all my cry: an open mouth, A gross want, bread to fill it to the lips, No more! That poor men narrowed their demands To such an end, was virtue, I supposed, Adjudicating that to see it so Was reason. Oh, I did not push the case Up higher, and ponder how it answers, when The rich take up the same cry for themselves, Professing equally,—‘an open mouth A gross want, food to fill us, and no more!’ Why that’s so far from virtue, only vice Finds reason for it! That makes libertines: That slurs our cruel streets from end to end With eighty thousand women in one smile, Who only smile at night beneath the gas: The body’s satisfaction and no more, Being used for argument against the soul’s, Here too! the want, here too, implying the right. —How dark I stood that morning in the sun, My best Aurora, though I saw your eyes,— When first you told me ... oh, I recollect The words ... and how you lifted your white hand, And how your white dress and your burnished curls Went greatening round you in the still blue air, As if an inspiration from within Had blown them all out when you spoke the same, Even these,—‘You will not compass your poor ends Of barley-feeding and material ease, Without the poet’s individualism To work your universal. It takes a soul, To move a body,—it takes a high-souled man, To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye: It takes the ideal, to blow an inch inside The dust of the actual: and your Fouriers failed, Because not poets enough to understand That life develops from within.’ I say Your words,—I could say other words of yours; For none of all your words has been more lost Than sweet verbena, which, being brushed against,