HE Go pluck Athena by the hair; For what mere book can grant a knowledge With an impassioned gravity Appropriate to that beating breast, That vigorous thigh, that dreaming eye? And may the devil take the rest. SHE And must no beautiful woman be Learned like a man? HE Paul Veronese And all his sacred company Imagined bodies all their days By the lagoon you love so much, For proud, soft, ceremonious proof That all must come to sight and touch; While Michael Angelo’s Sistine roof His ‘Morning’ and his ‘Night’ disclose How sinew that has been pulled tight, Or it may be loosened in repose, Can rule by supernatural right Yet be but sinew. SHE I have heard said There is great danger in the body. HE Did God in portioning wine and bread Give man His thought or His mere body? SHE My wretched dragon is perplexed. HE I have principles to prove me right. It follows from this Latin text That blest souls are not composite. And that all beautiful women may Live in uncomposite blessedness, And lead us to the like--if they Will banish every thought, unless The lineaments that please their view When the long looking-glass is full, Even from the foot-sole think it too. SHE They say such different things at school. SOLOMON AND THE WITCH And thus declared that Arab lady: “Last night, where under the wild moon On grassy mattress I had laid me, Within my arms great Solomon, I suddenly cried out in a strange tongue Not his, not mine.” And he that knew All sounds by bird or angel sung Answered: “A crested cockerel crew Upon a blossoming apple bough Three hundred years before the Fall, And never crew again till now, And would not now but that he thought, Chance being at one with Choice at last. All that the brigand apple brought And this foul world were dead at last. He that crowed out eternity Thought to have crowed it in again. A lover with a spider’s eye Will find out some appropriate pain, Aye, though all passion’s in the glance, For every nerve: lover tests lover With cruelties of Choice and Chance; And when at last that murder’s over Maybe the bride-bed brings despair For each an imagined image brings And finds a real image there; Yet the world ends when these two things, Though several, are a single light, When oil and wick are burned in one; Therefore a blessed moon last night Gave Sheba to her Solomon.” “Yet the world stays:” “If that be so, Your cockerel found us in the wrong Although he thought it worth a crow. Maybe an image is too strong Or maybe is not strong enough.”