How should ye understand? 
What could he win but jeers,
Or howls, such as sweet music draws from dog,
Who told of marriage-feasting to the man
That nothing knows of food but bread of bran? 
Besides, if aught such ears
Might e’er unclog,
There lives but one, with tones for Sion meet. 
Behoveful, zealous, beautiful, elect,
Mild, firm, judicious, loving, bold, discreet,
Without superfluousness, without defect,
Few are his words, and find but scant respect,
Nay, scorn from some, for God’s good cause agog. 
Silence in such a Land is oftenest such men’s speech. 
O, that I might his holy secret reach;
O, might I catch his mantle when he goes;
O, that I were so gentle and so sweet,
So I might deal fair Sion’s foolish foes
Such blows!

IX.  DELICIAE SAPIENTIAE DE AMORE.

Love, light for me
Thy ruddiest blazing torch,
That I, albeit a beggar by the Porch
Of the glad Palace of Virginity,
May gaze within, and sing the pomp I see;
For, crown’d with roses all,
’Tis there, O Love, they keep thy festival! 
But first warn off the beatific spot
Those wretched who have not
Even afar beheld the shining wall,
And those who, once beholding, have forgot,
And those, most vile, who dress
The charnel spectre drear
Of utterly dishallow’d nothingness
In that refulgent fame,
And cry, Lo, here! 
And name
The Lady whose smiles inflame
The sphere. 
Bring, Love, anear,
And bid be not afraid
Young Lover true, and love-foreboding Maid,
And wedded Spouse, if virginal of thought;
For I will sing of nought
Less sweet to hear
Than seems
A music in their half-remember’d dreams. 
   The magnet calls the steel: 
Answers the iron to the magnet’s breath;
What do they feel
But death! 
The clouds of summer kiss in flame and rain,
And are not found again;
But the heavens themselves eternal are with fire
Of unapproach’d desire,
By the aching heart of Love, which cannot rest,
In blissfullest pathos so indeed possess’d. 
O, spousals high;
O, doctrine blest,
Unutterable in even the happiest sigh;
This know ye all
Who can recall
With what a welling of indignant tears
Love’s simpleness first hears
The meaning of his mortal covenant,
And from what pride comes down
To wear the crown
Of which ’twas very heaven to feel the want. 
How envies he the ways
Of yonder hopeless star,
And so would laugh and yearn
With trembling lids eterne,
Ineffably content from infinitely far
Only to gaze
On his bright Mistress’s responding rays,
That never know eclipse;
And, once in his long year,
With praeternuptial ecstasy and fear,
By the delicious law of that ellipse
Wherein all citizens of ether move,
With hastening pace to come
Nearer, though never near,
His Love
And always inaccessible sweet Home;