wilder:  fixed are they,
     In elegancy scarce denoting ease;
     And do they breathe, it is not to betray
     The martyr in the caryatides. 
     Yet here and there along the graceful row
     Is one who fetches breath from deeps, who deems,
     Moved by a desperate craving, their old foe
     May yield a trustier friend than woman seems,
     And aid to bear the sculptured floral weight
     Massed upon heads not utterly of stone: 
     May stamp endurance by expounding fate. 
     She turned to him, and, This you seek is gone;
     Look in, she said, as pants the furnace, brief,
     Frost-white.  She gave his hearing sight to view
     The silent chamber of a brown curled leaf: 
     Thing that had throbbed ere shot black lightning through. 
     No further sign of heart could he discern: 
     The picture of her speech was winter sky;
     A headless figure folding a cleft urn,
     Where tears once at the overflow were dry.

     III

     So spake she her first utterance on the rack. 
     It softened torment, in the funeral hues
     Round wan Romance at ebb, but drove her back
     To listen to herself, herself accuse
     Harshly as Love’s imperial cause allowed. 
     She meant to grovel, and her lover praised
     So high o’er the condemnatory crowd,
     That she perforce a fellow phoenix blazed.

     The picture was of hand fast joined to hand,
     Both pushed from angry skies, their grasp more pledged
     Under the threatened flash of a bright brand
     At arm’s length up, for severing action edged. 
     Why, then Love’s Court of Honour contemplate;
     And two drowned shorecasts, who, for the life esteemed
     Above their lost, invoke an advocate
     In Passion’s purity, thereby redeemed.

     Redeemed, uplifted, glimmering on a throne,
     The woman stricken by an arrow falls. 
     His advocate she can be, not her own,
     If, Traitress to thy sex! one sister calls. 
     Have we such scenes of drapery’s mournfulness
     On Beauty’s revelations, witched we plant,
     Over the fair shape humbled to confess,
     An angel’s buckler, with loud choiric chant.

     IV

     No knightly sword to serve, nor harp of bard,
     The lady’s hand in her physician’s knew. 
     She had not hoped for them as her award,
     When zig-zag on the tongue electric flew
     Her charge of counter-motives, none impure: 
     But muteness whipped her skin.  She could have said,
     Her free confession was to work his cure,
     Show proofs for why she could not love or wed. 
     Were they not shown?  His muteness shook in thrall
     Her body on the verge of that black pit
     Sheer from the treacherous confessional,
     Demanding further, while perusing it.