Slave is the open mouth beneath the closed. 
     She sank; she snatched at colours; they were peel
     Of fruit past savour, in derision rosed. 
     For the dark downward then her soul did reel. 
     A press of hideous impulse urged to speak: 
     A novel dread of man enchained her dumb. 
     She felt the silence thicken, heard it shriek,
     Heard Life subsiding on the eternal hum: 
     Welcome to women, when, between man’s laws
     And Nature’s thirsts, they, soul from body torn,
     Give suck at breast to a celestial cause,
     Named by the mouth infernal, and forsworn. 
     Nathless her forehead twitched a sad content,
     To think the cure so manifest, so frail
     Her charm remaining.  Was the curtain’s rent
     Too wide? he but a man of that herd male? 
     She saw him as that herd of the forked head
     Butting the woman harrowed on her knees,
     Clothed only in life’s last devouring red. 
     Confession at her fearful instant sees
     Judicial Silence write the devil fact
     In letters of the skeleton:  at once,
     Swayed on the supplication of her act,
     The rabble reading, roaring to denounce,
     She joins.  No longer colouring, with skips
     At tangles, picture that for eyes in tears
     Might swim the sequence, she addressed her lips
     To do the scaffold’s office at his ears.

     Into the bitter judgement of that herd
     On women, she, deeming it present, fell. 
     Her frenzy of abasement hugged the word
     They stone with, and so pile their citadel
     To launch at outcasts the foul levin bolt. 
     As had he flung it, in her breast it burned. 
     Face and reflect it did her hot revolt
     From hardness, to the writhing rebel turned;
     Because the golden buckler was withheld,
     She to herself applies the powder-spark,
     For joy of one wild demon burst ere quelled,
     Perishing to astound the tyrant Dark.

     She had the Scriptural word so scored on brain,
     It rang through air to sky, and rocked a world
     That danced down shades the scarlet dance profane;
     Most women! see! by the man’s view dustward hurled,
     Impenitent, submissive, torn in two. 
     They sink upon their nature, the unnamed,
     And sops of nourishment may get some few,
     In place of understanding, scourged and shamed.

     Barely have seasoned women understood
     The great Irrational, who thunders power,
     Drives Nature to her primitive wild wood,
     And courts her in the covert’s dewy hour;
     Returning to his fortress nigh night’s end,
     With execration of her daughters’ lures. 
     They help him the proud fortress to defend,
     Nor see what front it wears, what life immures,
     The murder it commits; nor that its base