Now had her glut of vengeance left her grey
     Of blood, who in her entrails fiercely tore
     To clutch and squeeze her snakes; herself the more
     Devitalizing:  red washer Auroral ray;
     Desired if but to paint her pallid hue. 
     The passion for that young horizon red,
     Which dowered her with the flags, the blazing fame,
     Like dotage of the past-meridian dame
     For some bright Sungod adolescent, swelled
     Insatiate, to the voracious grew,
     The glutton’s inward raveners bred;
     Till she, mankind’s most dreaded, most abhorred,
     Witless in her demands on Fortune, asked,
     As by the weaving Fates impelled,
     To have the thing most loathed, the iron lord,
     Controller and chastiser, under Victory masked.

     XIII

     Banners from East, from South,
     She hugged him in them, feared the scourge they meant,
     Yet blindly hugged, and hungering built his throne. 
     So may you see the village innocent,
     With curtsey of shut lids and open mouth,
     In act to beg for sweets expect a loathly stone: 
     See furthermore the Just in his measures weigh
     Her sufferings and her sins, dispense her meed. 
     False to her bridegroom lord of the miracle day,
     She fell:  from his ethereal home observed
     Through love, grown alien love, not moved to plead
     Against the season’s fruit for deadly Seed,
     But marking how she had aimed, and where she swerved,
     Why suffered, with a sad consenting thought. 
     Nor would he shun her sullen look, nor monstrous hold
     The doer of the monstrous; she aroused,
     She, the long tortured, suddenly freed, distraught,
     More strongly the divine in him than when
     Joy of her as she sprang from mould
     Drew him the midway heavens adown
     To clasp her in his arms espoused
     Before the sight of wondering men,
     And put upon the day a deathless crown. 
     The veins and arteries of her, fold in fold,
     His alien love laid open, to divide
     The martyred creature from her crimes; he knew
     What cowardice in her valour could reside;
     What strength her weakness covered; what abased
     Sublimity so illumining, and what raised
     This wallower in old slime to noblest heights,
     Up to the union on the midway blue:-
     Day that the celestial grave Recorder hangs
     Among dark History’s nocturnal lights,
     With vivid beams indicative to the quick
     Of all who have felt the vaulted body’s pangs
     Beneath a mind in hopeless soaring sick. 
     She had forgot how, long enslaved, she yearned
     To the one helping hand above;
     Forgot her faith in the Great Undiscerned,
     Whereof she sprang aloft to her Angelical love
     That day:  and he, the bright day’s husband, still with love,