The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Volume 1

And weak of apprehension!

Adam. Courage, Sweet!
The mystic shapes ebb back from us, and drop
With slow concentric movement, each on each, —
Expressing wider spaces, – and collapsed
In lines more definite for imagery
And clearer for relation, till the throng
Of shapeless spectra merge into a few
Distinguishable phantasms vague and grand
Which sweep out and around us vastily
And hold us in a circle and a calm.

Eve. Strange phantasms of pale shadow! there are twelve.
Thou who didst name all lives, hast names for these?

Adam. Methinks this is the zodiac of the earth,
Which rounds us with a visionary dread,
Responding with twelve shadowy signs of earth,
In fantasque apposition and approach,
To those celestial, constellated twelve
Which palpitate adown the silent nights
Under the pressure of the hand of God
Stretched wide in benediction. At this hour,
Not a star pricketh the flat gloom of heaven:
But, girdling close our nether wilderness,
The zodiac-figures of the earth loom slow, —
Drawn out, as suiteth with the place and time,
In twelve colossal shades instead of stars,
Through which the ecliptic line of mystery
Strikes bleakly with an unrelenting scope,
Foreshowing life and death.

Eve. By dream or sense,
Do we see this?

Adam. Our spirits have climbed high
By reason of the passion of our grief,
And, from the top of sense, looked over sense
To the significance and heart of things
Rather than things themselves.

Eve. And the dim twelve…

Adam. Are dim exponents of the creature-life
As earth contains it. Gaze on them, beloved!
By stricter apprehension of the sight,
Suggestions of the creatures shall assuage
The terror of the shadows, – what is known
Subduing the unknown and taming it
From all prodigious dread. That phantasm, there,
Presents a lion, albeit twenty times
As large as any lion – with a roar
Set soundless in his vibratory jaws,
And a strange horror stirring in his mane.
And, there, a pendulous shadow seems to weigh —
Good against ill, perchance; and there, a crab
Puts coldly out its gradual shadow-claws,
Like a slow blot that spreads, – till all the ground,
Crawled over by it, seems to crawl itself.
A bull stands hornèd here with gibbous glooms;
And a ram likewise: and a scorpion writhes
Its tail in ghastly slime and stings the dark.
This way a goat leaps with wild blank of beard;
And here, fantastic fishes duskly float,
Using the calm for waters, while their fins
Throb out quick rhythms along the shallow air.
While images more human —

Eve. How he stands,
That phantasm of a man – who is not thou!
Two phantasms of two men!

Adam. One that sustains,
And one that strives, – resuming, so, the ends
Of manhood's curse of labour.[2 - Adam recognizes in Aquarius, the Water-bearer, and Sagittarius, the Archer, distinct types of the man bearing and the man combating, – the passive and active forms of human labour. I hope that the preceding zodiacal signs – transferred to the earthly shadow and representative purpose – of Aries, Taurus, Cancer, Leo, Libra, Scorpio, Capricornus, and Pisces, are sufficiently obvious to the reader.] Dost thou see
That phantasm of a woman?
Eve. I have seen;
But look off to those small humanities[3 - Her maternal instinct is excited by Gemini.]
Which draw me tenderly across my fear, —
Lesser and fainter than my womanhood,
Or yet thy manhood – with strange innocence
Set in the misty lines of head and hand.
They lean together! I would gaze on them
Longer and longer, till my watching eyes,
As the stars do in watching anything,
Should light them forward from their outline vague
To clear configuration.

[Two Spirits, of Organic and Inorganic Nature, arise from the ground

But what Shapes
Rise up between us in the open space,
And thrust me into horror, back from hope!

Adam. Colossal Shapes – twin sovran images,
With a disconsolate, blank majesty
Set in their wondrous faces! with no look,
And yet an aspect – a significance
Of individual life and passionate ends,