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The Kissed Mouth
4. The Apparition of Beatrice
d. The New Life
[Beatrice and Rossetti]

B:              At birth the essential spirit, cleansed and kissed by water,
                  Shines forth pearlescent.

R:                                                              All too soon, despair
               
Despoils and blots its luster. Cruel human laughter

                Scorches, twists, distorts it. I could bear
                
The blindness and the ignorance, the joyless mirth,
                But craved sweet mortal Beauty as my air....

B:           That hour has gone, all days are done, and every breath
               You spend is one you will not miss as you expire,
               Rejoining all those lost ones under earth.

R:           Lady! Blessed lady: what do you require?

B:           I conjure you: surrender and forgive.
              
Come now, essential spirit cleansed and kissed by fire
              
And holy grace, immortal love’s restorative.

R:          As one whose glance steals back to a familiar shore
               and weeps for parting, knowing he must leave to live
              
I follow you....

Both:                                    To new shores shining from afar,
               Unbounded and perpetual, where all we love
               Surrounds us amid the eternal blazing stars.

R [spoken]:

    And at this last of the book of my memory,
    beyond which is little that can be read,
    there is a rubric, saying:
    “Here begins the New Life.”

Fin.

Previous     Home: The Argument and Index  

Notes and Sources   

a fool in the forest

  • The personal & cultural web journal of George M. Wallace, an attorney practicing in Pasadena, California.
    An Index of Enthusiasms.

Epigraphs

  • A fool, a fool! I met a fool i' the
        forest,
    A motley fool; a miserable world!
    As I do live by food, I met a fool
    Who laid him down and bask'd him
        in the sun,
    And rail'd on Lady Fortune in good
        terms,
    In good set terms and yet a motley
        fool.

    As You Like It,
    Act II, Scene 7


    L'homme y passe à travers des
        forêts de symboles
    Qui l'observent avec des regards
        familiers.

    Les Fleurs du Mal,
    “Correspondances”


    [T]here is almost no subject-matter, and what little one can disentangle is foolish....
    One would call the style verbose, except that by definition verbosity is the use of words in excess of the occasion, and there seems to be no occasion.

    Yvor Winters,
    Forms of Discovery, Ch. 7

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