Justice, Art, and Love Theme Analysis

Love, my child, love, love!

‘You misconceive the question like a man,
Who sees a woman as the complement
Of his sex merely. You forget too much
That every creature, female as the male,
Stands single in responsible act and thought,
As also in birth and death. Whoever says
To a loyal woman, ‘Love and work with me,’
Will get fair answers, if the work and love,
Being good themselves, are good for her—the best
She was born for.’

‘So young,’ he gently asked her, ‘you have lost
Your father and your mother?’
‘Both,’ she said,
‘Both lost! my father was burnt up with gin
Or ever I sucked milk, and so is lost.
My mother sold me to a man last month,
And so my mother’s lost, ’tis manifest.
And I, who fled from her for miles and miles,
As if I had caught sight of the fires of hell
Through some wild gap, (she was my mother, sir)
It seems I shall be lost too, presently,
And so we end, all three of us.’
‘Poor child!’
He said,—with such a pity in his voice.

‘So indeed
He loves you, Marian?’
‘Loves me!’ She looked up
With a child’s wonder when you ask him first
Who made the sun—a puzzled blush, that grew,
Then broke off in a rapid radiant smile
Of sure solution. ‘Loves me! he loves all,—
And me, of course. He had not asked me else
To work with him for ever, and be his wife.’

Let me draw Lord Howe;
A born aristocrat, bred radical,
And educated socialist, who still
Goes floating, on traditions of his kind,
Across the theoretic flood from France,—
Though, like a drenched Noah on a rotten deck,
Scarce safer for his place there. He, at least,
Will never land on Ararat, he knows,
To recommence the world on the old plan:
Indeed, he thinks, said world had better end;
He sympathises rather with the fish
Outside, than with the drowned paired beasts within
Who cannot couple again or multiply:
And that’s the sort of Noah he is, Lord Howe.
He never could be anything complete,
Except a loyal, upright gentleman,
A liberal landlord, graceful diner-out,
And entertainer more than hospitable,
Whom authors dine with and forget the port.

Through the rage and roar
I heard the broken words which Romney flung
Among the turbulent masses, from the ground
He held still, with his masterful pale face—
As huntsmen throw the ration to the pack,
Who, falling on it headlong, dog on dog
In heaps of fury, rend it, swallow it up

With yelling hound-jaws,—his indignant words,
His piteous words, his most pathetic words,
Whereof I caught the meaning here and there
By his gesture ... torn in morsels, yelled across,
And so devoured.

At worst,—if he’s incapable of love,
Which may be—then indeed, for such a man
Incapable of love, she’s good enough;
For she, at worst too, is a woman still
And loves him ... as the sort of woman can.

‘I never blame the lady. Ladies who
Sit high, however willing to look down,
Will scarce see lower than their dainty feet.’

‘For this time I must speak out and confess
That I, so truculent in assumption once,
So absolute in dogma, proud in aim,
And fierce in expectation,—I, who felt
The whole world tugging at my skirts for help,
As if no other man than I, could pull,
Nor woman, but I led her by the hand,
Nor cloth hold, but I had it in my coat,—
Do know myself to-night for what I was
On that June-day, Aurora. Poor bright day,
Which meant the best ... a woman and a rose, ...
And which I smote upon the cheek with words,
Until it turned and rent me! Young you were,
That birthday, poet, but you talked the right:

While I, ... I built up follies like a wall
To intercept the sunshine and your face.
Your face! that’s worse.’

‘Ah, my friend,
You’ll learn to say it in a cheerful voice.
I, too, at first desponded. To be blind,

Turned out of nature, mulcted as a man,
Refused the daily largesse of the sun
To humble creatures! When the fever’s heat
Dropped from me, as the flame did from my house,
And left me ruined like it, stripped of all
The hues and shapes of aspectable life,
A mere bare blind stone in the blaze of day,
A man, upon the outside of the earth,
As dark as ten feet under, in the grave,—
Why that seemed hard.’

My Romney!—Lifting up my hand in his,
As wheeled by Seeing spirits toward the east,
He turned instinctively,—where, faint and fair,
Along the tingling desert of the sky,
Beyond the circle of the conscious hills,
Were laid in jasper-stone as clear as glass
The first foundations of that new, near Day
Which should be builded out of heaven, to God.

He stood a moment with erected brows,
In silence, as a creature might, who gazed:
Stood calm, and fed his blind, majestic eyes
Upon the thought of perfect noon. And when
I saw his soul saw,—‘Jasper first,’ I said,
‘And second, sapphire; third, chalcedony;
The rest in order, ... last, an amethyst.