Chapter 5

V. Arguments of the Poems.

* It has not been thought necessary, in these Arguments,
to use quotation marks wherever expressions from the poems
are incorporated; and especially where they are adapted
in construction to the place where they are introduced.

Wanting is -- What?

"Love, the soul of soul, within the soul", the Christ-spirit,
the spirit of the "Comer" (o' e'rxo/menos, Matt. 11:3),
completes incompletion, reanimates that which without it is dead,
and admits to a fellowship with the soul of things; 'Ubi caritas,
ibi claritas'. See passage from 'Fifine at the Fair',
quoted under 'My Star'.

My Star.

The following passage from 'Fifine at the Fair', section 55,
is an expansion of the idea involved in 'My Star', and is
the best commentary which can be given on it: --

"I search but cannot see
What purpose serves the soul that strives, or world it tries
Conclusions with, unless the fruit of victories
Stay, one and all, stored up and guaranteed its own
For ever, by some mode whereby shall be made known
The gain of every life. Death reads the title clear --
What each soul for itself conquered from out things here:
Since, IN THE SEEING SOUL, ALL WORTH LIES, I ASSERT, --
AND NOUGHT I' THE WORLD, WHICH, SAVE FOR SOUL THAT SEES, INERT
WAS, IS, AND WOULD BE EVER, -- STUFF FOR TRANSMUTING -- NULL
AND VOID UNTIL MAN'S BREATH EVOKE THE BEAUTIFUL --
BUT, TOUCHED ARIGHT, PROMPT YIELDS EACH PARTICLE, ITS TONGUE
OF ELEMENTAL FLAME, -- no matter whence flame sprung
From gums and spice, or else from straw and rottenness,
So long as soul has power to make them burn, express
What lights and warms henceforth, leaves only ash behind,
Howe'er the chance: if soul be privileged to find
Food so soon that, at first snatch of eye, suck of breath,
It shall absorb pure life:" etc.

The Flight of the Duchess.

In 'The Flight of the Duchess' we are presented with
a generous soul-life, as exhibited by the sweet, glad Duchess,
linked with fossil conventionalism and mediaevalsim,
and an inherited authority which brooks no submissiveness,
as exhibited by the Duke, her husband, "out of whose veins
ceremony and pride have driven the blood, leaving him but a fumigated
and embalmed self". The scene of the poem is a "rough north land",
subject to a Kaiser of Germany. The story is so plainly told
that no prose summary of it could make it plainer. Its deeper meaning
centres in the incantation of the old gypsy woman, in which
is mystically shadowed forth the long and painful discipline
through which the soul must pass before being fully admitted
to the divine arcanum, "how love is the only good in the