Aurora Leigh – Love and Revolution - 2cyberwhelm.org

AURORA
Untangled the wreath from my hair. Silently both of us disappointed, both of us wary,
we walked back into sight of the house.
ROMNEY
Aurora, let's be serious and throw by this game of head and heart. Life means to be sure
both head and heart. Both active, both complete. And both in earnest. Men and women
make the world as head and heart make human life. There is work for men and women in
this beleaguered earth.
ROMNEY & AURORA
And thought can never do the work of love.
ROMNEY
The chances are that, being a woman, young and pure, with such a pair of large, calm
eyes, you write as well and ill upon the whole as other women. If as well, what then? If
even a little better still, what then?
ROMNEY & AURORA
We want the best in art now or no art.
ROMNEY
The world is half blind with intellectual light, half brutalised with civilization. Having
caught the plague we shriek east to west along a thousand railroads, mad with pain and
sin. Does one woman who weeps so easily grow pale to see this? Does one of you stand
still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls and pine and die because of universal
anguish? You weep for what you know. But, for a million sick you remain unmoved; you
would as soon weep for an isosceles triangle. The same world uncomprehended by you,
must remain uninfluenced by you. Women, personal and passionate, give us doting
mothers and chaste wives, sublime madonnas, enduring saints.
ROMNEY & AURORA
We get no Christ from you. And truly we will not get a poet.
Not to my mind.
ROMNEY
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