Aurora Leigh – Love and Revolution - 2cyberwhelm.org

YOUNG AURORA
Whoever says to a loyal woman, Love and work with me, will get fair answers if the work
and love are good for her, the best that she was born for. Women in a softer mood may
sometimes only hear the first word, love, and catch up with it any kind of work, just so
dear love go with it. I do not blame such women.
AURORA
Earth's fanatics often make heaven's saints.
YOUNG AURORA
But me, your work is not the best for. Nor your love the best. Ah, you force me, sir, to be
overbold in speaking of myself. I too have a vocation - work to do - the heavens and earth
have set me. And, even if the world were twice as wretched as you represent, my work is
as important as any economist's. Unless artists keep open the road between the seen and
the unseen, bursting through the best conventions with the best God bids us speak, to
prove what lies beyond both speech and imagination. We'll not barter, sir, the beautiful
for barley. It takes a soul to move a body. It takes a high-souled man to move the masses,
even to a cleaner sty. It takes the ideal to blow an inch inside the dust of the actual and
your revolutionaries fail because not poets enough to understand that life develops from
within. Perhaps I am worthy, as you say. Perhaps a woman's soul aspires and not creates.
Yet we aspire. And if I fail, well, burn me up with everything else that is false. I'll not ask
for grace. I who love my art would not wish it lower to suit my stature. You grant that I
may love my art. Wasting true love on anything is womanly, past question.
Romney exits.
AURORA
I retain every word that was said that day.
YOUNG AURORA
His eyes were fiery points, fixed in my mind, forever after.
AURORA
And yet I know I did not love him, nor he me.
YOUNG AURORA
And what I said is unrepented, as truth is always.
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