245. Upon the Book and Picture of the Seraphical Saint Teresa

LIVE in these conquering leaves: live all the same;

And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame;

Live here, great heart; and love, and die, and kill:

And bleed, and wound, and yield, and conquer still.

Let this immortal life where’er it comes

Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms.

Let mystic deaths wait on’t; and wise souls be

The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee.

O sweet incendiary! show here thy art

Upon this carcase of a hard cold heart;

Let all thy scatter’d shafts of light, that play

Among the leaves of thy large books of day,

Combin’d against this breast at once break in,

And take away from me myself and sin;

This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be

And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me.

O thou undaunted daughter of desires!

By all thy dower of lights and fires;

By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;

By all thy lives and deaths of love;

By thy large draughts of intellectual day,

And by thy thirsts of love more large than they;

By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire,

By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire;

By the full kingdom of that final kiss

That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee His;

By all the Heav’n thou hast in Him

(Fair sister of the seraphim!);

By all of Him we have in thee;

Leave nothing of myself in me.

Let me so read thy life, that I

Unto all life of mine may die!