If I have had doubts, dearest, they have been of myself, lest I might be
unworthy of your friendship or love. Suspicions of you I never had.
Who wrote that suspicions among thoughts are like bats among birds, flying
only by twilight?
But even my doubts have been thoughts, Beloved,--sure of you if not always
of myself. And if I have looked for you only with doubtful vision, yet I
have always seen you in as strong a light as my eyes could bear:--
blue-moonlight. Beloved, is not twilight: and blue-moonlight has been the
light I saw you by: it is you alone who can make sunlight of it.
This I read yesterday has lain on my mind since as true and altogether
beautiful, with the beauty of major, not of minor poetry, though it was
a minor poet who wrote it. It is of a wood where Apollo has gone in
quest of his Beloved, and she is not yet to be found: "Here each branch
Sway'd with a glitter all its crowded leaves,
And brushed the soft divine hair touching them
In ruffled clusters....
Suddenly the moon
Smoothed herself out of vapor-drift and made
The deep night full of pleasure in the eye
Of her sweet motion. Not alone she came
Leading the starlight with her like a song:
And not a bud of all that undergrowth
But crisped and tingled out an ardent edge
As the light steeped it: over whose massed leaves
The portals of illimitable sleep
Faded in heaven."
That is love in its moonrise, not its sunrise stage: yet you see.
Beloved, how it takes possession of its dark world, quite as fully as
the brighter sunlight could do. And if I speak of doubts, I mean no
twilight and no suspicions: nor by darkness do I mean any unhappiness.
My blue-moon has come, leading the starlight with her like a song. Am I
not happy enough to be patiently yours before you know it? Good things
which are to be, before they happen are already true. Nothing is so true
as you are, except my love for you and yours for me. Good-night,
good-night.
Sleep well, Beloved, and wake.
Q.
Beloved: I heard somebody yesterday speak of you as "charming"; and I
began wondering to myself was that the word which could ever have covered
my thoughts of you? I do not know whether you ever charmed me, except in
the sense of charming which means magic and spell-binding. That you did
from the beginning, dearest. But I think I held you at first in too much
awe to discover charm in you: and at last knew you too much to the depths
to name you by a word so lightly used for the surface of things. Yet now a
charm in you, which is not all you, but just a part of you, comes to
light, when I see you wondering whether you are really loved, or whether,
Beloved, I only like you rather well!