"Escape me?
Never—
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue."
But she is not "the loth"; that is all his fancy. She wants him to find her. And this, in its turn, scares him.
"My life is a fault at last, I fear:
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best, I shall scarce succeed."
It is the trouble of love. He may never reach her. . . . They look at one another, and he takes heart again.
"But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And, baffled, get up and begin again—
So the chase takes up one's life, that's all."
But she is now almost repelled. She is not this enigma: she wants him to grasp her. Well, then, she can help him, he says:
"Look but once from your farthest bound
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope goes to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me—
Ever
Removed!"
Is not this the meaning? The two poems seem to me supplementary of each other. First, the sense of her elusiveness; then the dim resentment and fear which this knowledge of mystery awakes in her. She does not (as I have seemed to make her) speak in either of these poems; but the thoughts are those which she must have, and so far, surely, her lover can divine her? The explanation given both by Mrs. Orr and Berdoe of Love in a Life (the first lyric), that the lover is "inhabiting the same house with his love," seems to me simply inept. Is it not clear that no material house[308:1] is meant? They are both inhabiting the body; and she, passing through this sphere, touching it at various points, leaves the spell of her mere being everywhere—on the curtain, the couch, the cornice-wreath, the mirror. But through her house he cannot range, as she through actualities. And though ever she eludes him, this is not what she sets out to do; she needs his comprehension; she does not desire to "escape" him.
The old enigma that is no enigma—the sphinx with the answer to the riddle ever trembling on her lips! But if she were understood, she might be taken for granted. . . . So the lips may tremble, but the answer is kept back:
"While the one eludes must the other pursue."