Fidelity and love are two different things, like a
flower and a gem.
And love, like a flower, will fade, will change into something
else
or it would not be flowery.
O — flowers they fade because they are moving swiftly; a
little torrent of life
leaps up to the summit of the stem, gleams, turns over round the
bend
of the parabola of curved flight,
sinks, and is gone, like a comet curving into the
invisible.
O — flowers, they are all the time travelling
like comets, and they come into our ken
for a day, for two days, and withdraw, slowly vanish
again.
And we, we must take them on the wing, and let them
go.
Embalmed flowers are not flowers, immortelles are not
flowers;
flowers are just a motion, a swift motion, a coloured
gesture;
that is their loveliness. And that is
love.
But a gem is different. It lasts so much longer than we
do
so much much much much longer
that it seems to last for ever.
Yet we know it is flowing away
as flowers are, and we are, only slower.
The wonderful slow flowing of the
sapphire!
All flows, and every flow is related to every other
flow.
Flowers and sapphires and us, diversely
streaming.
In the old days, when sapphires were breathed upon and
brought forth
during the wild orgasms of chaos
time was much slower, when the rocks came forth.
It took aeons to make a sapphire, aeons for it to pass
away.
And a flower it takes a summer.
And man and woman are like the earth, that brings forth
flowers
in summer, and love, but underneath is rock.
Older than flowers, older than ferns, older than foraminiferae,
older than plasm altogether is the soul of a man
underneath.
And when, throughout all the wild orgasms of
love
slowly a gem forms, in the ancient, once-more-molten
rocks
of two human hearts, two ancient rocks, a man’s heart and a
woman’s,
that is the crystal of peace, the slow hard jewel of
trust,
the sapphire of fidelity.
The gem of mutual peace emerging from the wild chaos of
love.