Volume 2 / Part 2 / Act 1 — A
Reading edition
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS IN THE COURT OF LOVE
[Vide ante, p. 409.]
Why is my Love like the Sun?
1. The Dawn = the presentiment of my Love.
No voice as yet had made the air Be music with thy name: yet why That obscure [over aching] Hope: that yearning Sigh? That sense of Promise everywhere? Beloved! flew thy spirit by?
2. The Sunrise = the suddenness, the all-at-once of Love—and the first silence—the beams of Light fall first on the distance, the interspace still dark.
3. The Cheerful Morning—the established Day-light universal.
4. The Sunset—who can behold it, and think of the Sun-rise? It takes all the thought to itself. The Moon-reflected Light—soft, melancholy, warmthless—the absolute purity (nay, it is always pure, but), the incorporeity of Love in absence—Love per se is a Potassium—it can subsist by itself, tho' in presence it has a natural and necessary combination with the comburent principle. All other Lights (the fixed Stars) not borrowed from the absent Sun—Lights for other worlds, not for me. I see them and admire, but they irradiate nothing.