Pansies (Lawrence)/Fidelity
FIDELITY
Fidelity and love are two different things, like a flower and a gem.And love, like a flower, will fade, will change into something elseor it would not be flowery.
O flowers they fade because they are moving swiftly; a little torrent of lifeleaps up to the summit of the stem, gleams, turns over round the bendof the parabola of curved flightsinks, and is gone, like a comet curving into the invisible.
O flowers they are all the time travellinglike comets, and they come into our kenfor 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 doso much much much longerthat it seems to last forever.Yet we know it is flowing awayas 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 forthduring the wild orgasms of chaostime was much slower, when the rocks came forth.It took æons to make a sapphire, æons for it to pass away.
And a flower it takes a summer. And man and woman are like the earth, that brings forth flowersin summer, and love, but underneath is rock.Older than flowers, older than ferns, older than foraminiferæolder than plasm altogether is the soul of a man underneath.
And when, throughout all the wild orgasms of loveslowly a gem forms, in the ancient, once-more-molten rocksof 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 trustthe sapphire of fidelity.The gem of mutual peace emerging from the wild chaos of love.