Explore "Galatea" by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A moment's grace, Pygmalion! Let me be / A breath's space longer on this hither hand / Of fate too sweet, too sad, too mad to meet. / Whether to be thy statue or thy bride -- / An instant spare me! Terrible the choice, / As no man knoweth, being only man; / Nor any, saving her who hath been stone / And loved her sculptor. Shall I dare exchange / Veins of the quarry for the throbbing pulse? / Insensate calm for a sure-aching heart? / Repose eternal for a woman's lot? / Forego God's quiet for the love of man? / To float on his uncertain tenderness, / A wave tossed up the shore of his desire, / To ebb and flow whene'er it pleaseth him; / Remembered at his leisure, and forgot, / Worshiped and worried, clasped and dropped at mood, / Or soothed or gashed at mercy of his will, / Now Paradise my portion, and now Hell; / And every single, several nerve that beats / In soul or body, like some rare vase, thrust / In fire at first, and then in frost, until / The fine, protesting fibre snaps?
Oh, who / Foreknowing, ever chose a fate like this? / What woman out of all the breathing world / Would be a woman, could her heart select, / Or love her lover, could her life prevent? / Then let me be that only, only one; / Thus let me make that sacrifice supreme, / No other ever made, or can, or shall. / Behold, the future shall stand still to ask, / What man was worth a price so isolate? / And rate thee at its value for all time.