Guinevere by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward — Read

Of Guinevere from Arthur separate, / And separate from Launcelot and the world, / And shielded in the convent with her sin, / As one draws fast a veil upon a face / That 's marred, but only holds the scar more close / Against the burning brain -- I read to-day / This legend; and if other yet than I / Have read, or said, how know I? for the text / Was written in the story we have learned, / Between the ashen lines, invisible, / In hieroglyphs that blazed and leaped like light / Unto the eyes. A thousand times we read; / A thousand turn the page and understand, / And think we know the record of a life, / When lo! if we will open once again / The awful volume, hid, mysterious, / Intent, there lies the unseen alphabet -- / Re-reads the tale from breath to death, and spells / A living language that we never knew.

This that I read was one short song of hers, / A fragment, I interpret, or a lost / Faint prelude to another -- missing too. / She sang it (says the text) one summer night, / After the vespers, when the Abbess passed / And blessed her; when the nuns were gone, and when / She, kneeling in her drowsy cell, had said / Her prayers (poor soul! ), her sorrowful prayers, in which / She had besought the Lord, for His dear sake, / And love and pity of His Only Son, / To wash her of her stain, and make her fit / On summer nights, behind the convent bars / And on stone-floors, with bruised lips, to pray / Away all vision but repentance from her soul.