The Rainbow

They passed up the steep hill, he eager as a pilgrim arriving

at the shrine. As they came near the precincts, with castle on

one side and cathedral on the other, his veins seemed to break

into fiery blossom, he was transported.

They had passed through the gate, and the great west front

was before them, with all its breadth and ornament.

"It is a false front," he said, looking at the golden stone

and the twin towers, and loving them just the same. In a little

ecstasy he found himself in the porch, on the brink of the

unrevealed. He looked up to the lovely unfolding of the stone.

He was to pass within to the perfect womb.

Then he pushed open the door, and the great, pillared gloom

was before him, in which his soul shuddered and rose from her

nest. His soul leapt, soared up into the great church. His body

stood still, absorbed by the height. His soul leapt up into the

gloom, into possession, it reeled, it swooned with a great

escape, it quivered in the womb, in the hush and the gloom of

fecundity, like seed of procreation in ecstasy.

She too was overcome with wonder and awe. She followed him in

his progress. Here, the twilight was the very essence of life,

the coloured darkness was the embryo of all light, and the day.

Here, the very first dawn was breaking, the very last sunset

sinking, and the immemorial darkness, whereof life's day would

blossom and fall away again, re-echoed peace and profound

immemorial silence.

Away from time, always outside of time! Between east and

west, between dawn and sunset, the church lay like a seed in

silence, dark before germination, silenced after death.

Containing birth and death, potential with all the noise and

transition of life, the cathedral remained hushed, a great,

involved seed, whereof the flower would be radiant life

inconceivable, but whose beginning and whose end were the circle

of silence. Spanned round with the rainbow, the jewelled gloom

folded music upon silence, light upon darkness, fecundity upon

death, as a seed folds leaf upon leaf and silence upon the root

and the flower, hushing up the secret of all between its parts,

the death out of which it fell, the life into which it has

dropped, the immortality it involves, and the death it will

embrace again.

Here in the church, "before" and "after" were folded

together, all was contained in oneness. Brangwen came to his

consummation. Out of the doors of the womb he had come, putting

aside the wings of the womb, and proceeding into the light.

Through daylight and day-after-day he had come, knowledge after

knowledge, and experience after experience, remembering the

darkness of the womb, having prescience of the darkness after

death. Then between--while he had pushed open the doors of

the cathedral, and entered the twilight of both darkness, the

hush of the two-fold silence where dawn was sunset, and the

beginning and the end were one.