Lilith has a mythological function in Judaic legend as Adam's first wife but her function in Back to Methuselah seems to be different, to be more symbolic of certain things that are expressed in the play. This symbolism is accomplished by the use of anaphora in her concluding speech which serves to summarize the events of the play and bring a cyclical structure to the play as a whole.

The segment of the play in which Lilith is introduced and which includes her concluding speech is as follows:

A VOICE. There is one that came before the serpent. THE SERPENT. That is the voice of Lilith, in whom the father and mother were one. Hail, Lilith! Lilith becomes visible between Cain and Adam. LILITH. I suffered unspeakably; I tore myself asunder; I lost my life, to make of my one flesh these twain, man woman. And this is what has become of it. What do you make of it, Adam, my son? ADAM. I made the earth bring forth by my labor, and the woman bring forth by my love. And this is what has come of it. What do you make of it, Eve, my wife? EVE. I nourished the egg in my body and fed it with my blood. And now they let it fall as the birds did, and suffer not at all. What do you make of it, Cain, my first-born? CAIN. I invented killing and conquest and mastery and the winnowing out of the weak by the strong. And now the strong have slain one another; and the weak live for ever; and their deeds do nothing for the doer more than for another. What do you make of it, snake? THE SERPENT. I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough. [She vanishes]. CAIN. There is no place for me on earth any longer. You cannot deny that mine was a splendid game while it lasted. But now! Out, out, brief candle! [He vanishes]. EVE. The clever ones were always my favorites. The diggers and the fighters have dug themselves in with the worms. My clever ones have inherited the earth. All's well [She fades away]. ADAM. I can make nothing of it, neither head nor tail. What is it all for? Why? Whither? Whence? We were well enough in the garden. And now the fools have killed all the animals; and they are dissatisfied because they cannot be bothered with their bodies! Foolishness, I call it. [He disappears]. LILITH. They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction. Their breasts are without milk: Their bowels are gone: the very shapes of them are only ornaments for their children to admire and caress without understanding. Is this enough; or shall I labor again? Shall I bring forth something that will sweep them away and make an end of them as they have swept away the beasts of the garden, and made an end of the crawling things and the flying things and of all them that refuse to live for ever? I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made: Mars blushed as he looked down on the shame of his sister planet: cruelty and hypocrisy became so hideous that the face of the earth was pitted with the graves of little children among which living skeletons crawled in search of horrible food. The pangs of another birth were already upon me when one man repented and lived three hundred years; and I waited to see what would come of that. And so much came of it that the horrors of that time seem now but an evil dream. They have redeemed themselves from their vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still not satisfied: the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force. And though all that they have done seems but the first hour of the infinite work of creation, yet I will not supersede them until they have forded this last stream that lies between flesh and spirit, and disentangled their life from the matter that has always mocked it. I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow. Let them feed that appetite well for me. I say, let them dread, of all things, stagnation; for from the moment I, Lilith, lose hope and faith in them, they are doomed. In that hope and faith I have let them live for a moment; and in that moment I have spared them many times. But mightier creatures than they have killed hope and faith, and perished from the earth; and I may not spare them for ever. I am Lilith: I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul. But in enslaving Life's enemy I made him Life's master; for that is the end of all slavery; and now I shall see the slave set free and the enemy reconciled, the whirlpool become all life and no matter. And because these infants that call themselves ancients are reaching out towards that, I will have patience with them still; though I know well that when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and Lilith will be only a legend and a lay that has lost its meaning. Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond. [She vanishes].[1]

Back to Methuselah bears the subtitle A Metabiological Pentateuch. Shaw is referring in the title and the subtitle to several things. First, the Biblical character Methuselah, the oldest person mentioned in the Bible; secondly the title is a itself a cataphoric reference to the rallying cry of the brothers Barnabas in the second play, The Gospel of the Brothers' Barnabas. The subtitle combines two ideas, metabiology, a word that is unique to Shaw and one that is constructed along the same lines and conveys the same import as metaphysics, in other words metabiology is analogous to metaphysics in that it is philosophically oriented. Then the word pentateuch appears in the subtitle. Pentateuch means simply five books but is most often found in discussions of the first five books of the Bible, so the play is linked to other texts from the outset by the use of the name Methuselah, which is a direct Biblical reference, to philosophy through the neologistic formation of metabiological and then refers back to the Bible in a formal sense by adding the word pentateuch. Shaw could have called the play a quintet and seems to have chosen the word pentateuch precisely because of the Biblical associations; the word quintet would have musical connotations which Shaw apparently wanted to avoid. It is important to realize that Shaw, in other texts, expressed the view that what he advocated was a religion and that his plays were in some sense religious texts[2].

This Biblical patterning is exhibited in the first two plays In the Beginning and The Gospel of the Brothers' Barnabas. The first title echoes the opening of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, whose opening words are "In the beginning ...." This play deals with Adam and Eve and the temptation in the garden in its first act and with Cain in its second. The second play, which uses the word gospel in its title is intended to echo the gospels of the Bible, as such the connotative meanings of the word include those of message or news that is promulgated and doctrinal belief.

The third, fourth, and fifth plays within the cycle are entitled The Thing Happens, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman, and As Far as Thought Can Reach respectively.

The plays trace the evolution of the human race and predict its future evolution and vary from mythological and symbolic significance in the first play to standard drawing room comedy and satire in the second and third plays to melodrama in the fourth and depiction of a utopian society in the fifth.

The main concern, however, of this paper is an analysis, which makes use of the terms and concepts of discourse analysis, of Lilith's concluding speech. In order to do this it is necessary to provide a brief summary of the plots and thematic content of both plays.

Background Summary

Back to Methuselah opens with In the Beginning, which is designed to parallel the opening chapters of Genesis. The cast of characters in the first act is limited to Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. The first act hinges on the discovery, by the human characters, of a dead deer. They realize that it is possible for them to die by accident, as the deer has and so Adam decides that he shall set a limit on the span of his life and live for a thousand years. Eve acquiesces in this decision after she has been told about sex by the Serpent. It is the serpent who mentions Lilith and says,

I remember Lilith, who came before Adam and Eve. I was her darling, as I am yours. She was alone: there was no man with her. She saw death as you saw it when the fawn fell; and she knew then that she must find out how to renew herself and cast the skin like me. She had a mighty will; she strove to renew herself and strove and willed and willed for more moons than there are leaves on all the trees of the garden. Her pangs were terrible: her groans drove sleep from Eden. She said it must never be again: that the burden of renewing life was past bearing: that it was too much for one. And when she cast her skin, lo! there was not one new Lilith but two: one like herself, the other like Adam. You were the one: Adam was the other.[3]

The second act of the play takes place several hundred years later and the characters are Adam, Eve, and Cain. This episode takes place after Cain has killed Abel and is the scene in which the symbolic nature of the characters is brought to the fore. Cain is representative of the hunters and warriors; Adam and the dead Abel are representative of the farmers; the unseen Tubal and Enoch are representative of the clever artificers and religious mystics and Eve is, of course, the mother of all of them.

The fifth play, As Far as Thought Can Reach, takes place in 31,920 AD and presents a typical day in the life of a utopian community of a race of people who represent the next step in evolution, as such it has no plot to speak of, there is merely a succession of incidents which include the birth of a new member of the community (the people are oviparous and are born at what we would take for the biological age of seventeen); a visit by some older people, referred to as Ancients, who live an eremitical existence on the periphery of the community; an exhibition of a scientific exhibit (laboratory created human beings) by Pygmalion, who is killed by his creations; the departure of a young person who has started to turn old, to become one of the ancients and, finally, when the day is over, the ghostly appearances of Adam, Eve, Cain, the Serpent, and Lilith.

In the course of the fifth play there is discussion of evolution and the teleological impulse behind evolution, which is, for the Ancients, to achieve power, specifically intellectual power, and to eliminate the body and become immortal spirits without bodies, to become vortices.

It is at the end of the fifth play that our fragment of discourse appears, after the characters from the 30th millennium have left the stage the characters appear one by one and converse until finally Lilith appears.

Before giving a detailed analysis of Lilith's speech it seems advisable to discuss the overall patterns of reference in the fragment given here.

The Scene

The first thing that is noticeable about this fragment is the identification A VOICE. The character is not named until another character has used the character's name, this pattern of character identification only after the character has been identified by another is typical of printed Shavian dramatic texts and is found throughout the corpus of his work.

The voice states that it came before the serpent, thereby indicating its antiquity. The serpent responds by recognizing it as "the voice of Lilith, in whom the father and mother were one." This is the first reference in our scene fragment in which the reference is to the first play. Lilith was described in the first play as coming before Adam and Eve and has not been mentioned again until now.[4] Lilith then becomes visible between Cain and Adam, not between Adam and Eve or between Eve and the Serpent but between the two representatives of distinctly different types of men, between Adam, the gardener and farmer, and Cain, the hunter and warrior. Lilith then speaks and continues the reference begun by the Serpent and describes the pain she endured in bringing about the creation of Adam and Eve from herself. She then asks Adam what he makes of it and refers to him by his relationship to her, i.e., "my son." This pattern of statement and reference will be repeated by each character in turn, except for the Serpent, first they will state what they have done, then say what has become of it, and then ask another character what they make of it. The Serpent, however, varies the formula by saying "I am justified," and then making his statement. All the statements refer to events depicted or described in the first play. Further, no character in his or her statement refers directly to what the character preceding him has stated. The reference in each case is to what the character did or represented in the first play of the cycle. Lilith's statement is about cleaving herself in two and making man and woman but Adam's is about his life as a farmer and Eve's is about nourishing the egg in her body; Cain's statement is about conquest and mastery and the snake's is about choosing wisdom. This apparent irrelevance, however, is dependent upon the reference, in each case, of the word it in "What do you make of it...." In order for the reference not to be irrelevant it is necessary for the anaphora to be not to the statement that the character has just made but to the scene which has just been played out and to which Lilith, Adam, Eve, Cain and the Serpent have just been unseen spectators. This reference to the scene is something that will be emphasized in Lilith's concluding speech.

The formulaic nature of these utterance serves at least two purpose, topical statement and symbolic representation. The speaker is at once presenting a topic, one which has been discussed or dealt with throughout the cycle and also presenting themselves as the symbolic inventor of the thing (sexual duality, war, and so on). The question then becomes not one of what someone thinks about what has happened but "Was I justified in doing what I did; does the course of events bear witness to my success or failure?" The Serpent therefore is the last to speak in this sequence and the first to vanish and his speech states that he was justified and pleased with the results of his decision.

Since each of these utterances by the character refers to something which is not immediate to the reader or audience and which lies outside the fragment of the play which is presented here it is unclear whether this should be construed as exophoric or endophoric. Insofar as the episodes, in a staged production, would be seen with one or more breaks of uncertain duration between them or even with a break of one or more days, it would be exophoric and each play within the cycle would be a separate event. From the standpoint of the author, or of a person who reads the cycle at one sitting, the lines are endophoric inasmuch as the plays form, from his perspective, a unified whole. From the viewpoint of an audience, which may experience the plays as a series of events over a number of days, the references are exophoric. Insofar as the plays form a unified whole and represent a single work the pattern of pronominal reference could be construed as endophoric and it is as an endophoric reference based on the act of reading rather than as an audience viewing the cycle that we shall take as the pattern of pronominal reference.

Cain is the last human to speak in this sequence and he addresses the Serpent who makes his statement and then vanishes. At this point the characters begin to disappear from the stage in the opposite of the order in which they have just spoken. Cain makes a statement, which contains a quotation from Shakespeare, and then vanishes; Eve and Adam then speak and disappear so that only Lilith is left alone on the stage. It then falls to her to draw together the themes of the five plays and bring about an overall unity to what would otherwise be five isolated plays of varying quality strung together in a haphazard fashion.

This is accomplished indirectly and in part by the nature of the anaphoric reference in her speech. The use of they in the first sentence "They have accepted the burden of eternal life" makes no sense if it is to be understood as referring to the spirits who have just vanished, particularly since Adam and Eve are explicitly represented in the first play as having rejected "the burden of eternal life." Subsequent pronomial references then must be understood as having for their antecedents not the most immediate preceding direct statement but some other event or person or scene that precedes it.

The reference of the pronouns continues to be to the actors of the scene we have just witnessed up until Lilith says "I had patience with them for many ages...." At this point the reference seems to shift away from the immediately preceding scene to something else and this shift in reference is accompanied by a shift in tense from the perfect tense of "They have accepted...They have taken...their life does not fail them..." to the past tense of "I had patience...they did terrible things." The reference cannot be to the ancients and the children of the fifth play because it has already been established that they live in a utopia so the reference must be to something or someone else. The reference remains ambiguous until Lilith says "one man repented" here the reference is to a character in the second and third plays, the Reverend Haslam, who is the first man, since Biblical times, to live for three hundred years. At this point the immediately preceding references become clear, the reference is to the people that lived up until the time when Haslam "repented" and chose to live for three hundred years.

The reference immediately shifts again, however, and the they in "They have redeemed themselves..." cannot be understood as referring to Haslam and to those preceding him so it must be to something subsequent to Haslam's time and this is the ancients and children of the utopian community depicted in As Far as Thought Can Reach. This point is the last time the reference shifts in a major way or for an extended period of time to the generation of man that has just stepped off the stage although there are references to "the woman," who is most likely Eve, as Lilith's daughter or female side.

Lilith's speech takes a different turn when she says, "I will not supersede them." Prior to this point she had been a symbol of a sexual unity that diverged and became a duality, at this point, however, she begins a process that can only be called an apotheosis. The implicature of "I will not supersede them" is that she, Lilith, has the power or capability of supplanting the human race. Her next sentence, "I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal." is ambiguous in its use of the word eternal. The word eternal is used in an anaphoric way referring back to the I of the opening. What is ambiguous, however, is whether "the eternal" is used as referring to one of a number of eternal things of which Lilith is but one or whether it is used as referring to the concept of the eternal itself. The meaning seems to be clarified when Lilith says, "I am Lilith: I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul." Here the identification of Lilith seems to be with some eternal force, an immaterial force that is opposed to matter. The statement "I am Lilith" is in this context more than a simple statement of identity, the qualifications that are added after this clause indicate that it is said as the result of an apotheosis so that the meaning of "I am Lilith" becomes identical with the the statement "I am God." This continues in the next utterance of the speech in which Lilith says "I will have patience..." and then ends. At this point Lilith switches and speaks of being superseded by the ancients and then proceeds to an encomium on Life. Finally she concludes that whatever may lay beyond that point is too far away for her to see but that it is sufficient that there is a beyond. She vanishes and the final play is concluded.

The speech of Lilith then brings to a conclusion the cycle of plays that Shaw has presented and it does this by the use of a pattern of reference to the previous scenes but it does not conclude by simply summarizing the events of the play, for example the fourth play, The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman is not referred to at all by Lilith and the second play, The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas is referred to only indirectly insofar as the Reverend Haslam, the one who repents and lives for three hundred years, is a part of that play. The central points of reference then are the first play, In The Beginning; the third play, The Thing Happens; and the fifth play, As Far as Thought Can Reach. These are the plays that contain events that Lilith refers to by indirection rather than coming out and saying something like "You remember Haslam, he chose to live for three hundred years." The pronomial reference then is indirect and serves to bring the play to a complete close by repetition of the important philosophical ideas of the play. Lilith, however, conveys new ideas that are themselves of philosophical importance. Specifically the opposition of Matter and Life as entities has never been broached before; also the identity of Lilith with the creative principle itself is not made until her line beginning "I am Lilith," which is a new idea that has never been suggested before.

The speech summarizes and brings to a close the cycle and it also points to what may be beyond the far future when Lilith says "And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond."

A detailed analysis of Lilith's speech is given in an appendix below, immediately following the summary.

Summary

Lilith's speech brings a very long dramatic cycle to a close. The entire cycle occupies over two hundred and sixty pages of type and would probably take six or seven hours to present in its entirety on the stage. Since the play represents not only a dramatic fiction but also a philosophical and religious statement, as evidenced by the subtitle A Metabiological Pentateuch it is necessary to bring the play not only to a dramatic conclusion but also to a philosophical one. This is done in Lilith's speech which acts as a topical coda to the plays and summarizes and introduces new material as part of the statement of the play's topic.

The topic of the cycle is not necessarily the dramatic events that are portrayed in the play but what motivates the play, in this case a presentation of biological and philosophical doctrine. Lilith presents these doctrines in a summary form in her final discourse, a discourse that breaks down into three major sections, and a possible fourth section, or coda, that are marked by changes in tense and apparent changes in the reference of the third person pronouns which are used throughout the analyzed text. This may be referred to as the macro-structure of the text and can be determined by looking at the changes in tense and in pronominal reference that accompany the change in tense.

The macro- structure can be seen by breaking the speech into sections on the basis of the shift in tense from the perfect to the past and by the shift in pronominal usage from "they" to "I". Based on this it can be seen that the first part includes some material marked by the use of "I" but which is put into the first part because it is conjoined with the use of the perfect tense. The second section begins with Lilith asserting she had patience with them for many ages and is marked by a shift to the past tense. The third section is marked by a shift to the perfect tense again and the fourth by a shift in tense and mood, which goes from the indicative to the imperative and then alternates back and forth between the two moods before finally settling down into the indicative again.

In the first part of the speech, which is presented in the perfect tense she is referring to the ancients and to the fact that they have evolved into a race of long- lived human beings. The second part is presented through a shift to the past tense and is a description of the pain and suffering that ensued as a result of the First World War.[5] The third section seems to shift back to the ancients and to the evolved race of humans that have inherited the earth. Lilith then moves into what can only be described as an apotheosis or coda, which marks a fourth section, distinguished from the other three by the use of the first person singular, in which she reveals herself or identifies herself with life and with God and finally concludes with a vision of life's many mansions and the statement that for what may lie beyond the next step in evolution her, that is Lilith's, eyesight is too short.

The play is brought to a conclusion by the summation that refers back to the events and descriptions of the last play, by the shift in reference to the character of Haslam, the man who repented and chose to live for three hundred years, and then by shifting back to the ancients again. This serves to establish the relationship between the ancients and their short- lived ancestors and to provide the topical links between the second and third plays and the fifth play.

When Lilith refers to herself, or to "the woman," as she does in fragment 55, she is referring to the personages of the first play and to the event which the Serpent describes as giving birth to sexual duality and this sets the stage for her apotheosis.

The difficulty with the text arises from the shift in reference and in tense. A cursory reading would suggest that the third person pronouns that are used throughout the speech always refer to mankind in general but a closer examination, such as this, shows that in some cases it is clearly necessary for the reference to be to the ancients and in others to their short- lived predecessors. This ambiguity, however, can be resolved by noting that it is accompanied by a shift from the perfect tense to the past and back again so that two different groups are clearly referred to, one of which is acting in the present and one which did something in the past. Topical links between the plays are then established by the constant back and forth reference to events and scenes that are presumably still fresh in the viewer's/reader's mind.

The play is therefore summarized and new directions are indicated by the concluding speech and the play is thus brought to a satisfying dramatic and philosophical conclusion. 

APPENDIX

Detailed Analysis

In the analysis that follows Lilith's speech has been broken up into a series of fragments based on two principles, that of punctuation, where a pause has been indicated by a period, comma, semicolon, or colon that portion has been treated as a separate fragment, and by breaking on what seem to be minor pauses, which are not indicated by punctuation marks, but which also seem to be relatively complete information units.

Each fragment in the original version of this paper was preceded by a number in a bold typeface and then given immediately below it in a contrasting bold typeface.This feature has been omitted in this HTML version.[6]

Each fragment, except for those fragments that are composed of single words, contains information that is, in terms of discourse analysis, of both the given and new types, however, rather than attempting a mechanical breakdown of the information into these categories it has been mentioned only in those places where it seemed to affect the interpretation of the text or its oral interpretation by someone portraying Lilith on the stage.

LILITH.

They have accepted the burden of eternal life.

They have taken the agony from birth;

and their life does not fail them

even in the hour of their destruction.

Their breasts are without milk:

THE YOUTH. You old fish! I believe you dont know the difference between a man and a woman. THE ANCIENT. It has long ceased to interest me in the way it interests you. And when anything no longer interests us we no longer know it.[8]

Their bowels are gone:

the very shapes of them are only ornaments

for their children to admire and caress without understanding.

Is this enough;

or shall I labor again?

Shall I bring forth something that will sweep them away

and make an end of them

as they have swept away the beasts of the garden,

and made an end of the crawling things

and the flying things

and of all them that refuse to live for ever?

I had patience with them for many ages:

they tried me very sorely.

They did terrible things:

I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness

of the things I had made:

Mars blushed

as he looked down on the shame of his sister planet:

cruelty and hypocrisy became so hideous

that the face of the earth was pitted with the graves of little children

among which living skeletons crawled in search of horrible food.

The pangs of another birth were already upon me

when one man repented

However, since all of the things, the hypocrisy and cruelty, the First World War, in short all of the things referred to in 20-27 occur outside of the play these references are clearly exophoric and the reader/audience is expected to share, with Lilith, some of this knowledge.

and lived three hundred years;

and I waited to see what would come of that.

And so much came of it

that the horrors of that time seem now but an evil dream.

They have redeemed themselves from their vileness,

and turned away from their sins.

Best of all,

they are still not satisfied:

The impulse I gave them

in that day when I sundered myself in twain

and launched Man and Woman on the earth

still urges them:

after passing a million goals

they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh,

to the vortex freed from matter,

to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that,

when the world began,

was a whirlpool in pure force.

And though all that they have done seems but the first hour of the infinite work of creation,

yet I will not supersede them

until they have forded this last stream

that lies between flesh and spirit,

and disentangled their life from the matter that has always mocked it.

Lilith expresses her ability to wait and endure, but she pauses here, as if she expects to add a qualification to this statement. waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal.

At this point Lilith qualifies the utterance in fragment 53 that she can wait by saying that she is eternal. At first glance this piece of information, which must, in this utterance, be classified as new, both on the grounds of stress, which would fall naturally on eternal and in terms of conventional description, seems ambiguous. Lilith could be saying that she is one of a number of eternal beings and the utterance could be interpreted as meaning, "waiting and patience mean nothing to eternal beings, of whom I am one," or it could mean "waiting and patience mean nothing to the principal of eternity, which is myself." This will not be clarified until fragment 74 and the utterances that follow it.

I gave the woman the greatest of gifts:

curiosity.

By that her seed has been saved from my wrath;

for I also am curious;

and I have waited always

to see what they will do tomorrow.

Let them feed that appetite well for me.

I say,

let them dread,

of all things,

stagnation;

for from the moment I, Lilith,

lose hope and faith in them,

they are doomed.

In that hope and faith I have let them live for a moment;

and in that moment I have spared them many times.

But mightier creatures than they have killed hope and faith,

and perished from the earth;

and I may not spare them for ever.

I am Lilith:

I brought life into the whirlpool of force,

and compelled my enemy,

Matter,

to obey a living soul.

But in enslaving Life's enemy I made him Life's master;

for that is the end of all slavery;

and now I shall see the slave set free

and the enemy reconciled,

the whirlpool become all life and no matter.

And because these infants that call themselves ancients are reaching out towards that,

I will have patience with them still;

though I know well that when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me,

and Lilith will be only a legend and a lay that has lost its meaning.

Of Life only is there no end;

and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt,

and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert,

my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines.

And for what may be beyond,

the eyesight of Lilith is too short.

It is enough that there is a beyond.

[She vanishes].

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Gillian and Yule, George. Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1983.

Shaw, George Bernard. Complet Plays with Prefaces. 6 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead. 1962. WebSpace Furnished Courtesy Of Volant TurnPike(tm)