GUIDO: I dare not look at you:
You come to me with too pronounced a favour,
Get to your tirewomen.

DUCHESS: Ay, there it is!
There speaks the man! Yet had you come to me
With any heavy sin upon your soul,
Some murder done for hire, not for love,
Why, I had sat and watched at your bedside
All through the night-time, lest Remorse might come
And pour his poisons in your ear, and so
Keep you from sleeping! Sure it is the guilty,
Who, being very wretched, need love most.

GUIDO: There is no love where there is any guilt,

DUCHESS: No love where there is any guilt! O God,
How differently do we love from men!
There is many a woman here in Padua,
Some workman’s wife, or ruder artisan’s,
Whose husband spends the wages of the week
In a coarse revel, or a tavern brawl,
And reeling home late on the Saturday night,
Finds his wife sitting by a fireless hearth,
Trying to hush the child who cries for hunger,
And then sets to and beats his wife because
The child is hungry, and the fire black.
Yet the wife loves him! And will rise next day
With some red bruise across a careworn face,
And sweep the house, and do the common service,
And try and smile, and only be too glad
If he does not beat her a second time
Before her child! – that is how women love.

A pause: GUIDO says nothing.

Do you say nothing? Oh be kind to me
While yet I know the summer of my days.
I think you will not drive me from your side.
Where have I got to go if you reject me? –
You for whose sake this hand has murdered life,
You for whose sake my soul has wrecked itself
Beyond all hope of pardon.

GUIDO: Get thee gone:
The dead man is a ghost, and our love too,
Flits like a ghost about its desolate tomb,
And wanders through this charnel house, and weeps
That when you slew your lord you slew it also.
Do you not see?

DUCHESS: I see when men love women
They give them but a little of their lives,
But women when they love give everything;
I see that, Guido, now.

GUIDO: Away, away,
And come not back till you have waked your dead.

DUCHESS: I would to God that I could wake the dead,
Put vision in the glazed eyes, and give
The tongue its natural utterance, and bid
The heart to beat again; that cannot be:
For what is done, is done: and what is dead
Is dead for ever: the fire cannot warm him:
The winter cannot hurt him with its snows;
Something has gone from him; if you call him now,
He will not answer; if you mock him now,
He will not laugh; and if you stab him now
He will not bleed.