She fears him, and will always askWhat fated her to choose him;She meets in his engaging maskAll reasons to refuse him;But what she meets and what she fearsAre less than are the downward years,Drawn slowly to the foamless weirsOf age, were she to lose him.Between a blurred sagacityThat once had power to sound him,And Love, that will not let him beThe Judas that she found him,Her pride assuages her almost,As if it were alone the cost.—He sees that he will not be lost,And waits and looks around him.A sense of ocean and old treesEnvelops and allures him;Tradition, touching all he sees,Beguiles and reassures him;And all her doubts of what he saysAre dimmed of what she knows of days—Till even prejudice delaysAnd fades, and she secures him.The falling leaf inauguratesThe reign of her confusion;The pounding wave reverberatesThe dirge of her illusion;And home, where passion lived and died,Becomes a place where she can hide,While all the town and harbor sideVibrate with her seclusion.We tell you, tapping on our brows,The story as it should be,—As if the story of a houseWere told, or ever could be;We'll have no kindly veil betweenHer visions and those we have seen,—As if we guessed what hers have been,Or what they are or would be.Meanwhile we do no harm; for theyThat with a god have striven,Not hearing much of what we say,Take what the god has given;Though like waves breaking it may be,Or like a changed familiar tree,Or like a stairway to the seaWhere down the blind are driven.
(Washington Square)
I met him, as one meets a ghost or two,Between the gray Arch and the old Hotel."King Solomon was right, there's nothing new,"Said he. "Behold a ruin who meant well."He led me down familiar steps again,Appealingly, and set me in a chair."My dreams have all come true to other men,"Said he; "God lives, however, and why care?"An hour among the ghosts will do no harm."He laughed, and something glad within me sank.I may have eyed him with a faint alarm,For now his laugh was lost in what he drank."They chill things here with ice from hell," he said;"I might have known it." And he made a faceThat showed again how much of him was dead,And how much was alive and out of place,And out of reach. He knew as well as IThat all the words of wise men who are skilledIn using them are not much to defyWhat comes when memory meets the unfulfilled.What evil and infirm perversityHad been at work with him to bring him back?Never among the ghosts, assuredly,Would he originate a new attack;Never among the ghosts, or anywhere,Till what was dead of him was put away,Would he attain to his offended shareOf honor among others of his day."You ponder like an owl," he said at last;"You always did, and here you have a cause.For I'm a confirmation of the past,A vengeance, and a flowering of what was."Sorry? Of course you are, though you compress,With even your most impenetrable fears,A placid and a proper consciousnessOf anxious angels over my arrears."I see them there against me in a bookAs large as hope, in ink that shines by night.For sure I see; but now I'd rather lookAt you, and you are not a pleasant sight."Forbear, forgive. Ten years are on my soul,And on my conscience. I've an incubus:My one distinction, and a parlous tollTo glory; but hope lives on clamorous."'Twas hope, though heaven I grant you knows of what—The kind that blinks and rises when it falls,Whether it sees a reason why or not—That heard Broadway's hard-throated siren-calls;"'Twas hope that brought me through December storms,To shores again where I'll not have to beA lonely man with only foreign wormsTo cheer him in his last obscurity."But what it was that hurried me down hereTo be among the ghosts, I leave to you.My thanks are yours, no less, for one thing clear:Though you are silent, what you say is true."There may have been the devil in my feet,For down I blundered, like a fugitive,To find the old room in Eleventh Street.God save us!—I came here again to live."We rose at that, and all the ghosts rose then,And followed us unseen to his old room.No longer a good place for living menWe found it, and we shivered in the gloom.The goods he took away from there were few,And soon we found ourselves outside once more,Where now the lamps along the AvenueBloomed white for miles above an iron floor."Now lead me to the newest of hotels,"He said, "and let your spleen be undeceived:This ruin is not myself, but some one else;I haven't failed; I've merely not achieved."Whether he knew or not, he laughed and dinedWith more of an immune regardlessnessOf pits before him and of sands behindThan many a child at forty would confess;And after, when the bells in 'Boris' rangTheir tumult at the Metropolitan,He rocked himself, and I believe he sang."God lives," he crooned aloud, "and I'm the man!"He was. And even though the creature spoiledAll prophecies, I cherish his acclaim.Three weeks he fattened; and five years he toiledIn Yonkers,—and then sauntered into fame.And he may go now to what streets he will—Eleventh, or the last, and little care;But he would find the old room very stillOf evenings, and the ghosts would all be there.I doubt if he goes after them; I doubtIf many of them ever come to him.His memories are like lamps, and they go out;Or if they burn, they flicker and are dim.A light of other gleams he has to-dayAnd adulations of applauding hosts;A famous danger, but a safer wayThan growing old alone among the ghosts.But we may still be glad that we were wrong:He fooled us, and we'd shrivel to deny it;Though sometimes when old echoes ring too long,I wish the bells in 'Boris' would be quiet.
When he, who is the unforgiven,Beheld her first, he found her fair:No promise ever dreamt in heavenCould then have lured him anywhereThat would have been away from there;And all his wits had lightly striven,Foiled with her voice, and eyes, and hair.There's nothing in the saints and sagesTo meet the shafts her glances had,Or such as hers have had for agesTo blind a man till he be glad,And humble him till he be mad.The story would have many pages,And would be neither good nor bad.And, having followed, you would find himWhere properly the play begins;But look for no red light behind him—No fumes of many-colored sins,Fanned high by screaming violins.God knows what good it was to blind him,Or whether man or woman wins.And by the same eternal token,Who knows just how it will all end?—This drama of hard words unspoken,This fireside farce, without a friendOr enemy to comprehendWhat augurs when two lives are broken,And fear finds nothing left to mend.He stares in vain for what awaits him,And sees in Love a coin to toss;He smiles, and her cold hush berates himBeneath his hard half of the cross;They wonder why it ever was;And she, the unforgiving, hates himMore for her lack than for her loss.He feeds with pride his indecision,And shrinks from what will not occur,Bequeathing with infirm derisionHis ashes to the days that were,Before she made him prisoner;And labors to retrieve the visionThat he must once have had of her.He waits, and there awaits an ending,And he knows neither what nor when;But no magicians are attendingTo make him see as he saw then,And he will never find againThe face that once had been the rendingOf all his purpose among men.He blames her not, nor does he chide her,And she has nothing new to say;If he were Bluebeard he could hide her,But that's not written in the play,And there will be no change to-day;Although, to the serene outsider,There still would seem to be a way.
By what serene malevolence of namesHad you the gift of yours, Theophilus?Not even a smeared young Cyclops at his gamesWould have you long,—and you are one of us.Told of your deeds I shudder for your dreams,And they, no doubt, are few and innocent.Meanwhile, I marvel; for in you, it seems,Heredity outshines environment.What lingering bit of Belial, unforeseen,Survives and amplifies itself in you?What manner of devilry has ever beenThat your obliquity may never do?Humility befits a father's eyes,But not a friend of us would have him weep.Admiring everything that lives and dies,Theophilus, we like you best asleep.Sleep—sleep; and let us find another manTo lend another name less hazardous:Caligula, maybe, or Caliban,Or Cain,—but surely not Theophilus.
The ghost of Ninon would be sorry nowTo laugh at them, were she to see them here,So brave and so alert for learning howTo fence with reason for another year.Age offers a far comelier diademThan theirs; but anguish has no eye for grace,When time's malicious mercy cautions themTo think a while of number and of space.The burning hope, the worn expectancy,The martyred humor, and the maimed allure,Cry out for time to end his levity,And age to soften its investiture;But they, though others fade and are still fair,Defy their fairness and are unsubdued;Although they suffer, they may not forswearThe patient ardor of the unpursued.Poor flesh, to fight the calendar so long;Poor vanity, so quaint and yet so brave;Poor folly, so deceived and yet so strong,So far from Ninon and so near the grave.
Long warned of many terrors more severeTo scorch him than hell's engines could awaken,He scanned again, too far to be so near,The fearful seat no man had ever taken.So many other men with older eyesThan his to see with older sight behind themHad known so long their one way to be wise,—Was any other thing to do than mind them?So many a blasting parallel had searedConfusion on his faith,—could he but wonderIf he were mad and right, or if he fearedGod's fury told in shafted flame and thunder?There fell one day upon his eyes a lightEthereal, and he heard no more men speaking;He saw their shaken heads, but no long sightWas his but for the end that he went seeking.The end he sought was not the end; the crownHe won shall unto many still be given.Moreover, there was reason here to frown:No fury thundered, no flame fell from heaven.
Think not, because I wonder where you fled,That I would lift a pin to see you there;You may, for me, be prowling anywhere,So long as you show not your little head:No dark and evil story of the deadWould leave you less pernicious or less fair—Not even Lilith, with her famous hair;And Lilith was the devil, I have read.I cannot hate you, for I loved you then.The woods were golden then. There was a roadThrough beeches; and I said their smooth feet showedLike yours. Truth must have heard me from afar,For I shall never have to learn againThat yours are cloven as no beech's are.
She'd look upon us, if she could,As hard as Rhadamanthus would;Yet one may see,—who sees her face,Her crown of silver and of lace,Her mystical serene addressOf age alloyed with loveliness,—That she would not annihilateThe frailest of things animate.She has opinions of our ways,And if we're not all mad, she says,—If our ways are not wholly worseThan others, for not being hers,—There might somehow be found a fewLess insane things for us to do,And we might have a little heedOf what Belshazzar couldn't read.She feels, with all our furniture,Room yet for something more secureThan our self-kindled aureolesTo guide our poor forgotten souls;But when we have explained that graceDwells now in doing for the race,She nods—as if she were relieved;Almost as if she were deceived.She frowns at much of what she hears,And shakes her head, and has her fears;Though none may know, by any chance,What rose-leaf ashes of romanceAre faintly stirred by later daysThat would be well enough, she says,If only people were more wise,And grown-up children used their eyes.
Where a faint light shines alone,Dwells a Demon I have known.Most of you had better say"The Dark House", and go your way.Do not wonder if I stay.For I know the Demon's eyes,And their lure that never dies.Banish all your fond alarms,For I know the foiling charmsOf her eyes and of her arms,And I know that in one roomBurns a lamp as in a tomb;And I see the shadow glide,Back and forth, of one deniedPower to find himself outside.There he is who is my friend,Damned, he fancies, to the end—Vanquished, ever since a doorClosed, he thought, for evermoreOn the life that was before.And the friend who knows him bestSees him as he sees the restWho are striving to be wiseWhile a Demon's arms and eyesHold them as a web would flies.All the words of all the world,Aimed together and then hurled,Would be stiller in his earsThan a closing of still shearsOn a thread made out of years.But there lives another sound,More compelling, more profound;There's a music, so it seems,That assuages and redeems,More than reason, more than dreams.There's a music yet unheardBy the creature of the word,Though it matters little moreThan a wave-wash on a shore—Till a Demon shuts a door.So, if he be very stillWith his Demon, and one will,Murmurs of it may be blownTo my friend who is aloneIn a room that I have known.After that from everywhereSinging life will find him there;Then the door will open wide,And my friend, again outside,Will be living, having died.
No longer torn by what she knowsAnd sees within the eyes of others,Her doubts are when the daylight goes,Her fears are for the few she bothers.She tells them it is wholly wrongOf her to stay alive so long;And when she smiles her forehead showsA crinkle that had been her mother's.Beneath her beauty, blanched with pain,And wistful yet for being cheated,A child would seem to ask againA question many times repeated;But no rebellion has betrayedHer wonder at what she has paidFor memories that have no stain,For triumph born to be defeated.To those who come for what she was—The few left who know where to find her—She clings, for they are all she has;And she may smile when they remind her,As heretofore, of what they knowOf roses that are still to blowBy ways where not so much as grassRemains of what she sees behind her.They stay a while, and having doneWhat penance or the past requires,They go, and leave her there aloneTo count her chimneys and her spires.Her lip shakes when they go away,And yet she would not have them stay;She knows as well as anyoneThat Pity, having played, soon tires.But one friend always reappears,A good ghost, not to be forsaken;Whereat she laughs and has no fearsOf what a ghost may reawaken,But welcomes, while she wears and mendsThe poor relation's odds and ends,Her truant from a tomb of years—Her power of youth so early taken.Poor laugh, more slender than her songIt seems; and there are none to hear itWith even the stopped ears of the strongFor breaking heart or broken spirit.The friends who clamored for her place,And would have scratched her for her face,Have lost her laughter for so longThat none would care enough to fear it.None live who need fear anythingFrom her, whose losses are their pleasure;The plover with a wounded wingStays not the flight that others measure;So there she waits, and while she lives,And death forgets, and faith forgives,Her memories go foragingFor bits of childhood song they treasure.And like a giant harp that humsOn always, and is always blendingThe coming of what never comesWith what has past and had an ending,The City trembles, throbs, and poundsOutside, and through a thousand soundsThe small intolerable drumsOf Time are like slow drops descending.Bereft enough to shame a sageAnd given little to long sighing,With no illusion to assuageThe lonely changelessness of dying,—Unsought, unthought-of, and unheard,She sings and watches like a bird,Safe in a comfortable cageFrom which there will be no more flying.
Or the Contented Metaphysician
To the lore of no manner of menWould his vision have yieldedWhen he found what will never againFrom his vision be shielded,—Though he paid with as much of his lifeAs a nun could have given,And to-night would have been as a knife,Devil-drawn, devil-driven.For to-night, with his flame-weary eyesOn the work he is doing,He considers the tinder that fliesAnd the quick flame pursuing.In the leaves that are crinkled and curledAre his ashes of glory,And what once were an end of the worldIs an end of a story.But he smiles, for no more shall his daysBe a toil and a callingFor a way to make others to gazeOn God's face without falling.He has come to the end of his words,And alone he rejoicesIn the choiring that silence affordsOf ineffable voices.To a realm that his words may not reachHe may lead none to find him;An adept, and with nothing to teach,He leaves nothing behind him.For the rest, he will have his release,And his embers, attendedBy the large and unclamoring peaceOf a dream that is ended.
Faint white pillars that seem to fadeAs you look from here are the first one seesOf his house where it hides and dies in a shadeOf beeches and oaks and hickory trees.Now many a man, given woods like these,And a house like that, and the Briony gold,Would have said, "There are still some gods to please,And houses are built without hands, we're told."There are the pillars, and all gone gray.Briony's hair went white. You may seeWhere the garden was if you come this way.That sun-dial scared him, he said to me;"Sooner or later they strike," said he,And he never got that from the books he read.Others are flourishing, worse than he,But he knew too much for the life he led.And who knows all knows everythingThat a patient ghost at last retrieves;There's more to be known of his harvestingWhen Time the thresher unbinds the sheaves;And there's more to be heard than a wind that grievesFor Briony now in this ageless oak,Driving the first of its withered leavesOver the stones where the fountain broke.
"When he was here alive, Eileen,There was a word you might have said;So never mind what I have been,Or anything,—for you are dead."And after this when I am thereWhere he is, you'll be dying still.Your eyes are dead, and your black hair,—The rest of you be what it will."'Twas all to save him? Never mind,Eileen. You saved him. You are strong.I'd hardly wonder if your kindPaid everything, for you live long."You last, I mean. That's what I mean.I mean you last as long as lies.You might have said that word, Eileen,—And you might have your hair and eyes."And what you see might be Lisette,Instead of this that has no name.Your silence—I can feel it yet,Alive and in me, like a flame."Where might I be with him to-day,Could he have known before he heard?But no—your silence had its way,Without a weapon or a word."Because a word was never told,I'm going as a worn toy goes.And you are dead; and you'll be old;And I forgive you, I suppose."I'll soon be changing as all do,To something we have always been;And you'll be old... He liked you, too.I might have killed you then, Eileen."I think he liked as much of youAs had a reason to be seen,—As much as God made black and blue.He liked your hair and eyes, Eileen."
Could he have made Priscilla shareThe paradise that he had planned,Llewellyn would have loved his wifeAs well as any in the land.Could he have made Priscilla ceaseTo goad him for what God left out,Llewellyn would have been as mildAs any we have read about.Could all have been as all was not,Llewellyn would have had no story;He would have stayed a quiet manAnd gone his quiet way to glory.But howsoever mild he wasPriscilla was implacable;And whatsoever timid hopesHe built—she found them, and they fell.And this went on, with intervalsOf labored harmony betweenResounding discords, till at lastLlewellyn turned—as will be seen.Priscilla, warmer than her name,And shriller than the sound of saws,Pursued Llewellyn once too far,Not knowing quite the man he was.The more she said, the fiercer clungThe stinging garment of his wrath;And this was all before the dayWhen Time tossed roses in his path.Before the roses ever cameLlewellyn had already risen.The roses may have ruined him,They may have kept him out of prison.And she who brought them, being Fate,Made roses do the work of spears,—Though many made no more of herThan civet, coral, rouge, and years.You ask us what Llewellyn saw,But why ask what may not be given?To some will come a time when changeItself is beauty, if not heaven.One afternoon Priscilla spoke,And her shrill history was done;At any rate, she never spokeLike that again to anyone.One gold October afternoonGreat fury smote the silent air;And then Llewellyn leapt and fledLike one with hornets in his hair.Llewellyn left us, and he saidForever, leaving few to doubt him;And so, through frost and clicking leaves,The Tilbury way went on without him.And slowly, through the Tilbury mist,The stillness of October goldWent out like beauty from a face.Priscilla watched it, and grew old.He fled, still clutching in his flightThe roses that had been his fall;The Scarlet One, as you surmise,Fled with him, coral, rouge, and all.Priscilla, waiting, saw the changeOf twenty slow October moons;And then she vanished, in her turnTo be forgotten, like old tunes.So they were gone—all three of them,I should have said, and said no more,Had not a face once on BroadwayBeen one that I had seen before.The face and hands and hair were old,But neither time nor penuryCould quench within Llewellyn's eyesThe shine of his one victory.The roses, faded and gone by,Left ruin where they once had reigned;But on the wreck, as on old shells,The color of the rose remained.His fictive merchandise I boughtFor him to keep and show again,Then led him slowly from the crushOf his cold-shouldered fellow men."And so, Llewellyn," I began—"Not so," he said; "not so, at all:I've tried the world, and found it good,For more than twenty years this fall."And what the world has left of meWill go now in a little while."And what the world had left of himWas partly an unholy guile."That I have paid for being calmIs what you see, if you have eyes;For let a man be calm too long,He pays for much before he dies."Be calm when you are growing oldAnd you have nothing else to do;Pour not the wine of life too thinIf water means the death of you."You say I might have learned at homeThe truth in season to be strong?Not so; I took the wine of lifeToo thin, and I was calm too long."Like others who are strong too late,For me there was no going back;For I had found another speed,And I was on the other track."God knows how far I might have goneOr what there might have been to see;But my speed had a sudden end,And here you have the end of me."The end or not, it may be nowBut little farther from the truthTo say those worn satiric eyesHad something of immortal youth.He may among the millions hereBe one; or he may, quite as well,Be gone to find again the TreeOf Knowledge, out of which he fell.He may be near us, dreaming yetOf unrepented rouge and coral;Or in a grave without a nameMay be as far off as a moral.
Time was when his half million drewThe breath of six per cent;But soon the worm of what-was-notFed hard on his content;And something crumbled in his brainWhen his half million went.Time passed, and filled along with hisThe place of many more;Time came, and hardly one of usHad credence to restore,From what appeared one day, the manWhom we had known before.The broken voice, the withered neck,The coat worn out with care,The cleanliness of indigence,The brilliance of despair,The fond imponderable dreamsOf affluence,—all were there.Poor Finzer, with his dreams and schemes,Fares hard now in the race,With heart and eye that have a taskWhen he looks in the faceOf one who might so easilyHave been in Finzer's place.He comes unfailing for the loanWe give and then forget;He comes, and probably for yearsWill he be coming yet,—Familiar as an old mistake,And futile as regret.
Well, Bokardo, here we are;Make yourself at home.Look around—you haven't farTo look—and why be dumb?Not the place that used to be,Not so many things to see;But there's room for you and me.And you—you've come.Talk a little; or, if not,Show me with a signWhy it was that you forgotWhat was yours and mine.Friends, I gather, are small thingsIn an age when coins are kings;Even at that, one hardly flingsFriends before swine.Rather strong? I knew as much,For it made you speak.No offense to swine, as such,But why this hide-and-seek?You have something on your side,And you wish you might have died,So you tell me. And you triedOne night last week?You tried hard? And even thenFound a time to pause?When you try as hard again,You'll have another cause.When you find yourself at oddsWith all dreamers of all gods,You may smite yourself with rods—But not the laws.Though they seem to show a spiteRather devilish,They move on as with a mightStronger than your wish.Still, however strong they be,They bide man's authority:Xerxes, when he flogged the sea,May've scared a fish.It's a comfort, if you like,To keep honor warm,But as often as you strikeThe laws, you do no harm.To the laws, I mean. To you—That's another point of view,One you may as well indueWith some alarm.Not the most heroic faceTo present, I grant;Nor will you insure disgraceBy fearing what you want.Freedom has a world of sides,And if reason once deridesCourage, then your courage hidesA deal of cant.Learn a little to forgetLife was once a feast;You aren't fit for dying yet,So don't be a beast.Few men with a mind will say,Thinking twice, that they can payHalf their debts of yesterday,Or be released.There's a debt now on your mindMore than any gold?And there's nothing you can findOut there in the cold?Only—what's his name?—Remorse?And Death riding on his horse?Well, be glad there's nothing worseThan you have told.Leave Remorse to warm his handsOutside in the rain.As for Death, he understands,And he will come again.Therefore, till your wits are clear,Flourish and be quiet—here.But a devil at each earWill be a strain?Past a doubt they will indeed,More than you have earned.I say that because you needAblution, being burned?Well, if you must have it so,Your last flight went rather low.Better say you had to knowWhat you have learned.And that's over. Here you are,Battered by the past.Time will have his little scar,But the wound won't last.Nor shall harrowing surpriseFind a world without its eyesIf a star fades when the skiesAre overcast.God knows there are lives enough,Crushed, and too far goneLonger to make sermons of,And those we leave alone.Others, if they will, may rendThe worn patience of a friendWho, though smiling, sees the end,With nothing done.But your fervor to be freeFled the faith it scorned;Death demands a decencyOf you, and you are warned.But for all we give we getMostly blows? Don't be upset;You, Bokardo, are not yetConsumed or mourned.There'll be falling into viewMuch to rearrange;And there'll be a time for youTo marvel at the change.They that have the least to fearQuestion hardest what is here;When long-hidden skies are clear,The stars look strange.
Between me and the sunset, like a domeAgainst the glory of a world on fire,Now burned a sudden hill,Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher,With nothing on it for the flame to killSave one who moved and was alone up thereTo loom before the chaos and the glareAs if he were the last god going homeUnto his last desire.Dark, marvelous, and inscrutable he moved onTill down the fiery distance he was gone,—Like one of those eternal, remote thingsThat range across a man's imaginingsWhen a sure music fills him and he knowsWhat he may say thereafter to few men,—The touch of ages having wroughtAn echo and a glimpse of what he thoughtA phantom or a legend until then;For whether lighted over ways that save,Or lured from all repose,If he go on too far to find a grave,Mostly alone he goes.Even he, who stood where I had found him,On high with fire all round him,—Who moved along the molten west,And over the round hill's crestThat seemed half ready with him to go down,Flame-bitten and flame-cleft,—As if there were to be no last thing leftOf a nameless unimaginable town,—Even he who climbed and vanished may have takenDown to the perils of a depth not known,From death defended though by men forsaken,The bread that every man must eat alone;He may have walked while others hardly daredLook on to see him stand where many fell;And upward out of that, as out of hell,He may have sung and strivenTo mount where more of him shall yet be given,Bereft of all retreat,To sevenfold heat,—As on a day when three in Dura sharedThe furnace, and were sparedFor glory by that king of BabylonWho made himself so great that God, who heard,Covered him with long feathers, like a bird.Again, he may have gone down easily,By comfortable altitudes, and found,As always, underneath him solid groundWhereon to be sufficient and to standPossessed already of the promised land,Far stretched and fair to see:A good sight, verily,And one to make the eyes of her who bore himShine glad with hidden tears.Why question of his ease of who before him,In one place or another where they leftTheir names as far behind them as their bones,And yet by dint of slaughter toil and theft,And shrewdly sharpened stones,Carved hard the way for his ascendencyThrough deserts of lost years?Why trouble him now who sees and hearsNo more than what his innocence requires,And therefore to no other height aspiresThan one at which he neither quails nor tires?He may do more by seeing what he seesThan others eager for iniquities;He may, by seeing all things for the best,Incite futurity to do the rest.Or with an even likelihood,He may have met with atrabilious eyesThe fires of time on equal terms and passedIndifferently down, until at lastHis only kind of grandeur would have been,Apparently, in being seen.He may have had for evil or for goodNo argument; he may have had no careFor what without himself went anywhereTo failure or to glory, and least of allFor such a stale, flamboyant miracle;He may have been the prophet of an artImmovable to old idolatries;He may have been a player without a part,Annoyed that even the sun should have the skiesFor such a flaming way to advertise;He may have been a painter sick at heartWith Nature's toiling for a new surprise;He may have been a cynic, who now, for allOf anything divine that his effeteNegation may have tasted,Saw truth in his own image, rather small,Forbore to fever the ephemeral,Found any barren height a good retreatFrom any swarming street,And in the sun saw power superbly wasted;And when the primitive old-fashioned starsCame out again to shine on joys and warsMore primitive, and all arrayed for doom,He may have proved a world a sorry thingIn his imagining,And life a lighted highway to the tomb.Or, mounting with infirm unsearching tread,His hopes to chaos led,He may have stumbled up there from the past,And with an aching strangeness viewed the lastAbysmal conflagration of his dreams,—A flame where nothing seemsTo burn but flame itself, by nothing fed;And while it all went out,Not even the faint anodyne of doubtMay then have eased a painful going downFrom pictured heights of power and lost renown,Revealed at length to his outlived endeavorRemote and unapproachable forever;And at his heart there may have gnawedSick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawedAnd long dishonored by the living deathAssigned alike by chanceTo brutes and hierophants;And anguish fallen on those he loved around himMay once have dealt the last blow to confound him,And so have left him as death leaves a child,Who sees it all too near;And he who knows no young way to forgetMay struggle to the tomb unreconciled.Whatever suns may rise or setThere may be nothing kinder for him hereThan shafts and agonies;And under theseHe may cry out and stay on horribly;Or, seeing in death too small a thing to fear,He may go forward like a stoic RomanWhere pangs and terrors in his pathway lie,—Or, seizing the swift logic of a woman,Curse God and die.Or maybe there, like many another oneWho might have stood aloft and looked ahead,Black-drawn against wild red,He may have built, unawed by fiery gulesThat in him no commotion stirred,A living reason out of moleculesWhy molecules occurred,And one for smiling when he might have sighedHad he seen far enough,And in the same inevitable stuffDiscovered an odd reason too for prideIn being what he must have been by lawsInfrangible and for no kind of cause.Deterred by no confusion or surpriseHe may have seen with his mechanic eyesA world without a meaning, and had room,Alone amid magnificence and doom,To build himself an airy monumentThat should, or fail him in his vague intent,Outlast an accidental universe—To call it nothing worse—Or, by the burrowing guileOf Time disintegrated and effaced,Like once-remembered mighty trees go downTo ruin, of which by man may now be tracedNo part sufficient even to be rotten,And in the book of things that are forgottenIs entered as a thing not quite worth while.He may have been so greatThat satraps would have shivered at his frown,And all he prized alive may rule a stateNo larger than a grave that holds a clown;He may have been a master of his fate,And of his atoms,—ready as anotherIn his emergence to exonerateHis father and his mother;He may have been a captain of a host,Self-eloquent and ripe for prodigies,Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees,And then give up the ghost.Nahum's great grasshoppers were such as these,Sun-scattered and soon lost.Whatever the dark road he may have taken,This man who stood on highAnd faced alone the sky,Whatever drove or lured or guided him,—A vision answering a faith unshaken,An easy trust assumed of easy trials,A sick negation born of weak denials,A crazed abhorrence of an old condition,A blind attendance on a brief ambition,—Whatever stayed him or derided him,His way was even as ours;And we, with all our wounds and all our powers,Must each await alone at his own heightAnother darkness or another light;And there, of our poor self dominion reft,If inference and reason shunHell, Heaven, and Oblivion,May thwarted will (perforce precarious,But for our conservation better thus)Have no misgiving leftOf doing yet what here we leave undone?Or if unto the last of these we cleave,Believing or protesting we believeIn such an idle and ephemeralFlorescence of the diabolical,—If, robbed of two fond old enormities,Our being had no onward auguries,What then were this great love of ours to sayFor launching other lives to voyage againA little farther into time and pain,A little faster in a futile chaseFor a kingdom and a power and a RaceThat would have still in sightA manifest end of ashes and eternal night?Is this the music of the toys we shakeSo loud,—as if there might be no mistakeSomewhere in our indomitable will?Are we no greater than the noise we makeAlong one blind atomic pilgrimageWhereon by crass chance billeted we goBecause our brains and bones and cartilageWill have it so?If this we say, then let us all be stillAbout our share in it, and live and dieMore quietly thereby.Where was he going, this man against the sky?You know not, nor do I.But this we know, if we know anything:That we may laugh and fight and singAnd of our transience here make offeringTo an orient Word that will not be erased,Or, save in incommunicable gleamsToo permanent for dreams,Be found or known.No tonic and ambitious irritantOf increase or of wantHas made an otherwise insensate wasteOf ages overthrownA ruthless, veiled, implacable foretasteOf other ages that are still to beDepleted and rewarded variouslyBecause a few, by fate's economy,Shall seem to move the world the way it goes;No soft evangel of equality,Safe cradled in a communal reposeThat huddles into death and may at lastBe covered well with equatorial snows—And all for what, the devil only knows—Will aggregate an inkling to confirmThe credit of a sage or of a worm,Or tell us why one man in fiveShould have a care to stay aliveWhile in his heart he feels no violenceLaid on his humor and intelligenceWhen infant Science makes a pleasant faceAnd waves again that hollow toy, the Race;No planetary trap where souls are wroughtFor nothing but the sake of being caughtAnd sent again to nothing will attuneItself to any key of any reasonWhy man should hunger through another seasonTo find out why 'twere better late than soonTo go away and let the sun and moonAnd all the silly stars illuminateA place for creeping things,And those that root and trumpet and have wings,And herd and ruminate,Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas,Or by their loyal tails in lofty treesHang screeching lewd victorious derisionOf man's immortal vision.Shall we, because Eternity recordsToo vast an answer for the time-born wordsWe spell, whereof so many are dead that onceIn our capricious lexiconsWere so alive and final, hear no moreThe Word itself, the living word no manHas ever spelt,And few have ever feltWithout the fears and old surrenderingsAnd terrors that beganWhen Death let fall a feather from his wingsAnd humbled the first man?Because the weight of our humility,Wherefrom we gainA little wisdom and much pain,Falls here too sore and there too tedious,Are we in anguish or complacency,Not looking far enough aheadTo see by what mad couriers we are ledAlong the roads of the ridiculous,To pity ourselves and laugh at faithAnd while we curse life bear it?And if we see the soul's dead end in death,Are we to fear it?What folly is here that has not yet a nameUnless we say outright that we are liars?What have we seen beyond our sunset firesThat lights again the way by which we came?Why pay we such a price, and one we giveSo clamoringly, for each racked empty dayThat leads one more last human hope away,As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyesOur children to an unseen sacrifice?If after all that we have lived and thought,All comes to Nought,—If there be nothing after Now,And we be nothing anyhow,And we know that,—why live?'Twere sure but weaklings' vain distressTo suffer dungeons where so many doorsWill open on the cold eternal shoresThat look sheer downTo the dark tideless floods of NothingnessWhere all who know may drown.
[End of text.]
From the original advertisements:
By the same author
Captain Craig, A Book of Poems