That look upon you drinkingly.
They almost touch you with their fever look!
O keep your beauty like a mystic gem,
Clear-surfaced--give no fibre grain of hold
To those prehensile amorous bold eyes!
My heart is sick!
O love, let not my heart
Corrupt the flower of your liberty--
Go spend your beauty like the summer sky
That makes a radius of every glance,
And with your morning color light them all!
X RAYS
Your eyes were gem-like in that dim deep chamber
Hushed and sombre with imprisoned fire,
With yellow ghostly globes of intense aether
Potent as the rays of pure desire.
Your voice was startled into vivid wonder,
When the winged wild whining mystic wheel
Took flight and shot the dark with frosty crashings
Like an ice-berg splitting to the keel.
Your flesh was never warmer to my passion
Than when, moving in that lumor green,
We saw with eyes our fragile bones enamoured
Clasping sadly on the pallid screen.
You seemed so virginal and so undreaming
Of the burning hunger in my eyes,
To peer more fever-deeply in your being
Than the very death of passion lies.
The subtle-tuned shy motions of your spirit,
Fashioned through the ages for the sun,
Were dumb in that green lustre-haunted cavern
Where you walked a naked skeleton;
Slim-hipped and fluent and of lovely motion,
Living to the tip of every bone,
And ah, too exquisitely vivid-moving
Ever to lie wanly down alone--
To lie forever down so still and slender,
Tracing on the ancient screen of night
That naked and pale writing of the wonder
Of your beauty breathing in the light.
SONNETS
A PREFACE ABOUT SONNETS
Although so complex and difficult to construct, the sonnet has always
seemed to me a natural and almost inevitable form. Whether the reason
lies in its intrinsic nature, or in the tradition that surrounds it, is
not easy to tell. A sonnet is almost exactly square, and yet it has a
division sufficiently off the centre to make its squareness admirable
instead of tiresome; and perhaps this simple trait, together with its
closely woven structure of rhyme, is what gives it the quiet assurance
it has--the tranquil rightness of a thing of nature or natural
convenience. I feel towards an excellent sonnet as I imagine an eager
horse may feel towards a good measure tightly filled up with golden
grain.
This feeling is due partly to a kind of honesty of which the squareness
of a sonnet is symbolic. It is a form in which poets can express
themselves when they are not rhapsodically excited. And very often they
are not so excited, and at such times if they write rapid lyrics they
have to whip themselves up with an emotion that they get out of the
writing rather than out of the facts. And this makes much lyric poetry
seem a little histrionic, whereas in order to create a sonnet at all, a
concentration and sustainment of feeling is required that is inevitably
equal to its more temperate pretensions.
The quality of being inevitably and honestly square may become a
dreadful thing, however. And it makes this form inappropriate for
persons who have not at least a certain degree of lyrical taste. In the
hands of such persons a sonnet is not a poem, but an enterprise. They
get inside that square with a whole lot of materials, colors and sounds
and old clothes of ideas, and they push them round, and if they can not
make them fill in properly and come up to the edges, they climb out and
get some more. And the result is so palpably spreadout an object, always
with lumps of imagery here and there, that it can not even be received
in the linear sequence that is natural to the eye and ear.
This fault can be avoided by having strongly in mind while composing a
sonnet, the virtues not specifically its own--the clarity, the running
and pouring in single stream, that are the qualities of song. And to
these qualities the strict convention of its rhymes and the traditional
relation of the sonnet's parts, ought to give way when there is a
conflict between them, for if a poem has not rhapsody, it is the more
important that it should have grace. At least that is my opinion, and I
offer this preface, in expiatory rather than boastful vein, to those
high priests of perfection who guard the sonnet as a kind of lonely
reliquary of their god.
A PRAISEFUL COMPLAINT
You love me not as I love, or when I
Grow listless of the crimson of your lips,
And turn not to your burning finger-tips,
You would show fierce and feverish your eye,
And hotly my numb wilfulness decry,
Holding your virtues over me like whips,
And stinging with the visible eclipse
Of that sweet poise of life I crucify!
How can you pass so proudly from my face,
With all the tendrils of your passion furled,
So adequate and animal in grace,
As one whose mate is only all the world!
I never taste the sweet exceeding thought
That you might love me, though I loved you not!
THOSE YOU DINED WITH
They would have made you like a pageant, bold
And nightly festive, lustre-lit for them,
And round your beauty, like a dusky gem,
Have poured the glamour of the pride of gold;
And you would lie in life as in her bed
The mistress of a pale king, indolent,
Though hot her limbs and strong her languishment,
And her deep spirit is unvisited.
But I would see you like a gypsy, free
As windy morning in the sunny air,
Your wild warm self, your vivid self, to be,
A miracle of nature's liberty,
Giving your gift of being kind and fair,
High, gay and careless-handed everywhere!
THE PASSIONS OF A CHILD
The passions of a child attend his dreams.
He lives, loves, hopes, remembers, is forlorn
For legendary creatures, whom he deems
Not too unreal--until one golden morn
The gracious, all-awaking sun shines in
Upon his tranquil pillow, and his eyes
Are touched, and opened greatly, and begin
To drink reality with rich surprise.
I loved the impetuous souls of ancient story--
Heroic characters, kings, queens, whose wills
Like empires rose, achieved, and fell, in glory.
I was a child, until the radiant dawn,
Thy beauty, woke me--O thy spirit fills
The stature of those heroes, they are gone!
AS THE CRAG EAGLE
As the crag eagle to the zenith's height
Wings his pursuit in his exalted hour
Of her the tempest-reared, whose airy power
Of plume and passion challenges his flight
To that wild altitude, where they unite,
In mutual tumultuous victory
And the swift sting of nature's ecstasy,
Their shuddering pinions and their skyward might--
As they, the strong, to the full height of heaven
Bear up that joy which to the strong is given,
Thus, thus do we, whose stormy spirits quiver
In the bold air of utter liberty,
Clash equal at our highest, I and thee,
Unconquered and unconquering forever!
TO MY FATHER
The eastern hill hath scarce unveiled his head,
And the deliberate sky hath but begun
To meditate upon a future sun,
When thou dost rise from thy impatient bed.
Thy morning prayer unto the stars is said.
And not unlike a child, the penance done
Of sleep, thou goest to thy serious fun,
Exuberant--yet with a whisper tread.
And when that lord doth to the world appear,
The jovial sun, he leans on his old hill,
And levels forth to thee a golden smile--
Thee in his garden, where each warming year
Thou toilest in all joy with him, to fill
And flood the soil with Summer for a while.
TO EDWARD S. MARTIN
FROM A PROFESSIONAL HOBO
How old, my friend, is that fine-pointed pen
Wherewith in smiling quietude you trace
The maiden maxims of your writing-place,
And on this gripped and mortal-sweating den
And battle-pit of hunger now and then
Dip out, with nice and intellectual grace,
The faultless wisdoms of a nurtured race
Of pale-eyed, pink, and perfect gentlemen!
How long have art and wit and poetry,
With all their power, been content, like you,
To gild the smiling fineness of the few,
To filmy-curtain what they dare not see,
In multitudinous reality,
The rough and bloody soul of what is true!
* * * * *
(In an editorial in _Life_, Mr. Martin had described as
"professional hoboes" a number of revolutionary agitators whom
he did not like--Pancho Villa, William D. Haywood, Wild Joe
O'Carroll--and he did me the honor to include me among them.)
EUROPE--1914
Since Athens died, the life that is a light
Has never shone in Europe. Alien moods,
The oriental morbid sanctitudes,
Have darkened on her like the fear of night.
In happy augury we dared to guess
That her pure spirit shot one sunny glance
Of paganry across the fields of France,
Clear startling this dim fog of soulfulness.
But now, with arms and carnage and the cries
Of Holy Murder, rolling to the clouds
Her bloody-shadowed smoke of sacrifice,
The Superstition conquers, and the shrouds
Of sick black wonder lay their murky blight
Where shone of old the immortal-seeming light.
ISADORA DUNCAN
You bring the fire and terror of the wars
Of infidels in thunder-running hordes,
With spears like sun-rays, shields, and wheeling swords
Flame shape, death shape and shaped like scimitars,
With crimson eagles and blue pennantry,
And teeth and armor flashing, and white eyes
Of battle horses, and the silver cries
Of trumpets unto storm and victory!
Who is this naked-footed lovely girl
Of summer meadows dancing on the grass?
So young and tenderly her footsteps pass,
So dreamy-limbed and lightly wild and warm--
The bugles murmur and the banners furl,
And they are lost and vanished like a storm!
THE SUN
Now autumn, and that sadness as of love
Heroic in immortal solitude;
Those veins of flaming passion through the wood;
But in the blue and infinite above
A shining circle like the light of truth,
Self-poising; deathless his desire sublime,
Whose motion is the measurement of time,
Whose step is morning, and his smile is youth.
No passion burns upon the livid earth
Whose stain can tint that circle, or whose cry
Can rout the tranquilly receiving sky.
All passion, all its crimson stream, from birth
To murder, bloom and pestilential blight,
All flows beneath the sanction of his light.
THE NET
The net brings up, how long and languidly,
A million vivid quiverings of life,
Keen-finned and gleaming like a steely knife,
All colors, green and silver of the sea,
All forms of skill and eagerness to be--
They die and wither of the very breath
That sounds your pity of their lavish death
While they are leaping, star-like, to be free.
They die and wither, but the aged sea,
Insane old salty womb of mystery,
Is pregnant with a million million more,
Whom she will suckle in her oozy floor,
Whom she will vomit on a heedless shore,
While onward her immortal currents pour.
A DUNE SONNET
I was so lonely on the dunes to-day;
The shadow of a bird passed o'er the sand,
And I, a driftwood relic in my hand....
Sea winds are not more lonely when they stray
A little fitful and bewildered way
In this wan acre, whose dry billows stand
So pitilessly still of curve, so bland,
And wide, and waiting, infinitely grey.
In hollows I could almost hear them say,
The misty breezes--Run, we will not stay
In this unreal and spiritual land!
Our soul of life is calling from the strand,
Whose blue and breathing bosom leapt or lay
Or laughed to us in shots of silver spray!
SONGS
SEA-SHORE
The wind blows in along the sea--
Its salty wet caresses
Impart to all the ships that be
A thrill before it passes.
The tide is never at a stand,
A mountain in its motion,
Forever homing to the land,
And ever to the ocean.
And on its fickle, mighty breast
The waters still are moving,
With love in every running crest
And laughter in the loving--
Light love to touch the prows of ships
That slip along so slenderly.
I would as lightly touch your lips,
And your heart as tenderly,
If you would move with all that move,
The flowing and caressing,
Who have no firmness in their love,
No sorrow in its passing.
RAINY SONG
Down the dripping pathway dancing through the rain,
Brown eyes of beauty, laugh to me again!
Eyes full of starlight, moist over fire,
Full of young wonder, touch my desire!
O like a brown bird, like a bird's flight,
Run through the rain drops lithely and light.
Body like a gypsy, like a wild queen,
Slim brown dress to slip through the green--
The little leaves hold you as soft as a child,
The little path loves you, the path that runs wild.
Who would not love you, seeing you move,
Warm-eyed and beautiful through the green grove?
Let the rain kiss you, trickle through your hair,
Laugh if my fingers mingle with it there,
Laugh if my cheek too is misty and drips--
Wetness is tender--laugh on my lips
The happy sweet laughter of love without pain,
Young love, the strong love, burning in the rain.
A HYMN TO GOD
IN TIME OF STRESS
Lift, O dark and glorious Wonder,
Once again thy gleaming sword,
Cleave this killing doubt asunder
With one sheer and sacred word!
For my heart is weak and broken,
And the struggle runs too high,
And there is no burning token
In the new immortal sky.
Oh, not curb or courage only
Does my hour demand of me,
It is thought supreme and lonely
And responsible and free!
And I quail before the danger
As a bark before the blast,
When the beacon star's a stranger
In the mountains piling fast,
And there is no light but reason
And the compass of the ship.
God, a word of thine in season!
God, a motion of thy lip!
COMING SPRING
Ice is marching down the river,
Gaily out to sea!
Sunbeams o'er the snow-hills quiver,
Setting torrents free!
Yellow are the water-willows,
Yellow clouds are they,
Rising where the laden billows
Swell along their way!
Arrows of the sun are flying!
Winter flees the light,
And his chilly horn is sighing
All the moisty night!
Lovers of the balmy weather,
Lovers of the sun!
Drifts and duty melt together--
Get your labors done!
Ice is marching down the river,
Gaily out to sea!
Sing the healthy-hearted ever,
Spring is liberty!
DAISIES
Daisies, daisies, all surprise!
Open wide your sunny eyes!
See the linnet on the wing;
See the crimson feather!
See the life in every thing,
Sun, and wind, and weather!
Shadow of the passer-by,
Bare-foot skipping over,
Meadow where the heifers lie,
Butter-cup, and clover!
All is vivid, all is real,
All is high surprising!
Ye are pure to see and feel;
Ye the gift are prizing
Men and gods would perish for--
Gods with all their thunder!--
Could they have the thing ye are,
Everlasting wonder!
BOBOLINK
Bright little bird with a downward wing,
How many birds within you sing?
Two or three at the least it seems,
Overflowing golden streams.
If I could warble on a wing so strong,
Filling five acres full of song,
I'd never sit on the grey rail fence,
I'd never utter a word of sense,
I'd float forever in a light blue sky,
Uttering joy to the passers-by!
DIOGENES
A hut, and a tree,
And a hill for me,
And a piece of a weedy meadow.
I'll ask no thing,
Of God or King,
But to clear away His shadow.
EARLIER POEMS
EARLIER POEMS
A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY
Most of the friends who read the volume from which these poems are
selected, wanted to ask me what I meant by one of the titles, "The
Thought of Protagoras." And I meant so much--I meant to convey in that
phrase the hue of the philosophic background upon which the colors of my
life are drawn--that since I failed, I venture to enlarge its meaning
here with a word of confession.
An attitude that might be called affirmative scepticism is native to my
mind, and underlies every impulse that I have to portray the universal
character of life and truth. We seek among all our experiences for some
absolute and steadfast value by which, or toward which, we may guide
ourselves, but there is no absolute value except life itself, the having
of experiences. And among all our opinions we seek for an objective and
eternal truth, but nothing is eternally true except the variety of
opinions. Intermittently throughout the whole history of western, and I
suppose of eastern thought, this mood has arisen. It was the mood of
Protagoras, and of that Protagorean vein in Plato which is the height of
ancient wisdom. It arose again, after a period of bright-minded
investigation and formulation of "isms," in Sextus Empiricus and the
little group of Alexandrian scientists--the last light to go out in the
darkness of the reign of saints and theologies. Again, after those ages
of sombre and oppressive faith under the roof of the cathedral, it
appeared in the great Montaigne. The writings of Montaigne arrive in
history with a bold and tranquil flavor of delight in free meditation,
as though the too Sunday-serious world had at last made up its mind to
escape from church and go fishing. It is a reverent Sabbath holiday in
human thought. Almost immediately, however, the insane passion of belief
recurs. Descartes' attempt at a surgery of doubt is only the pathetic
opening of space for new and enormous growths of the old substance.
Spinoza follows him, the God-intoxicated man, and Leibnitz and other
monumental believers. And then David Hume quietly prepares, and once
more offers to mankind, in his clear, humble and noble enquiry about
Human Understanding, the sceptic wisdom, the moral equilibrium, that
would save its health and reason. But Kant and Hegel and those
mountainous Germans, the giants of soul-vapor, overwhelming again with
their rationalizations of primitive egotism, send all the world to the
mad-house of metaphysical conviction. And from this we are now again
issuing awakened--for the fifth time. And today the awakener is no
individual. The awakener is science--empirical science turning its brave
eyes upon man, its maker, to reveal the origin and destroy the excessive
pretensions of his thoughts. And so once again the sanity of the world
has been saved--or so at least it seems to one whose intellectual home
is in these ages of sacred doubt.
Thoughts that are abstract logically, are, psychologically, concrete
things. General ideas are specific occurrences. They are occurrences in
an individual mind, reflecting perhaps a material disturbance in a
brain. And these things and occurrences can, in the conception of
science, be explained as the result of antecedent causes. They, which
are the sovereign instruments of explanation, can themselves become the
subject of explanation, and therein lose their impersonality and their
universality which was their truth. Such, I think, is the modern
counterpart of the thought of Protagoras, summarized for the ancients
in his famous saying that "man is the measure of all things."
This thought used to come to my mind strongly in a seminar at Columbia
University, where in a shadowy corner of the great library at sunset we
gathered to read and study the writing of Spinoza. Our teacher was a
scholar of philosophy with the rarest gift of sinking himself
emotionally, as well as with intellect, into the metaphysical system of
the philosopher he studied. He is not the one I have portrayed in my
poem--that is a product of my imagination. But he seemed always so
ingenuous to me, in his acceptance of the existence of realities
corresponding to the vast abstractions of that philosopher of eternity,
that I could not but see continually in my fancy demons of time and the
concrete conspiring against him among the alleys of the book-shelves;
and there came the thought of death walking straight into that chamber
to annihilate the event of the individual idea--the only actual thing
denoted for me by his words of portentous and childish-universal import.
In my poem I tried to make such a death portray and prove to the
imagination the thought of Protagoras.
In another poem, Leif Ericson, I made the same reflection a theme of joy
and a kind of pagan sermon of life. The voyage of that wonderful sailor
out over the challenging blue, without knowledge and without sanction of
ends, is a symbol of the adventure of individual being. It is an example
to our hearts, so fond of faith and prudence, so little filled by nature
with moral courage and abandon.
AT THE AQUARIUM
Serene the silver fishes glide,
Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed;
As through the aged deeps of ocean,
They glide with wan and wavy motion.
They have no pathway where they go,
They flow like water to and fro.
They watch with never winking eyes,
They watch with staring, cold surprise,
The level people in the air,
The people peering, peering there,
Who wander also to and fro,
And know not why or where they go,
Yet have a wonder in their eyes,
Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.
EARTH'S NIGHT
Sombre,
Sombre is the night, the stars' light is dimmed
With smoky exhalations of the earth,
Whose ancient voice is lifted on the wind
In ceaseless elegies and songs of tears.
O earth, I hear thee mourning for thy dead!
Thou art waving the long grass over thy graves;
Murmuring over all thy resting children,
That have run and wandered and gone down
Upon thy bosom. Thou wilt mourn for him
Who looketh now a moment on these stars,
And in the moving boughs of this dark night
Heareth the murmurous sorrow of thy heart.
THE THOUGHT OF PROTAGORAS
My memory holds a tragic hour to prove,
Or paint with bleeding stroke, the ancient thought
That will to sorrow move all minds forever--
All that love to know. It was the hour
When lamps wink yellow in the winter twilight,
And the hurriers go home to rest;
And we whose task was meditation rose
And wound a murmuring way among the books
And effigies, the fading fragrance, of
A vaulted library--a place to me
Most like a dim vast cavernous brain, that holds
All the world hath of musty memory
In sombre convolutions that are dying.
There at our faithful table every day,
In the great shadow of this dissolution,
We would speak of things eternal, things
Divine, that change not. And we spoke with one
Who was a leader of the way to them;
A man born regal to the realms of thought.
High, pale, and sculptural his brow,
And high his concourse with the kings of old,
Plato, and Aristotle, and the Jew--
The bold, mild Jew who in his pensive chamber
Fell in love with God. It was of him,
And that unhungering love of his, he told us;
And with soft and stately melody,
The scholar's eloquence, he lifted us
Sublime above the very motions of
Our mortal being, and we walked with him
The heights of meditation like the gods.
I have no memory surpassing this.
And yet--strange pity of our natures or
Of his--there ran a rumor poisonous.
Scandal breeds her brood in the house of prayer.
And we, to whom these were like hours of prayer,
We whispered things not all philosophy
When he was gone. We knew but little where
He went, or whence he came, but this we knew,
That there was other love in him than what
He taught us--love that makes more quickly pale!
Ay, even he was tortured with the lure
Of mortal motion in the eyes--and lips
And limbs that were not warm to him alone
Were warm to him. He drank mortality.
Dim care, the ghost of retribution, sat
In pallor on his brow, and made us whisper
In the shadow of our meditations.
Faintly, faintly did we feel the hour
Advancing--livid painting of a thought!
He spoke of Substance,--strangely--on that day--
Eternal, self-existent, infinite--
He seemed, I thought, to rest upon the name.
And as he spoke there came on me that trance
Of inattention, when the words would seem
To drop their magic of containing things,
And, by a shift, become but things themselves--
Mere partial motions of the flesh of lips.
I watched these motions, watched them blandly, till
I knew I watched them, and that roused me, and
I heard him saying, "Things, and moving things,
Are merely modes of but one attribute,
Of what is infinite in attributes,
And may be called----" He spoke to there, and then--
His pencil, the thin pencil, dropped--A crack
Behind us--A quick step among the books--
His hand, his head, his body all collapsed
And fell, or settled utterly, before
The fact came on us--he was shot and killed.
But little I remember after that.
What matters it? The deed, the quick red deed
Was done, and all his speculations vanished
Like a sound.
TO THE ASCENDING MOON