Celia has challenged me....
Be my reply,
Challenge to poets who, with tinkling tricks,
Meet life and pass it by.
"Beauty," they ask, "in politics?"
"If you put it there," say I.
Wide the new world had opened its bright gates.
And a woman who had heard of the new world
All her life long and had saved her pence
By hard frugality, to be her competence
In the free home, came eagerly in nineteen seven
Into These States,
With her little earnings furled
In a large handkerchief--but with a heart
Too rich to be contained, for she had done her part:
She had come
With faith to Heaven.
But there was a panic that year,
No work, no wages in These States.
And a great fear
Seized on the immigrant. And so she took her pence
All of them, furled
Safe in her handkerchief, to a government cashier--
A clerk in the post-office. (And he relates
Her errand as a joke, yet tenderly
For I watched him telling me.)
... Not knowing English, being dumb,
She had brought with her a thin-faced lad
To interpret. And he made it clear,
While she unfurled
Her handkerchief and poured the heap of coins out of her hand,
That 'she was giving all she had--
To be used no matter how, you understand' ...
Lest harm should come to the new world.
O doubters of democracy,
Undo your mean contemptuous art!--
More than in all that poetry has said,
More than in mound or marble, in the living live the dead.
The past has done its reproductive part.
Hear now the cry of beauty's present needs,
Of comrades levelling a thousand creeds,
Finding futility
In conflict, selfishness, hardness of heart!
For love has many poets who can see
Ascending in the sky
Above the shadowy passes
The everlasting hills: humanity.
O doubters of the time to be,
What is this might, this mystery,
Moving and singing through democracy,
This music of the masses
And of you and me--
But purging and dynamic poetry!--
What is this eagerness from sea to sea
But young divinity!
I have seen doubters, with a puny joy,
Accept amusement for their little while
And feed upon some nourishing employ
But otherwise shake their wise heads and smile--
Protesting that one man can no more move the mass
For good or ill
Than could the ancients kindle the sun
By tying torches to a wheel and rolling it downhill.
But not the wet circumference of the seas
Can quench the living light in even these,
These who forget,
Eating the fruits of earth,
That nothing ever has been done
To spur the spirit of mankind,
Which has not come to pass
Forth from the heart and mind
Of some one man, through other men birth after birth,
In thoughts that dare
And in deeds that share
And in a will resolved to find
A finer breath
Born in the deep maternity of death.
... If these be ecstasies of youth,
Yet they are news of which all time has need.
If they be lies, tell them yourselves and heed
How poets' twice-told lies become the truth!
There was a poet Celia loved who, hearing all around
The multitudinous tread
Of common majesty,
(A hearty immigrant was he!)
Made of the gathering insurgent sound
Another continent of poetry?
His name is writ in his blood, mine and yours.
... "And when he celebrates
These States,"
She said, "how can Americans worth their salt
But listen to the wavesong on their shores,
The waves and Walt,
And hear the windsong over rock and wood,
The winds and Walt,
And let the mansong enter at their gates
And know that it is good!"
Walt Whitman, by his perfect friendliness
Has let me guess
That into Celia, into me,
He and unnumbered dead have come
To be our intimates,
To make of us their home
Commingling earth and heaven....
That by our true and mutual deeds
We shall at last be shriven
Of these hypocrisies and jealous creeds
And petty separate fates--
That I in every man and he in me,
Together making God, are gradually creating whole
The single soul.
Somebody called Walt Whitman--
Dead!
He is alive instead,
Alive as I am. When I lift my head,
His head is lifted. When his brave mouth speaks,
My lips contain his word. And when his rocker creaks
Ghostly in Camden, there I sit in it and watch my hand grow old
And take upon my constant lips the kiss of younger truth....
It is my joy to tell and to be told
That he, in all the world and me,
Cannot be dead,
That I, in all the world and him, youth after youth
Shall lift my head.
V
There is a vision, Celia, in your face....
Beauty had lived in India like a mad
And withdrawn prophetess, in Greece had set her pace
Between a laurelled lad
And a singing maiden, pitched her purple tents
In Rome, leaned with a mother's fears
In Bethlehem to nurse a son of God upon her breast
And learned the tender loneliness of tears,
Awhile had hid in Europe, sad
In the shadow of magnificence,
Brooding, finding no rest,
And then of a sudden she had run forth from her hiding-place,
Rejoicing, desperate, intense
Against her enemy, a rod
Of fire in her hand, her tresses crowned
With liberty, her purpose bold and bound
That every son should be a son of God.
And then she wept for France.... But once more clad
In stars, she beckons to America, the land
Of hope. Behold her stand
With her bright finger scorning armaments
And on her lips the unconquerable common sense
Of love calling the world to challenge and confound
The empty idols of her enemy!
... Comforter of experience,
Enlightener of old events,
Beauty forever dares to widen and retrace
Her way, singing the marches of democracy,
Carrying banners of the time to be,
Calling companions to her high command.
There is a banner, Celia, in your hand!
Though sons, whose fathers bled
For freedom, struggle now instead
With heavier weapons and with weary-waking head
For bread;
Though sons, whose fathers fought in other ages
For fame, bear in their hearts today the scar
Of entering where the laborer sleeps
And rousing him with masterly inquiry where he keeps
His wages:
Though all the cunning coil of trade appear a baser thing
Than battles are,
O trace through time the orbit of this troubled star!
... See, from afar off, how the valiant few
Of old, each with a helmet on his head,
Practiced their inconclusive feud
Upon no battlefield of unfeeling dew--
But on the prostrate stillness of the multitude!
Even their knightliest prowess they must rear,
Tamerlane, Alexander, Arthur, every king,
Upon the common clay from which they spring.
For see how slaves, on whom war falls, renew
The strength of war and disappear
Year after year
Into the earth--fulfilling it to form and bear
Democracy!
Look nearer now along the modern sky
And watch where every man fastens the electric wing
Upon his foot, that he may leave his little sod
Of ignorance!
And look where, by and by,
Taking his high inheritance,
He knows himself and other men as the winged self of God!
The times are gone when only few were fit
To view with open vision the sublime,
When for the rest an altar-rail sufficed
To obscure the democratic Christ....
Perceiving now his gift, demanding it,
The benison of common benefit,
Men, women, all,
Interpreters of time,
Have found that lordly Christ apocryphal
While Christ the comrade comes again--no wraith
Of virtue in a far-off faith
But a companion hearty, natural,
Who sorrows with indomitable eyes
For his mistreated plan
To share with all men the upspringing sod,
The unfolding skies--
Not God who made Himself the Man,
But a man who proved man's unused worth--
And made himself the God.
Once you had listened, Celia, to a stream
And lain a long time, silent as a sleeper.
And then your word arrived as from beyond
Your body, bending with its breath the frond
Of a fern. You whispered to the listening stream:
"As evil is yet wider than we dream,
So good is deeper." ...
O how I try to bring
Your voice to say in mine that word!--to sing
Clear-hearted as a mountain-spring
Of the wonders we see deepening!
Time cannot bury what the blest have thought,
For there is resurrection far and near.
Often it seems as though a single day had brought
To each bright hemisphere
Courage to cast
The servitude
And blinded glory of the past
Away and in a flash had taught
Purpose and fortitude....
But not so swiftly are we wrought.
By many single days we learn to live,
By many flashes read the vision clear
That every heart is equal debtor
To its own and every breast
For the good before the better,
The better toward the best.
When we who hugged awhile the golden bowl
Of greed behold it now a sieve
Through which is drained invisibly
A nectar we were saving for the soul,
Then not in vain have many gone
The empty ways of stealth
Seeking a firmer base than honesty
For building happiness upon....
And by the ancient agonizing test
We have slowly guessed
That a just portion of the whole
Is all there is of wealth.
When those who labor wake
And care ...
And through the tingling air
A dead man's voice, by living men renewed
And women, dares democracy
To self-respect: "Open the lands! Let mankind share
The ample livelihood they bear!"--
Then not in vain have the poor known distress,
Teaching the rich that happiness
Is something no man may--possess.
Little by little we, whose fathers fought
Impassioned, are ashamed
Of the familiar thought
That waste of blood is honourable feud:
Little by little from the wondering land
The agitation and the lie of war
Shall pass; for in the heart disclaimed
Murder shall be abandoned by the hand.
And while there grows a fellowship of unshed blood
To stop the wound and heal the scar
Of time, with sudden glorious aptitude
Woman assumes her part. Her pity in a flood
Flings down the gate.
She has been made to wait
Too long, undreaming and untaught
The touch and beauty of democracy.
But, entering now the strife
In which her saving sense is due,
She watches and she grows aware,
Holding a child more dear than property,
That the many perish to empower the few,
That homeless politics have split apart
The common country of the human heart.
(Your heart is beating, Celia, like a song!)
.... For man has need
Not merely of the lips that kiss and hands that feed
But of the hearts that heed
And of the minds that speed
Like rain.
Loving a mother or a wife,
Let him release her tenderness, to make him strong,
And use her beauty and receive her law:
The very life of life.
In temporary pain
The age is bearing a new breed
Of men and women, patriots of the world
And one another. Boundaries in vain,
Birthrights and countries, would constrain
The old diversity of seed
To be diversity of soul.
O mighty patriots, maintain
Your loyalty!--till flags unfurled
For battle shall arraign
The traitors who unfurled them, shall remain
And shine over an army with no slain,
And men from every nation shall enroll
And women--in the hardihood of peace!
What can my anger do but cease?
Whom shall I fight and who shall be my enemy
When he is I and I am he?
Let me have done with that old God outside
Who watched with preference and answered prayer,
The Godhead that replied
Now here, now there,
Where heavy cannon were
Or coins of gold!
Let me receive communion with all men,
Acknowledging our one and only soul!
For not till then
Can God be God, till we ourselves are whole.