1
The browned trees are singing for my thirty-fourth birthday. Leaves are
beginning to fall upon the long grass. Their cold perfume raises the
anticipation of sensational revolutions in my unsettled life. Violence
has begotten peace, peace has fluttered away in agitation. A bewildered
change has turned among the roots and the Prince’s kiss as far at sea as
ever.
* * * * *
_To each age as to each person its perfections. But in these things there
is a kind of revolutionary sequence. So that a man having lain at ease
here and advanced there as time progresses the order of these things
becomes inverted. Thinking to have brought all to one level the man finds
his foot striking through where he had thought rock to be and stands
firm where he had experienced only a bog hitherto. At a loss to free
himself from bewilderment at this discovery he puts off the caress of the
imagination._
2
The trick is never to touch the world anywhere. Leave yourself at the
door, walk in, admire the pictures, talk a few words with the master of
the house, question his wife a little, rejoin yourself at the door—and go
off arm in arm listening to last week’s symphony played by angel hornsmen
from the benches of a turned cloud. Or if dogs rub too close and the poor
are too much out let your friend answer them.
* * * * *
_The poet being sad at the misery he has beheld that morning and seeing
several laughing fellows approaching puts himself in their way in order
to hear what they are saying. Gathering from their remarks that it is of
some sharp business by which they have all made an inordinate profit,
he allows his thoughts to play back upon the current of his own life.
And imagining himself to be two persons he eases his mind by putting his
burdens upon one while the other takes what pleasure there is before him._
Something to grow used to; a stone too big for ox haul, too near
for blasting. Take the road round it or—scrape away, scrape away: a
mountain’s buried in the dirt! Marry a gopher to help you! Drive her in!
Go yourself down along the lit pastures. Down, down. The whole family
take shovels, babies and all! Down, down! Here’s Tenochtitlan! here’s a
strange Darien where worms are princes.
3
But for broken feet beating, beating on worn flagstones I would have
danced to my knees at the fiddle’s first run. But here’s evening and
there they scamper back of the world chasing the sun round! And it’s
daybreak in Calcutta! So lay aside, let’s draw off from the town and look
back awhile. See, there it rises out of the swamp and the mists already
blowing their sleepy bagpipes.
* * * * *
_Often a poem will have merit because of some one line or even one
meritorious word. So it hangs heavily on its stem but still secure, the
tree unwilling to release it._