An Actor's Reminiscences and Other Poems :: :: University of Virginia Library

Yes: I was speaking to a poet once
And envying his high calling ('twas before
I learned the true wide bearings of the Stage).
“Ah! not for you,” I said, “the drudgery
Of nightly acting: not for you the toil;
The base companionship; the smell of gas;
The dust; the tumult; and the slavery
To some coarse master of a manager.
Your Stage is all wide Nature, and the sea
Is your orchestra, and the countless stars
Are your footlights; and what you need of praise
You win from all the true hearts of the world
—From living souls, and from posterity:
Not from an audience flattered for one night.
Not yours the painted trees; the painted girls;
The painted horrid canvas waves of seas;

The painted staring flowers; the rattle of tin
For thunder, and the flashing in the pan
Of gunpowder for lightning;—most of all
Not yours the simulated pale stage-love
When fingers curve around a waist but fear
To touch, and lips may never dare to close
For fear of rubbing off the paint!—or else
For fear that she the actress will resent
(I have known cases) a too amorous kiss
And in the Green-Room afterwards exclaim
‘That was no stage kiss, most presuming man!’
And bring an action 'gainst the luckless fool.

“Yours least of all is this. Yours most of all
The whole wide world of rosy womanhood
(Rosy this time without a touch of paint!)
To love and to rejoice in: land on land
Wherein to seek the lady of your dreams,
While we are chained to the incessant boards.
Yours is the living blue sea: yours the clouds

Whence the live resonant red levin leaps
And the live thunder: yours the pathless crags
(Innocent, like your women, of all paint;
Perhaps more so): yours the vivid sunset sky
And the gold sunrise (when did actor see
Sunrise or sunset?): yours the blossoms couched
In the green midmost of entangled woods
Where scanty sunrays pierce the flexile boughs
(What actor ever sees a real green wood
Or gets beyond the Green-Room?): yours the air
Of summer days, intolerably sweet
With odours of a million blossoms mixed.

“Your Manager is Nature, and your own
Untrammelled spirit that guides and leads you on
And the pure universal voice of things.”