University of Virginia Library

POËTICS.

Yes, every man of woman born
To crown of thunder or of thorn,
I am convinced—it is my honest credo—
May do one thing which not another can,
And has in him some private plan
For building up or pulling down,
And framing (just for his renown)
A toy or death torpedo.
And each of us, hitched to reality,
Possesses still
To use or lay aside at will
A glorious individuality,
Unlike the rest and all apart and fair
However slight or simple it may be,
Hung upon golden hair
Or like a splendid ocean broad and free;
A spacious song
To roll the weary world along,
And set a thousand hearts on fire
With stern magnificence of hate
At evil fate,
Or love of beauty and divine desire;
A talent
Worth finding and worth using and worth telling,
Which never will be given again—
For thus the Powers ordain—
To gentle wisdom or imperious youth,
And might make earth more gay and gallant
Or kindle sunshine in a brother's dwelling;
A truth,
Which would be falsehood to a different mind,
But here could turn all nations kin and kind.
Yet most, the millions,
Are quite content to eat and drink and sleep
And at their petty tasks in squalor creep
Or ride on pillions
Behind the noisy Few who lead and lie,
And then (not coming to their own)
To neighbours and themselves unknown,
Decay and die.
And there the treasure goes with them, is lost,
An undiscovered land
Though ripe and ready to the hand,
Which by them only could be crost;
And the full grace and blessing
Not for a single class
But the great total mass—
The book, the picture,
The deed of light like God's supreme caressing,
The red-hot stricture
Which blasts to ashes the brute wrong
However throned and diademed and strong—
These and a thousand more,
That might have grandly lifted
The multitude of toilers unto rest
And higher levels, adding to the store
Of happiness and learning and rich art,
Or rifted
The ragged clouds and shown the bright and best;
That should have striven to humanise the heart
With all its rudeness
And clothe in comely garments nudeness,
Or sound a science or new chord
Which predecessors failed to reach and raise
Out of the darkness unto dawn and praise,
Or whet a saving sword—
These quite unheard, with their sweet languages,
Pass into the cold Silences
Unsyllabled, and the grand sum of things
Is so much poorer for their unwaked springs.
And I,
Who move unhonoured among men,
Am still a player needed
Though all unheeded,
If but by some rejected song or sigh
Or little touch of an obscurer pen,
To round the orb of labour and bring heaven
Just one thought nearer,
And be an atom of the secret leaven
Fermenting in the minds of those who toil
And make earth dearer.
I, too, a factor
In the broad compass of the land and sky,
Do yield my measure of the power or oil
To the great wheels and piston rods,
A hidden but inevitable actor
Amid the legions that are God's
Upon the platform of Eternity.
The giant in me romps
And asks for revels,
Though he may sport alike with babes and devils,
And pageantries and varied pomps;
He fain would sprawl his giant length
About an endless canvas in profusion
Of all sweet colours, and assay the strength
Which is his weakness and his joy,
And treat the universe as though a toy—
Yet, after every form
Or freak of tranquil ease and storm,
Be quite as far from the conclusion.
Let others drag in the old ruts,
Or hoop themselves in meagre butts
Of wine they turn to water;
I want a larger space,
A continent or two for my embrace
And not the curled and scented quarter
Of some small fraction,
As tame and tiny as a lady's lap,
Wherein to feed on sugarplums and pap
And serve the silken reins of idle traction.
I have big notions,
Not narrowed to mere Matins and devotions,
But wide as is the world of being
And deep as the abyss of hell—
Yes, sometimes with a brimstone smell—
And gathering in the purview of its seeing
The honest mud, and not by ounces,
As much as furbelows and flounces
And midnight shapes
Like monstrous owls and bats
And beetles and Egyptian cats,
With sunrise and sunsetting,
And not forgetting
Our oldest friends, the blest anthropoid apes.
I hold Poetics
To be the mirror of each mortal thing—
Your skeleton, your dear wife's apron string,
Your private mole,
Your comicals as well as your pathetics;
Not quite the cinder-hole,
Or cesspit or the gutter;
For there I draw a decent line,
And bar our ethics and the true Divine
Within a shade and shutter.
I do believe in good taste and good morals
And leave the dirty capers
To d——d Religious Papers,
And grand young men who yet are cutting
Their teeth and new opinions
On babies' corals
Throughout the Press in our too free dominions,
Or roar their time of rutting.
I duly try to catch
The perfume and the passion as they flower,
The one sweet moment, if a smear
Of glory on some cottage latch,
The moonlight on a mossy tower,
A terrible tear
Which in the shadowed light looks red as blood,
Like sweat of gray Gethsemane—
Love at its topmost flood,
And in calm woods the coy anemone
A fallen star.
But, though I never veil the scar
Which has a grace and is a gem of jewels
According to its range,
I do not rashly blaze it out
Exposing it to study strange;
I leave the maid her crewels,
Her pretty zone and pout
And magic dimple—
I wish her to be clean and simple.
From those who lightly tear the figleaves off
And make of purity their scoff
Or gloat in coarse excesses
And squirmings of mere lewd undresses,
I turn with loathing
As from the dunghill and the awful reek;
My soul is vexed
With vice made sweet and virgins all unsexed,
And the rouge-plastered cheek—
I want a creed and clothing.