University of Virginia Library

What does God Almighty mean,
Having made me
And in shade me
Fettered to a fortune low and lean,
Now to do with such a creature little—
Such a brittle
Vessel, common and unclean?
Yet He saith
In His Word unto the ear of faith,
Every jot and every tittle
Of the Law shall be performed in season
And declare its reason
By the righteous predetermined end;
So for me
Somewhere must be, though in the far distance,
Good excuse for this existence,
And a goal to which I darkly tend
As the rivers run toward the sea.
Some day I,
If I seem born out of due chronology,
Shall by doing
Deeds or wooing
Danger, thus for being make a grand apology—
Should I die.

Thus you argue well and yarely,
In the proper hole where squarely
You are fitted;
Who have never felt your own
One disharmony, nor for a minute known
What the iron meant
Stabbed within the heart, still unacquitted
Of a discord with its true environment.
Nothing suits
Me and mine, I seem apart, alone,
Yet unable to atone
For my barrenness in works and fruits.
I'm not your quadratus homo—
Nor could be, although I lived in fairy climes
And enjoyed more large and liberal times;
Sweetly in a paradise like Como,
Totus teres et rotundus
(Round peg in a ready round hole),
If re-made and quite re-ground whole
By the great mills, old, Divine,
Which we often deem have shunn'd us;
When (you say) they only watch and wait
For the psychologic moment stern and strait,
To reform us and refine.

I am fifty,
Fat and foolish, and have yet not found my task
Sought for at the noonday and in murk
Of the midnight, under every mask;
I have been unthrifty
With ball cartridge, too, and shot the Turk
And the tiger
In tall Indian jungles—Turk for choice;
Sworn, with manly voice,
In a dozen languages from Nile to Niger;
Played the lover
With the dusky houris of Pacific isles
Dandled on hot bosoms to their sultry smiles;
Hungered, thirsted, fought and fled,
But could nowhere in my course discover
Fitting post
Made for me alone in camp or college;
Though I stole my apples from the Tree of Knowledge
And explored the living and the dead—
Court and coast.
Yes, I had my wildest fling and fun
Everywhere, and with no 'prentice hand
Tried the fashions of the sportsman's gun
And full glasses,
Or the measure of obliging rose-red lasses,
Over all the world by sea and land;
But I never
By my utmost ripe endeavour
Could, though asked of man and nation,
Solve the sense of this d-d personal equation.
What does God Almighty wish?
He did surely not so frame me,
Just to shame me
In the eyes of all and my own self-respect;
Like a fish
Out of water, with no duty to expect
And no purpose and no place?
What can the poor Apteryx, that has no portion
In the air and now is an abortion,
Do to please himself or serve his Builder—
Though he often gets a touch from some neat gilder,
In this roar and headlong race?
I want treatment sharp and thorough,
As for a disfranchised rotten borough,
Not mere trifling with a pinch of pain;
But to be reduced to sections,
And with all my follies and affections
Clapt into the grand old cooking-pot again.

Show me toil,
Deal me pleasure,
Brought for none but me to speed or spoil
Of its virgin soul and treasure;
I will do it and at any cost,
Though it be with price of living
Or by oceans and wild deserts crost
And my heart's last drop of blood for giving.
Ah, this is my honest crux—
In the ceaseless ebb and flux
Of our grim great tide of action
Seething round me I have nought to do
Which no other may, not a small fraction;
Nay, not even to tie a harlot's pretty shoe.
Worlds are making,
Labours calling
These to prisons, those to thrones—
New stars rising, old stars falling;
I can help none, not in breaking
Wayside stones.
I as something common and unclean,
Seem omitted
As the only one unfitted—
What does God Almighty mean?