Starved Rock

by Edgar Lee Masters

NEL MEZZO DEL CAMMIN

You call this a world! Cloud cuckoo town,

Nephelo coccygia, warp and woof,

Now at the last I write it down,

Since I no longer have the proof

To show it isn't opera bouffe,

A moving picture film and scene;

Stage world, with the glue between

The angels' feathers, the devil's hoof

Neither violent nor venene.

*****

Eheu! The middle of the way too—

Gethsemane and left in the lurch.

Storms frowning up the dying day too,

Bending a weed that was a birch.

I can step right over the tallest church.

Trumpets have shrunk to trumpet toys,

Tottle-te-toot! I hear the clocks

Ticking in paper breasts. What noise!

Gorges and towering rocks

Are just the canvas He employs,

With gelatine rivers and candy lochs,

Shored in with painted blocks.

I passed through a jungle where smoky mosses

Hung from the trees, the crocodile

Slept or clambered about the fosses;

Buzzards roosting, not very vile;

Rivers of red-ink shed for crosses.

Centaurs with arrows file on file

Drew and shouted: he seems to smile

Let's make him weep a while.

Look out for the lion! Said I, with a scowl,

Let the lion growl:

Cat-gut scraped in the painted wings.

Does the terrible tiger howl:

Tin cans and resined strings.

Do the dead gibber and does the owl

Hoot where the shroud is slipping, clings?

Who pressed the squeaky springs

In the death bird that it sings?

And you, sir! Well, one time I was sure

You carried a poisoned dart!

And now you're empty space as pure

As the sky when clouds are blown apart.

Ether! Radium! Nothing! A cure

For grit and dust which start

Grief in this Waterbury heart.

For I had trod the cobra, found

He is but calico, cotton stuffed.

The boa chased me round and round,

Hyenas tracked me, licked and snuffed,

And made my poor heart flutter and pound,

Until I saw the mirror is all,

And the wood became a rare-bit dream

With monstrous faces and figures packed.

And then you ask: Is the mirror cracked,

Or is it so bright that it casts a beam

Through all the shadow scheme?

One time I saw a river's bank

Shaved down with spades as sheer as a wall,

Wasp holes, snake holes cut in two

Brought these molds of earth to view.

I turned away where the air was blank

And here was a thing fantastical:

Space was cored like the honey comb

With forms of things that crawl and roam,

Animals, men. As I am alive

I saw the form of a horse and cow

Edged with air and hollow as space.

But a horse and cow began to thrive

In just a second, a drifting mist

Flowed into the molds before my face.

And the animals moved, I don't know how,

Out of the all surrounding mesh,

Creatures of bone and flesh!

And it was just the same with men. I vow

I saw an astral stuff poured in

Pockets of air and men became

Voices talking of good and evil,

Virtue, courage, vice and sin,

God and the devil.

For the all unfolding Air is what?

The Great Idea, if so I may say,

A sort of Ocean leaping to waves.

And what do you care if they pass away?

They sink to their source, not into graves.

Beasts may vanish, races decay,

The Ocean will always remain the same;

With new waves rising, no two alike;

Waves that are little and waves that rise

In storms and touch the skies.

R. Browning, you were a man of power,

But I don't think much of your tower.

And I see no use of blowing a horn,

The tower is merely papier-maché,

And comes no higher than to my knees.

I step right over it—pick a flower,

Purple, it may be, called heart's ease

And go with the way of the seas.

For I am an optimist better than you:

This dream is hell, but it's all to the good:

The Ocean is water in calm or flood.

There's nothing wrecked, or wrongly wrought,

There's nothing real but Thought!

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