The Little Review, May 1914 (Vol. 1., No. 3)

by Various

On Behalf of Literature

DeWitt C. Wing

It is well-nigh incredible that Edwin Björkman, of his own free will, should have written the “open letter to President Wilson on behalf of American literature” which appeared in the April Century. Whenever a man of promise and power shows the white feather those who admire him suffer a keen, personal pain. And yet Mr. Björkman is by no means the last man whom I should expect to make a plea for an official recognition, through honors, prizes, and subsidies, of an American literature. A conventional literary man could have done it, but a great man never.

Mr. Björkman, after remarking the President’s ability to appreciate the importance of what he purposes to lay before him, asks, “Will this nation, as a nation, never do anything for the encouragement or reward of its poets and men of letters?” He thinks it ought to do something because “the soul of a nation is in its literature,” and because “we shall never raise our poetry to the level of our other achievements until we, as a nation, try to find some method of providing money for the poet’s purse and laurels for his brow.”

No specific proposal is made to the President. Mr. Björkman outlines the general question, instances England, France, Sweden, and Norway as bestowing honors and rewards upon their writers, and says that he has “learned by bitter experience what it means to strive for sincere artistic expression in a field where brass is commonly valued above gold,” and “should like to see the road made a little less hard, and the goal a little more attractive, lest too many of those that come after lose their courage and let themselves be tempted by the incessant clangor of metal in the marketplace.” Wherefore “on behalf of men and women who are striving against tremendous odds to give this nation a poetry equaling in worth and glory that of any other nation in the world” he appeals to the Chief Executive to take the lead.

A literature worthy of national fostering does not require it.

When President Wilson read Mr. Björkman’s letter—we may assume that he has somehow found time to do so—my little wager is that he smiled sadly, and perhaps recalled a sentence that he wrote nearly twenty years ago, when the spirit of youth gave a sort of instinctive inerrancy to his judgments. In an essay on An Author’s Company he said:

Literatures are renewed, as they are originated, by uncontrived impulses of nature, as if the sap moved unbidden in the mind.

In the same essay occurs this wide-worldly phrase:

There is a greater thing than the spirit of the age, and that is the spirit of the ages.

A man capable of the deep, wide thought which these excerpts contain is not the man seriously to consider Mr. Björkman’s appeal. Literature is not a response to a monetary or other invitation; it is as inevitable as the sunrise, and opportunity neither originates nor develops it. The conditions that govern the rise of sap and its transformations into beauty cannot be set up by legislation nor made easier by Nobel prizes. An artist of original power, born pregnant with a poem, a picture, or a symphony, will inevitably give it birth. His necessity is not to receive but to give. He is independent of the caprice of chance. He has no thought of a chance “for sincere artistic expression.” He is not interested in the control of circumstance; he is the instrument of something that controls him. Opportunity never knocks at his door; his door cannot be opened from without; it is pushed open by an indwelling, outgrowing guest. The process is as uncontrived as the unfolding of an acorn into an oak.

I fear that Mr. Björkman’s definition of art, if he have one, needs expansion. The so-called art which he wishes to have encouraged as something geographically local is an imitation which probably would suffice in a petty world of orthodox socialism, where writing was a kind of sociological business. Since unmistakable art is born, not manufactured or induced, it were folly to try to nurture it. Unborn art is nurtured by an inner sap; it cannot be fed on sedative pap. It always has been and always will be born of suffering, in unexpected, unprepared places, like all its wild and wonderful kin. Eugenics cannot be applied to its unfathomable heredity.

The soul of a nation is not in its literature but in its contemporary life. Literatures haven’t souls, even if, haply, they have considerable vitality or permanence. Literatures are intricate autobiographies, vague symbols of personal feeling, lifted by a modicum of consciousness into mystic articulation. The great literatures that are on the way will be more and more psychological. What people call love in the world of realism will play a sublimer part in the world of consciousness. Prose and poetry in which our conscious life is more intimately portrayed will challenge and in a million years increase consciousness, so that through emphasis and use this later acquisition of the race will transmute information into perfect organic knowledge. A larger consciousness will break up the chaos of unnumbered antagonisms in human relationships. The literature of description and the blind play of instinct has served its purpose and had its day. The literature of the future must deal with a vaster world than that in which animals prey upon one another. Such a literature will not bear the name of a man, a state, a nation, or an age.

We are opposed to the whole idea of nationalism; we even object to worldliness in literature; we want something still bigger: a literature with a sense of the planets in it. In this new day it is too late to fuss about nations, geographical literatures, and races. We are called toward the universe and mankind. In this land of blended nationalities our hope is to evolve a literature vitalized by the blood of multitudinous races and linked in pedigree with the infinite ages of the past. Walt Whitman’s poetry was cosmic; the new poetry will extend to the planets. The summit of Parnassus now rests in the gloom of the valley, and the poet of the future will look down from the higher eminence to which science has called him. Man today soars in flying machines in the old realm of his young imagination. Poets must outreach mere science.

What little patriots call a nation is a huge dogma that must be overcome. In poetry there must be an increasingly larger sense of the universe instead of nations as man’s habitation. National literatures are exclusive of and alien to one another; they should be interrelated and fundamentally combinable. There can be no local literature if the thought of the world is embodied in it, and any other quality of literature must lack integrity. Wild dreamers insist upon a literature that shall be superior to political boundaries. The idea of nationalism involves the setting up of barriers and the fossilizing of life. It is a small idea that belongs to the dark ages. If we are ever to expand in feeling, thought, and achievement we must rise above nations into the starry spaces. We shall at least be citizens of the world, and, if citizens of the world, then truth-seekers beyond the reach of land and sea.

The little question put to President Wilson by Mr. Björkman cannot escape a negative answer, unless through petty exclusions and barbaric insularities we continue trying to organize, cement, and perpetuate a nation—that smug dream of our forefathers who reeked with selfishness and reveled in a freedom that at the core was slavery. Statehood must give way to a universal brotherhood. And if this were achieved it would still be idle twaddle to talk about “providing money for the poet’s purse and laurels for his brow”; for a poet—I am not thinking of facile versifiers, who are capable of intoxicating emotional persons with philological colors and sensuous music—is rewarded not by money but by understanding, and he fashions his own laurel, even as the sea pink crowns itself with its ample glory. The kind of poet whose measure is taken by Mr. Björkman’s pale solicitude is already generously provided for by an unpoetic public, and there awaits his moist brow a laurel of uncritical, national homage.

Whitman, chanter of the earth’s major note, and Blake, exquisite singer of its subtlest minors, are clearly recognizable mutations. Apart from the work of four or five men English verse falls into infinite grades of imitative excellence and mediocrity. The best of it is highly finished manufactured or in part reproduced art, obedient to a commercial age, in which little men with renowned names gossip about nations, and worship the god of utility.

Poetry of the highest quality—great enough to burst a language—is the outflow of the unconfinable passion of exceedingly rare individualities that can be neither encouraged nor discouraged by any external condition. They are vagrant leaps of life, wild with the creative power of projecting variety. They come off the common stock as new forms having many characteristics common to their ancestors but expressing their unlikeness in mental or physiological development. Real poets are genuine “sports” or mutations; near-poets are made by cultivation. As a nation grows old and the impact of its culture upon all classes of people increases, the greater its production of so-called classical art; but this has nothing to do with what I mean by poetry.

What is popularly termed poetry may represent sincere work; it may answer to all the technical requirements of versification; it may possess a sheen of word-music; it may contain deep, subtle thought, and yet, despite all these customary earmarks, it is not real poetry. To be sure, thousands of critics will acclaim it as authentic, and lecturers will quote it as beautiful wisdom, but it is soon lost to eye and memory. And in a large sense this must be true of the greatest poetry.

One reason why we haven’t more and better contemporary poetry and prose is that we are under the tyranny of so-called masters. It is foolishly assumed that masterpieces are finalities in their fields. By talking, writing, and teaching this absurdity we set up popular prejudices against vital work of our own time, so that even literary artists, with an alleged sharp eye for genius, cannot identify an outstanding genius when it appears before them. Only that poetry or prose which is a reminder of or is almost as good as a celebrity’s work is accepted as art. We thus evolve “forms of appraisal” or standards with which we try to hammer rebels and geniuses into line. The artist who, confident, fearless, ample, and resolute, can go through this acid test without compromise (fighting, even dying, for his vision) is the hope of men. He does not ask for anything; he is a god; the gods merely command—not always posthumously—and all the world is theirs.

It is quite possible to encourage the profession of writing verse and prose by making the road easier and the goal more attractive for the weaklings who whine for nationalized alms, to enable them to pursue a craft; but literature in the big sense is created by all sorts of men and women who cannot withhold it, let the world approve, condemn, or ignore. Hence literature is incapable of encouragement.

In his Gleams, which are the most intimately personal things that he has published, Mr. Björkman reiterates the conviction that artists ought to have a better chance than they now enjoy to express themselves. For instance, he says:

He who is to minister to men’s souls should have time and chance to acquire one for himself.

And this:

The children will build up the New Kingdom as soon as they are given a chance.

These extracts from his Gleams taken in connection with our concluding quotation from his Century article indicate if they do not prove that Mr. Björkman regards artists as meticulous persons who must be coaxed, humored, coddled, and rewarded in order to incite them to creative activity. Obviously he means craftsmen when he uses the word artists. An artist is impelled to do his work, which is his pain, joy, and passion. If life is made easy for him the chances are that he will lose his independence and power, and descend to a popular success. Stevenson could not endure prosperity; once a man, accustomed to a hard, uphill road—he did his noblest work then—a sentimental public made it so easy for him that he eventually grew fairly Tennysonian in his output of pretty trifles.

A literature worthy of the name might address itself, in Whitman’s words, to authors who would be themselves in life and art:

I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes;

You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,

You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,

You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d—you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction, before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart.

The Challenge of Emma Goldman

Margaret C. Anderson

Emma Goldman has been lecturing in Chicago, and various kinds of people have been going to hear her. I have heard her twice—once before the audience of well-dressed women who flock to her drama lectures and don’t know quite what to think of her, and once at the International Labor Hall before a crowd of anarchists and syndicalists and socialists, most of whom were collarless but who knew very emphatically what they thought of her and of her ideas. I came away with a series of impressions, every one of which resolved somehow into a single conviction: that here was a great woman.

The drama audience might have been dolls, for all they appeared to understand what was going on. One of them went up to Miss Goldman afterward and tried, almost petulantly, to explain why she believed in property and wealth. She was utterly serious. No one could have convinced her that there was any humor in the situation; that she might as well try to work up a fervor of war enthusiasm in Carnegie as to expect Emma Goldman to sympathize in the sanctity of property. The second audience, after listening to a talk on anti-Christianity, got to its feet and asked intelligent questions. Men with the faces of fanatics and martyrs waved their arms in their excitement pro and con; some one tried to prove that Nietzsche had an unscientific mind; a suave lawyer stated that Miss Goldman was profoundly intellectual, but that her talk was destructive—to which she replied that it would require another lawyer to unravel his inconsistency; and then some one established forcibly that the only real problem in the universe was that of three meals a day.

Most people who read and think have become enlightened about anarchism. They know that anarchists are usually timid, thoughtful, unviolent people; that dynamite is a part of their intellectual, not their physical, equipment; and that the goal for which they are striving—namely, individual human freedom—is one for which we might all strive with credit. But for the benefit of those who regard Emma Goldman as a public menace, and for those who simply don’t know what to make of her—like that fashionable feminine audience—it may be interesting to look at her in a new way.

To begin with, why not take her quite simply? She’s a simple person. She’s natural. In any civilization it requires genius to be really simple and natural. It’s one of the most subtle, baffling, and agonizing struggles we go through—this trying to attain the quality that ought to be easiest of all attainment because we were given it to start with. What a commentary on civilization!—that one can regain his original simplicity only through colossal effort. Nietzsche calls it the three metamorphoses of the spirit: “how the spirit becometh a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.”

And Emma Goldman has struggled through these stages. She has taken her “heavy load-bearing spirit” into the wilderness, like the camel; become lord of that wilderness, captured freedom for new creating, like the lion; and then created new values, said her Yea to life, like the child. Somehow Zarathustra kept running through my mind as I listened to her that afternoon.

Emma Goldman preaches and practises the philosophy of freedom; she pushes through the network of a complicated society as if it were a cobweb instead of a steel structure; she brushes the cobwebs from her eyes and hair and calls back to the less daring ones that the air is more pure up there and “sunrise sometimes visible.” Someone has put it this way: “Repudiating as she does practically every tenet of what the modern state holds good, she stands for some of the noblest traits in human nature.” And no one who listens to her thoughtfully, whatever his opinion of her creed, will deny that she has nobility. Such qualities as courage—dauntless to the point of heartbreak; as sincerity, reverence, high-mindedness, self-reliance, helpfulness, generosity, strength, a capacity for love and work and life—all these are noble qualities, and Emma Goldman has them in the nth power. She has no pale traits like tact, gentleness, humility, meekness, compromise. She has “a hard, kind heart” instead of “a soft, cruel one.” And she’s such a splendid fighter!

What is she fighting for? For the same things, concretely, that Nietzsche and Max Stirner fought for abstractly. She has nothing to say that they have not already said, perhaps; but the fact that she says it instead of putting it into books, that she hurls it from the platform straight into the minds and hearts of the eager, bewildered, or unfriendly people who listen to her, gives her personality and her message a unique value. She says it with the same unflinching violence to an audience of capitalists as to her friends the workers. And the substance of her gospel—I speak merely from the impressions of those two lectures and the very little reading I’ve done of her published work—is something of this sort:

Radical changes in society, releasement from present injustices and miseries, can come about not through reform but through change; not through a patching up of the old order, but through a tearing down and a rebuilding. This process involves the repudiation of such “spooks” as Christianity, conventional morality, immortality, and all other “myths” that stand as obstacles to progress, freedom, health, truth, and beauty. One thus achieves that position beyond good and evil for which Nietzsche pleaded. But it is more fair to use Miss Goldman’s own words. In writing of the failure of Christianity, for instance, she says:

I believe that Christianity is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to the very conditions confronting us today. Indeed, never could society have degenerated to its present appalling stage if not for the assistance of Christianity.... No doubt I will be told that, though religion is a poison and institutionalized Christianity the greatest enemy of progress and freedom, there is some good in Christianity itself. What about the teachings of Christ and early Christianity, I may be asked; do they not stand for the spirit of humanity, for right, and justice?

It is precisely this oft-repeated contention that induced me to choose this subject, to enable me to demonstrate that the abuses of Christianity, like the abuses of government, are conditioned in the thing itself, and are not to be charged to the representatives of the creed. Christ and his teachings are the embodiment of inertia, of the denial of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name.

I am not interested in the theological Christ. Brilliant minds like Bauer, Strauss, Renan, Thomas Paine, and others refuted that myth long ago. I am even ready to admit that the theological Christ is not half so dangerous as the ethical and social Christ. In proportion as science takes the place of blind faith, theology loses its hold. But the ethical and poetical Christ-myth has so thoroughly saturated our lives, that even some of the most advanced minds find it difficult to emancipate themselves from its yoke. They have rid themselves of the letter, but have retained the spirit; yet it is the spirit which is back of all the crimes and horrors committed by orthodox Christianity. The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to the régime of authority and wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every indignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.... Many otherwise earnest haters of slavery and injustice confuse, in a most distressing manner, the teachings of Christ with the great struggles for social and economic emancipation. The two are irrevocably and forever opposed to each other. The one necessitates courage, daring, defiance, and strength. The other preaches the gospel of non-resistance, of slavish acquiescence in the will of others; it is the complete disregard of character and self-reliance, and, therefore, destructive of liberty and well-being....

The public career of Christ begins with the edict, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

Why repent, why regret, in the face of something that was supposed to bring deliverance? Had not the people suffered and endured enough; had they not earned their right to deliverance by their suffering? Take the Sermon on the Mount, for instance; what is it but a eulogy on submission to fate, to the inevitability of things?

“Blessed are the poor in spirit....”

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit live there. How can anything creative, anything vital, useful, and beautiful, come from the poor in spirit? The idea conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the teachings of Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this virtue by reward and punishment. Every intelligent being realizes that our worst curse is the poverty of the spirit; that it is productive of all evil and misery, of all the injustice and crimes in the world.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery, inactivity, and parasitism. Besides, it is not true that the meek can inherit anything.

“Blessed are ye when men shall revile you ... for great is your reward in heaven.”

The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have been, and still are, reviled. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas?... Redemption through the Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ....

The teachings of Christ and of his followers have failed because they lacked the vitality to lift the burdens from the shoulders of the race; they have failed because the very essence of that doctrine is contrary to the spirit of life, opposed to the manifestation of nature, to the strength and beauty of passion.

And so on. In her dissolution of other “myths”—such as that of morality, for instance,—she has even more direct things to say. I quote from a lecture on Victims of Morality:

It is Morality which condemns woman to the position of a celibate, a prostitute, or a reckless, incessant breeder of children.

First as to the celibate, the famished and withered human plant. When still a young, beautiful flower, she falls in love with a respectable young man. But Morality decrees that unless he can marry the girl, she must never know the raptures of love, the ecstasy of passion. The respectable young man is willing to marry, but the Property Morality, the Family and Social Moralities decree that he must first make his pile, must save up enough to establish a home and be able to provide for a family. The young people must wait, often many long, weary years.... And the young flower, with every fiber aglow with the love of life? She develops headaches, insomnia, hysteria; grows embittered, quarrelsome, and soon becomes a faded, withered, joyless being, a nuisance to herself and every one else.... Hedged in her narrow confines with family and social tradition, guarded by a thousand eyes, afraid of her own shadow—the yearning of her inmost being for the man or the child, she must turn to cats, dogs, canary birds, or the Bible class.

Now as to the prostitute. In spite of laws, ordinances, persecution, and prisons; in spite of segregation, registration, vice crusades, and other similar devices, the prostitute is the real specter of our age.... What has made her? Whence does she come? Morality, the morality which is merciless in its attitude to women. Once she dares to be herself, to be true to her nature, to life, there is no return; the woman is thrust out from the pale and protection of society. The prostitute becomes the victim of Morality, even as the withered old maid is its victim. But the prostitute is victimized by still other forces, foremost among them the Property Morality, which compels woman to sell herself as a sex commodity or in the sacred fold of matrimony. The latter is no doubt safer, more respected, more recognized, but of the two forms of prostitution the girl of the street is the least hypocritical, the least debased, since her trade lacks the pious mask of hypocrisy, and yet she is hounded, fleeced, outraged, and shunned by the very powers that have made her: the financier, the priest, the moralist, the judge, the jailer, and the detective, not to forget her sheltered, respectably virtuous sister, who is the most relentless and brutal in her persecution of the prostitute.

Morality and its victim, the mother—what a terrible picture! Is there, indeed, anything more terrible, more criminal, than our glorified sacred function of motherhood? The woman, physically and mentally unfit to be a mother, yet condemned to breed; the woman, economically taxed to the very last spark of energy, yet forced to breed; the woman, tied to a man she loathes, yet made to breed; the woman, worn and used-up from the process of procreation, yet coerced to breed, more, ever more. What a hideous thing, this much-lauded motherhood!

With the economic war raging all around her, with strife, misery, crime, disease, and insanity staring her in the face, with numberless little children ground into gold dust, how can the self and race-conscious woman become a mother? Morality cannot answer this question. It can only dictate, coerce, or condemn—and how many women are strong enough to face this condemnation, to defy the moral dicta? Few indeed. Hence they fill the factories, the reformatories, the homes for feeble-minded, the prisons.... Oh, Motherhood, what crimes are committed in thy name! What hosts are laid at your feet. Morality, destroyer of life!

Fortunately, the Dawn is emerging from the chaos and darkness.... Through her re-born consciousness as a unit, a personality, a race builder, woman will become a mother only if she desires the child, and if she can give to the child, even before its birth, all that her nature and intellect can yield ... above all, understanding, reverence, and love, which is the only fertile soil for new life, a new being.

I have talked lately with a man who thinks Emma Goldman ought to have been hanged long ago. She’s directly or indirectly “responsible” for so many crimes. “Do you know what she’s trying to do?” I asked him.

“She’s trying to break up our government,” he responded heatedly.

“Have you ever read any of her ideas?”

“No.”

“Have you ever heard her lecture?”

“No! I should say not.”

In a play, that line would get a laugh. (It did in Man and Superman.) But in life it fares better. It gets serious consideration; it even has a certain prestige as a rather righteous thing to say.

Another man threw himself into the argument. “I know very little about Emma Goldman,” he said, “but it has always struck me that she’s simply trying to inflame people—particularly to do things that she’d never think of doing herself.” That charge can be answered best by a study of her life, which will show that she has spent her time doing things that almost no one else would dare to do.

In his Women as World Builders Floyd Dell said this: “Emma Goldman has become simply an advocate of freedom of every sort. She does not advocate violence any more than Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated violence. It is, in fact, as an essayist and speaker of the kind, if not the quality, of Emerson, Thoreau, and George Francis Train, that she is to be considered.” I think, rather, that she is to be considered fundamentally as something more definite than that:—as a practical Nietzschean.

I am incapable of listening, unaroused, to the person who believes something intensely, and who does intensely what she believes. What more simple—or more difficult? Most of us don’t know what we believe, or, if we do, we have the most extraordinary time trying to live it. Emma Goldman is so bravely consistent—which to many people is a confession of limitations. But if one is going to criticise her there are more subtle grounds to do it on. One of her frequent assertions is that she has no use for religion. That is like saying that one has no use for poetry: religion isn’t merely a matter of Christianity or Catholicism or Buddhism or any other classifiable quantity. Also, if it is true that the person to be distrusted is the one who has found an answer to the riddle, then Emma Goldman is to be discounted. Her convictions are presented with a sense of definite finality. But there’s something splendidly uncautious, something irresistibly stirring, about such an attitude. And whatever one believes, of one thing I’m certain: whoever means to face the world and its problems intelligently must know something about Emma Goldman. Whether her philosophy will change the face of the earth isn’t the supreme issue. As the enemy of all smug contentment, of all blind acquiescence in things as they are, and as the prophet who dares to preach that our failures are not in wrong applications of values but in the values themselves, Emma Goldman is the most challenging spirit in America.

No sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this, too, will be swept away.... Observe always that everything is the result of a change, ... get used to thinking that there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing forms and to make new ones like them.—Marcus Aurelius.

Chloroform

Mary Aldis and Arthur Davison Ficke

A sickening odour, treacherously sweet,

Steals through my sense heavily.

Above me leans an ominous shape,

Fearful, white-robed, hooded and masked in white.

The pits of his eyes

Peer like the port-holes of an armoured ship,

Merciless, keen, inhuman, dark.

The hands alone are of my kindred;

Their slender strength, that soon shall press the knife

Silver and red, now lingers slowly above me,

The last links with my human world ...

... The living daylight

Clouds and thickens.

Flashes of sudden clearness stream before me,—and then

A menacing wave of darkness

Swallows the glow with floods of vast and indeterminate grey.

But in the flashes

I see the white form towering,

Dim, ominous,

Like some apostate monk whose will unholy

Has renounced God; and now

In this most awful secret laboratory

Would wring from matter

Its stark and appalling answer.

At the gates of a bitter hell he stands, to wrest with eager fierceness

More of that dark forbidden knowledge

Wherefrom his soul draws fervor to deny.

The clouds have grown thicker; they sway around me

Dizzying, terrible, gigantic, pressing in upon me

Like a thousand monsters of the deep with formless arms.

I cannot push them back, I cannot!

From far, far off, a voice I knew long ago

Sounds faintly thin and clear.

Suddenly in a desperate rebellion I strive to answer,—

I strive to call aloud.—

But darkness chokes and overcomes me:

None may hear my soundless cry.

A depth abysmal opens

And receives, enfolds, engulfs me,—

Wherein to sink at last seems blissful

Even though to deeper pain....

O respite and peace of deliverance!

The silence

Lies over me like a benediction.

As in the earth’s first pale creation-morn

Among winds and waters holy

I am borne as I longed to be borne.

I am adrift in the depths of an ocean grey

Like seaweed, desiring solely

To drift with the winds and waters; I sway

Into their vast slow movements; all the shores

Of being are laved by my tides.

I am drawn out toward spaces wonderful and holy

Where peace abides,

And into golden aeons far away.

But over me

Where I swing slowly

Bodiless in the bodiless sea,

Very far,

Oh very far away,

Glimmeringly

Hangs a ghostly star

Toward whose pure beam I must flow resistlessly.

Well do I know its ray!

It is the light beyond the worlds of space,

By groping sorrowing man yet never known—

The goal where all men’s blind and yearning desire

Has vainly longed to go

And has not gone:—

Where Eternity has its blue-walled dwelling-place,

And the crystal ether opens endlessly

To all the recessed corners of the world,

Like liquid fire

Pouring a flood through the dimness revealingly;

Where my soul shall behold, and in lightness of wonder rise higher

Out of the shadow that long ago

Around me with mortality was furled.

I rise where have winds

Of the night never flown;

Shaken with rapture

Is the vault of desire.

The weakness that binds

Like a shadow is gone.

The bonds of my capture

Are sundered with fire!

This is the hour

When the wonders open!

The lightning-winged spaces

Through which I fly

Accept me, a power

Whose prisons are broken—

. . . . . .

... But the wonder wavers—

The light goes out.

I am in the void no more; changes are imminent.

Time with a million beating wings

Deafens the air in migratory flight

Like the roar of seas—and is gone ...

And a silence

Lasts deafeningly.

In darkness and perfect silence

I wander groping in my agony,

Far from the light lost in the upper ether—

Unknown, unknowable, so nearly mine.

And the ages pass by me,

Thousands each instant, yet I feel them all

To the last second of their dragging time.

Thus have I striven always

Since the world began.

And when it dies I still must struggle ...

. . . . . .

The voice I knew so long ago, like a muffled echo under the sea

Is coming nearer.

Strong hands

Grip mine.

And words whose tones are warm with some forgotten consolation,

Some unintelligible hope,

Drag me upward in horrible mercy;

And the cold once-familiar daylight glares into my eyes.

He stands there,

The white apostate monk,

Speaking low lying words to soothe me.

And I lift my voice out of its vales of agony

And laugh in his face,

Mocking him with astonishment of wonder.

For he has denied;

And I have come so near, so near to knowing ...

Then as his hand touches me gently, I am drawn up from the lonely abysses,

And suffer him to lead me back into the green valleys of the living.