And he rubbed his thin hands together, spread them to the warmth, and repeated two or three times,
“Oh, pile a bright fire!”
“Oh, pile a bright fire!”
More than once, I heard him returning to those lines; and saw him several times reading the last stanzas of the poem from a typewritten copy on his porch table, chafing his hands the while, and extending them before the imaginary fire as if they were cold, or as if he felt through his hands, so sensitive was he physically, an actual fire in the written lines. The poem is Edward Fitzgerald’s “Old Song,” and I am sure Burroughs was learning it by heart, and making rather hard work of it, I thought, for one who had already in memory so much good poetry. But he was getting very old.
Then, at my request he said some of the lines of his own poem, “Waiting.” “The only thing I ever did,” he remarked, “with real poetry in it.”
“How about the philosophy in it,” I inquired, “Do you find it sound after all these years?”
There was an audible chuckle inside of him. Then rather solemnly he replied: “My father killed himself early trying to clear these acres of debts and stones. I might have been in my grave, too, these forty years had I tried to hurry it his way. I waited. By and by Henry Ford came along and cleared up the whole farm for me. Here I am, and here
“Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;