Figgers seemed to start up and bagon to me from every side. Aurora Leigh, with her sad, sweet smile, stood in front of me with that lover of hern; the Portuguese lovers, with hearts of fire and dew too; the “Poet Mother” holdin’ her two boys to her heart, knit to that heart by ties of iron; Nino and Guido, little babies, teaching ’em to—“Say first the word country,” after that mother and love. Then I see her alone in the house—alone.
“God, how the house feels!”
While Guido and Nino lay dead, shot down by the balls of the enemy—“One by the East Sea and by the West”—then she remembered that she had learnt ’em to say first the word “country,” puttin’ it before “mother and home.”
She wuz kinder sorry she’d done it at first, I guess. She forgot Glory and Patriotism, for this woman—this “Who was agonized here, the East Sea and West Sea rhymed on in her head, forever instead.”
She couldn’t think of anything else, only the mightiness of human love and grief.
I don’t blame her; I should felt jest so myself if it had been Thomas Jefferson shot down. What would the glory of Jonesville be to me, if his bright, understandin’, affectionate eyes wuz closed in death? I, too, should think that everything else wuz “imbecile, hewin’ out roads to a wall.”
How black that wall would look to me!
And then the cry of the Human, how it rung in my ears—
“Be pitiful, O God!”
Yes, indeed, in how many crysises have I felt the hite and the depth of that cry!