| |
| STANDING out, as from the confusion | |
| Of dark masses ebbing and flowing | |
| In surging wastes on all sides, | |
| I saw the signal figure of a man, | |
| Standing as though | 5 |
| On the moving forepoint of a ship— | |
| A sea-going dragon-like monster ship. | |
| Always I saw this man figure: | |
| The ship’s prow was always in the picture; | |
| And the sea, blue and continent, | 10 |
| Swept its silhouette beyond and around him. | |
| But I had my soul’s knapsack strapped on, | |
| Ready for the brave climb | |
| After the far-flung bloomy mass | |
| That fringes every woman’s sky-line. | 15 |
| And so I passed by the ship’s prow | |
| And its picture of power. | |
| |
| O wooing Wonder of Life, | |
| You cast your spell upon me! | |
| You swept over me with shivers of frightened delight, | 20 |
| And made every leaf and crevice | |
| Turn into a fairy hiding-place and brownie fane; | |
| You egged the trees to follow me, | |
| And brought them to a standstill | |
| When I turned and caught them; | 25 |
| You taught the bluffs and hills | |
| To kneel and offer their breasts to me; | |
| With spiring cyclones and flooding gullies | |
| You whirled me out into the world-floods. | |
| |
| O wooing Wonder of Life! | 30 |
| Your spirit of adventure pushed me; | |
| You rushed me with hot deeds | |
| For humanity—that workshop where ever must | |
| Young talent whittle itself into shape; | |
| Where the only hindrance is the crawling hour of youth. | 35 |
| And oh, how I chafed like the steed of some boy Galahad, | |
| Begging to be unleashed from the plow of Time. | |
| |
| But somehow I escaped you, | |
| O wooing Wonder of Life, | |
| For another wonder wooed me! | 40 |
| Always this massive figure of the man indeed, | |
| Face outward toward the limitless, | |
| Stood ready for the subduing leap into the blue, | |
| Filling me with terror lest he take it. | |
| |
| One restless morning | 45 |
| Something made contact, | |
| And the voiceless one broke into quiet words. | |
| As though those words had called | |
| To my heart’s Sesame, | |
| A great wall lifted, | 50 |
| And I found myself behind it, shaking, | |
| Like a lily that had nestled unwisely | |
| A roistering bee. And then something was stolen, | |
| Something that had swapped my honey for a bitter dew. | |
| |
| What had toppled? | 55 |
| What was broken? | |
| What had been committed?—what wrong done | |
| To the trust and charge that had been softly | |
| Handed through the gate | |
| When birth had kept its tryst with me? | 60 |
| |
| There came a rust-gray swamp before me, | |
| Where once the drowsy blueness of the day | |
| Had lured me out into the shimmering mirage | |
| That I had called my work. | |
| Moonlights of promise and longing | 65 |
| Which had been opal before, | |
| Turned to bronze-brown glare. | |
| The warm rose of the cloud-edges | |
| Of my daily doings shone off into a slimy silver void. | |
| Haloes that had beckoned me to wear them | 70 |
| Fell into shivered icicles. | |
| Roses I had reached for now were rags and sticks. | |
| Songs that had called me to dizzy heights | |
| Now tripped off in silly jingles. | |
| Stories that had hungered me with plot-power died. | 75 |
| Garments that had helped me feel beauty and freedom | |
| Fell as tatters, and I felt cold and naked…. | |
| For I saw my primal, self-swung orbit | |
| Against the zenith of the myriad; | |
| My solitary life against the solitary figure | 80 |
| On the ship’s prow, | |
| With the whole sea to rest its shadow. | |
| |
| Then the shadow of the sea flooded from my eyes, | |
| And, as though the whole of my future | |
| Had gulped me in, I stood there, completed yet rebelling, | 85 |
| Lost in a boundless forest main. | |
| For I realized his as a life that had the contour | |
| Of the spreading prodigal English oak; | |
| With a soul aspiring as the top-shoot | |
| Of a Norwegian fir, tapping the sky for space; | 90 |
| With a fantasy complex as the cypresses of Lebanon; | |
| With a power to structure itself, | |
| Even as Lebanon’s blossomed into building | |
| For a temple-ridden race, which bore David | |
| In its lute-slumbering womb…. | 95 |
| |
| His ear and throat made the memory | |
| Long for an hour to prowl | |
| In the nightingale-haunted terraces | |
| Of the Black Forest pines, | |
| Where mix the scents of wine and resin. | 100 |
| And again like Lebanon’s planks | |
| There was laid in him an everlasting sounding-board | |
| Against which the mighty resonance | |
| Of a choral heart might throw itself in song, | |
| And sing as the Jehovah-mad Jew has sung to the ages— | 105 |
| A song which ever after mocked the little gods, | |
| As his melody since has mocked my littleness…. | |
| |
| His stern resolves were as the unfaltering spheres | |
| That endless—forward, backward—thread their silver paths | |
| Without a time-keeper or a score-line; | 110 |
| Since some paternal force, inhibiting, | |
| Has seeded them with constancy. | |
| |
| A delirium of historic deeds ever battled | |
| To break into the world through him; | |
| Yet through the canyon of his fretless life | 115 |
| There threaded such a line of fine refreshment | |
| That the merest weed and tiniest bird | |
| Might lave itself—as I had learned to lave myself, | |
| To lose my littleness. | |
| |
| And his untrammelled instinct | 120 |
| Swung him to the plumb of daily life. | |
| Honor, sobriety and self-control | |
| Were swallowed up in a rage of instinctive rightness | |
| That held him ever at the ship’s prow, | |
| Staying his acts as a relentless tide. | 125 |
| |
| And the same tide caught me | |
| And swayed my life, | |
| And—fie for shame!—found me too small | |
| Or else it might have made a poet of me. | |
| |
