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From a sequence I SOME certainty? Some light to guide the way | |
| Pure-burning through the blackness or through murk? | |
| Abstraction—such as Duty, Love, your Work? | |
| O darling, if I could or might or may | |
| Wrest it from living! I can’t. What shall I say! | 5 |
| Because for you there’s the individual quirk, | |
| And my salvation grievously might irk | |
| Your living soul that seeks a freer day. | |
| |
| So always, they tell, the generations go…. | |
| Yet what’s ahead! This world, this substance strange | 10 |
| Gradually we’ve fought clear of, but are slow, | |
| Oh very slow, to fashion and arrange | |
| And melt and mold—blows there an encircling fire | |
| This very hour, white-hot from our great desire! | |
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II Suppose you have just a person for a mother! | 15 |
| I at the outset candidly must confess | |
| I’m skeptical of my power to shield and bless. | |
| Yet perhaps I’ll do as well as she, that other, | |
| Idealized! For I swear that I’ll not smother | |
| You—your athletic soul—with lusciousness, | 20 |
| Nor precepts redolent of the governess, | |
| Nor padded quilts that serve the mind as cover. | |
| |
| So here we are: I having lived my years | |
| Up to—I hope not half the time allotted; | |
| You a beginner in this vale of tears, | 25 |
| Criss-crossed, they say, with sun and shadow blotted. | |
| I can’t assume omniscience. Here’s my hand! | |
| My diffidence I trust you’ll understand. | |
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III Woman and freedom! Freedom—it is much. | |
| You’ll hear it often—the tale—how she has cast | 30 |
| Gradually the shackles of the past, | |
| And so moves forth transfigured. Such and such | |
| Emerges now the female. So and such | |
| Is she and will be—nun, iconoclast, | |
| Machinist, priestess of Eros, scholiast— | 35 |
| Does economist or artist give the touch? | |
| |
| And here you stand or toddle, innocent-clear | |
| Of agony, and of lives and creeds that are breaking. | |
| How shall it be when you are sonneteer, | |
| You girl-child, new with the world that’s in the making?— | 40 |
| You girl-child, who shall see what I can’t see | |
| Of what she is! Oh, tell it truthfully! | |
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