Contents -Volume INDEX -AUTHOR INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Stedman and Hutchinson, comps. A Library of American Literature:
An Anthology in Eleven Volumes. 1891.
Vols. IX–XI: Literature of the Republic, Part IV., 1861–1889

Pessim

By Coates Kinney (1826–1904)

TO think! to think and never rest from thinking!

To feel this great globe flying through the sky

And reckon by the rising and the sinking

Of stars how long to live, how soon to die!

This, this is life. Is life, then, worth the living?

This plotting for his freedom by the slave!

This agony of loving and forgiving!

This effort of the coward to be brave!

Our freedom! We are sin-scourged into being,

And ills of birth enslave us all our days;

No chance of flying and no way of fleeing,

Until the last chance and the end of ways.

We are walled in by darkness—wall behind us,

From whose sprung dungeon-gates Fate dragged us in,

And wall before us, where Fate waits to bind us

And thrust us out through swinging gates of sin.

But what is Fate? It is a mere breath spoken,

To echo clamoring between the walls

Of darkness—blind phrase uttered to betoken

This blind Unreason which our life enthralls.

Out through abysmal depths of heaven round us

We think our way past orbs of day and night,

Till skies of empty outer darkness bound us

And place and time are fixed pin-points of light;

But nowhere from the silent planets wheeling,

And nowhere from the thundering hell of suns,

And nowhere in the darkness comes revealing

Itself a Fate that through all being runs.

No ghostly presence, no mysterious voices,

The midnight of these infinite spaces thrill;

And even chaos flies hence and rejoices

To find and feel yon universe’s Will.

Thought follows chaos—nay, without the places

And times of matter globed and motion whirled,

Thought chaos is, a spread dead wing in space is,

Drifting for wafture somewhere toward a world.

Such thinkings are not Thought, they are but dreamings

Of what perchance may be itself but dream;

Our truths are to the Truth as moonlight’s gleamings

In dungeon are to open midnoon’s beam.

All worlds of matter, all the world of spirit,

How these are one, eternal, increate—

Soul cannot clutch it, sense come never near it;

It is unthinkable, and it is Fate!