I met a lady from the South who said

(You won’t believe she said it, but she said it):

“None of my family ever worked, or had

A thing to sell.” I don’t suppose the work

Much matters. You may work for all of me.

I’ve seen the time I’ve had to work myself.

The having anything to sell[1] is what

Is the disgrace in man or state or nation.

I met a traveller from Arkansas

Who boasted of his state as beautiful

For diamonds and apples. “Diamonds

And apples in commercial quantities?”

I asked him, on my guard. “Oh yes,” he answered,

Off his. The time was evening in the Pullman.

“I see the porter’s made your bed,” I told him.

I met a Californian who would

Talk California—a state so blessed,

He said, in climate none had ever died there

A natural death, and Vigilance Committees

Had had to organize to stock the graveyards

And vindicate the state’s humanity.

“Just the way Steffanson runs on,” I murmured,

“About the British Arctic. That’s what comes

Of being in the market with a climate.”

I met a poet from another state,

A zealot full of fluid inspiration,

Who in the name of fluid inspiration,

But in the best style of bad salesmanship,

Angrily tried to make me write a protest

(In verse I think) against the Volstead Act.

He didn’t even offer me a drink

Until I asked for one to steady him.

This is called having an idea to sell.

It never could have happened in New Hampshire.

The only person really soiled with trade

I ever stumbled on in old New Hampshire

Was someone who had just come back ashamed

From selling things in California.

He’d built a noble mansard roof with balls

On turrets like Constantinople, deep

In woods some ten miles from a railroad station,

As if to put forever out of mind

The hope of being, as we say, received.

I found him standing at the close of day

Inside the threshold of his open barn,

Like a lone actor on a gloomy stage—

And recognized him through the iron grey

In which his face was muffled to the eyes

As an old boyhood friend, and once indeed

A drover with me on the road to Brighton.

His farm was “grounds,” and not a farm at all;

His house among the local sheds and shanties

Rose like a factor’s at a trading station.

And he was rich, and I was still a rascal.

I couldn’t keep from asking impolitely,

Where had he been and what had he been doing?

How did he get so? (Rich was understood.)

In dealing in “old rags” in San Francisco.

Oh it was terrible as well could be.

We both of us turned over in our graves.

Just specimens is all New Hampshire has,

One each of everything as in a show-case

Which naturally she doesn’t care to sell.

She had one President (pronounce him Purse,

And make the most of it for better or worse.

He’s your one chance to score against the state).

She had one Daniel Webster. He was all

The Daniel Webster ever was or shall be.

She had the Dartmouth needed to produce him.

I call her old. She has one family

Whose claim is good to being settled here

Before the era of colonization,

And before that of exploration even.

John Smith remarked them as he coasted by

Dangling their legs and fishing off a wharf

At the Isles of Shoals, and satisfied himself

They weren’t Red Indians but veritable

Pre-primitives of the white race, dawn people,

Like those who furnished Adam’s sons with wives;

However uninnocent they may have been

In being there so early in our history.

They’d been there then a hundred years or more.

Pity he didn’t ask what they were up to

At that date with a wharf already built,

And take their name. They’ve since told me their name—

Today an honored one in Nottingham.

As for what they were up to more than fishing—

Suppose they weren’t behaving Puritanly,

The hour had not yet struck for being good,

Mankind had not yet gone on the Sabbatical.

It became an explorer of the deep

Not to explore too deep in others’ business.

Did you but know of him, New Hampshire has

One real reformer who would change the world

So it would be accepted by two classes,

Artists the minute they set up as artists,

Before, that is, they are themselves accepted,

And boys the minute they get out of college.

I can’t help thinking those are tests to go by.

And she has one I don’t know what to call him,

Who comes from Philadelphia every year

With a great flock of chickens of rare breeds

He wants to give the educational

Advantages of growing almost wild

Under the watchful eye of hawk and eagle—

Dorkings because they’re spoken of by Chaucer,

Sussex because they’re spoken of by Herrick.

She has a touch of gold. New Hampshire gold—[2]

You may have heard of it. I had a farm

Offered me not long since up Berlin way

With a mine on it that was worked for gold;

But not gold in commercial quantities.

Just enough gold to make the engagement rings

And marriage rings of those who owned the farm.

What gold more innocent could one have asked for?

One of my children ranging after rocks

Lately brought home from Andover or Canaan

A specimen of beryl with a trace

Of radium. I know with radium

The trace would have to be the merest trace

To be below the threshold of commercial,

But trust New Hampshire not to have enough

Of radium or anything to sell.

A specimen of everything, I said.

She has one witch—old style.[3] She lives in Colebrook.

(The only other witch I ever met

Was lately at a cut-glass dinner in Boston.

There were four candles and four people present.

The witch was young, and beautiful (new style),

And open-minded. She was free to question

Her gift for reading letters locked in boxes.

Why was it so much greater when the boxes

Were metal than it was when they were wooden?

It made the world seem so mysterious.

The S’ciety for Psychical Research

Was cognizant. Her husband was worth millions.

I think he owned some shares in Harvard College.)

New Hampshire used to have at Salem

A company we called the White Corpuscles,

Whose duty was at any hour of night

To rush in sheets and fool’s caps where they smelled

A thing the least bit doubtfully perscented

And give someone the Skipper Ireson’s Ride.

One each of everything as in a show-case.

More than enough land for a specimen

You’ll say she has, but there there enters in

Something else to protect her from herself.

There quality[4] makes up for quantity.

Not even New Hampshire farms are much for sale.

The farm I made my home on in the mountains

I had to take by force rather than buy.

I caught the owner outdoors by himself

Raking up after winter, and I said,

“I’m going to put you off this farm: I want it.”

“Where are you going to put me? In the road?”

“I’m going to put you on the farm next to it.”

“Why won’t the farm next to it do for you?”

“I like this better.” It was really better.

Apples? New Hampshire has them, but unsprayed,

With no suspicion in stem-end or blossom-end

Of vitriol or arsenate of lead,

And so not good for anything but cider.

Her unpruned grapes are flung like lariats

Far up the birches out of reach of man.[5]

A state producing precious metals, stones,

And—writing; none of these except perhaps

The precious literature in quantity

Or quality to worry the producer

About disposing of it. Do you know,

Considering the market, there are more

Poems produced than any other thing?[6]

No wonder poets sometimes have to seem

So much more business-like than business men.

Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

She’s one of the two best states in the Union.

Vermont’s the other. And the two have been

Yoke-fellows in the sap-yoke from of old

In many Marches.[7] And they lie like wedges,

Thick end to thin end and thin end to thick end,

And are a figure of the way the strong

Of mind and strong of arm should fit together,

One thick where one is thin and vice versa.

New Hampshire raises the Connecticut

In a trout hatchery near Canada,

But soon divides the river with Vermont.

Both are delightful states for their absurdly

Small towns—Lost Nation, Bungey, Muddy Boo,

Poplin, Still Corners (so called not because

The place is silent all day long, nor yet

Because it boasts a whisky still—because

It set out once to be a city and still

Is only corners, cross-roads in a wood).

And I remember one whose name appeared

Between the pictures on a movie screen

Election[8] night once in Franconia,

When everything had gone Republican

And Democrats were sore in need of comfort:

Easton goes Democratic, Wilson 4

Hughes 2. And everybody to the saddest

Laughed the loud laugh, the big laugh at the little.

New York (five million) laughs at Manchester,

Manchester (sixty or seventy thousand) laughs

At Littleton (four thousand), Littleton

Laughs at Franconia (seven hundred), and

Franconia laughs, I fear,—did laugh that night—

At Easton. What has Easton left to laugh at,

And like the actress exclaim, “Oh my God” at?

There’s Bungey; and for Bungey there are towns,

Whole townships named but without population.[9]

Anything I can say about New Hampshire

Will serve almost as well about Vermont,

Excepting that they differ in their mountains.

The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight;

New Hampshire mountains curl up in a coil.

I had been coming to New Hampshire mountains.

And here I am and what am I to say?

Here first my theme becomes embarrassing.

Emerson said, “The God who made New Hampshire

Taunted the lofty land with little men.”

Another Massachusetts poet said,

“I go no more to summer in New Hampshire.

I’ve given up my summer place in Dublin.”

But when I asked to know what ailed New Hampshire,

She said she couldn’t stand the people in it,

The little men (it’s Massachusetts speaking).

And when I asked to know what ailed the people,

She said, “Go read your own books and find out.”

I may as well confess myself the author

Of several books against the world in general.

To take them as against a special state

Or even nation’s to restrict my meaning.

I’m what is called a sensibilitist,

Or otherwise an environmentalist.

I refuse to adapt myself a mite

To any change from hot to cold, from wet

To dry, from poor to rich, or back again.

I make a virtue of my suffering

From nearly everything that goes on round me.[10]

In other words, I know wherever I am,

Being the creature of literature I am,

I shall not lack for pain to keep me awake.

Kit Marlowe taught me how to say my prayers:

“Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it.”

Samoa, Russia, Ireland I complain of,

No less than England, France and Italy.

Because I wrote my novels in New Hampshire

Is no proof that I aimed them at New Hampshire.

When I left Massachusetts years ago

Between two days, the reason why I sought

New Hampshire, not Connecticut,

Rhode Island, New York, or Vermont was this:

Where I was living then, New Hampshire offered

The nearest boundary to escape across.

I hadn’t an illusion in my hand-bag

About the people being better there

Than those I left behind. I thought they weren’t.

I thought they couldn’t be. And yet they were.

I’d sure had no such friends in Massachusetts

As Hall of Windham, Gay of Atkinson,[11]

Bartlett of Raymond (now of Colorado),

Harris of Derry, and Lynch of Bethlehem.

The glorious bards of Massachusetts seem

To want to make New Hampshire people over.

They taunt the lofty land with little men.

I don’t know what to say about the people.

For art’s sake one could almost wish them worse[12]

Rather than better. How are we to write

The Russian novel in America

As long as life goes so unterribly?

There is the pinch from which our only outcry

In literature to date is heard to come.

We get what little misery we can

Out of not having cause for misery.

It makes the guild of novel writers sick

To be expected to be Dostoievskis

On nothing worse than too much luck and comfort.

This is not sorrow, though; it’s just the vapors,

And recognized as such in Russia itself

Under the new régime, and so forbidden.

If well it is with Russia, then feel free

To say so or be stood against the wall

And shot. It’s Pollyanna now or death.

This, then, is the new freedom we hear tell of;

And very sensible. No state can build

A literature that shall at once be sound

And sad on a foundation of wellbeing.

To show the level of intelligence

Among us; it was just a Warren farmer

Whose horse had pulled him short up in the road

By me, a stranger. This is what he said,

From nothing but embarrassment and want

Of anything more sociable to say:

“You hear those hound-dogs sing on Moosilauke?[13]

Well they remind me of the hue and cry

We’ve heard against the Mid-Victorians

And never rightly understood till Bryan

Retired from politics and joined the chorus.

The matter with the Mid-Victorians

Seems to have been a man named John L. Darwin.”[14]

“Go ’long,” I said to him, he to his horse.

I knew a man who failing as a farmer

Burned down his farmhouse for the fire insurance,

And spent the proceeds on a telescope[15]

To satisfy a life-long curiosity

About our place among the infinities.

And how was that for other-worldliness?

If I must choose which I would elevate—

The people or the already lofty mountains,

I’d elevate the already lofty mountains.

The only fault I find with old New Hampshire

Is that her mountains aren’t quite high enough.

I was not always so; I’ve come to be so.

How, to my sorrow, how have I attained

A height from which to look down critical

On mountains? What has given me assurance

To say what height becomes New Hampshire mountains,

Or any mountains? Can it be some strength

I feel as of an earthquake in my back

To heave them higher to the morning star?

Can it be foreign travel in the Alps?

Or having seen and credited a moment

The solid moulding of vast peaks of cloud

Behind the pitiful reality

Of Lincoln, Lafayette and Liberty?

Or some such sense as says how high shall jet

The fountain in proportion to the basin?

No, none of these has raised me to my throne

Of intellectual dissatisfaction,

But the sad accident of having seen

Our actual mountains given in a map

Of early times as twice the height they are—

Ten thousand feet instead of only five—

Which shows how sad an accident may be.

Five thousand is no longer high enough.

Whereas I never had a good idea

About improving people in the world,

Here I am over-fertile in suggestion,

And cannot rest from planning day or night

How high I’d thrust the peaks in summer snow

To tap the upper sky and draw a flow

Of frosty night air on the vale below

Down from the stars to freeze the dew as starry.

The more the sensibilitist I am

The more I seem to want my mountains wild;

The way the wiry gang-boss liked the log-jam.[16]

After he’d picked the lock and got it started,

He dodged a log that lifted like an arm

Against the sky to break his back for him,

Then came in dancing, skipping, with his life

Across the roar and chaos, and the words

We saw him say along the zigzag journey

Were doubtless as the words we heard him say

On coming nearer: “Wasn’t she an i-deal

Son-of-a-bitch? You bet she was an i-deal.”

For all her mountains fall a little short,

Her people not quite short enough for Art,

She’s still New Hampshire, a most restful state.

Lately in converse with a New York alec

About the new school of the pseudo-phallic,

I found myself in a close corner where

I had to make an almost funny choice.

“Choose you which you will be—a prude, or puke,

Mewling and puking in the public arms.”

“Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose.”[17]

“But if you had to choose, which would you be?”

I wouldn’t be a prude afraid of nature.

I know a man who took a double axe

And went alone against a grove of trees;

But his heart failing him, he dropped the axe

And ran for shelter quoting Matthew Arnold:

“Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood;

There’s been enough shed without shedding mine.

Remember Birnam Wood! The wood’s in flux!”

He had a special terror of the flux

That showed itself in dendrophobia.

The only decent tree had been to mill

And educated into boards, he said.

He knew too well for any earthly use

The line where man leaves off and nature starts,[18]

And never over-stepped it save in dreams.

He stood on the safe side of the line talking;

Which is sheer Matthew Arnoldism,

The cult of one who owned himself “a foiled,

Circuitous wanderer,” and “took dejectedly

His seat upon the intellectual throne.”

Agreed in frowning on these improvised

Altars the woods are full of nowadays,

Again as in the days when Ahaz sinned

By worship under green trees in the open.

Scarcely a mile but that I come on one,

A black-cheeked stone and stick of rain-washed charcoal.

Even to say the groves were God’s first temples

Comes too near to Ahaz’ sin for safety.

Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred.

But here is not a question of what’s sacred;

Rather of what to face or run away from.

I’d hate to be a runaway from nature.

And neither would I choose to be a puke

Who cares not what he does in company,

And, when he can’t do anything, falls back

On words, and tries his worst to make words speak

Louder than actions, and sometimes achieves it.

It seems a narrow choice the age insists on.

How about being a good Greek, for instance?

That course, they tell me, isn’t offered this year.

“Come, but this isn’t choosing—puke or prude?”

Well, if I have to choose one or the other,

I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer

With an income in cash of say a thousand

(From say a publisher in New York City).

It’s restful to arrive at a decision,

And restful just to think about New Hampshire.

At present I am living in Vermont.

Never tell me that not one star of all

That slip from heaven at night and softly fall

Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.

Some laborer found one faded and stone cold,

And saving that its weight suggested gold,

And tugged it from his first too certain hold,

He noticed nothing in it to remark.

He was not used to handling stars thrown dark

And lifeless from an interrupted arc.

He did not recognize in that smooth coal

The one thing palpable besides the soul

To penetrate the air in which we roll.

He did not see how like a flying thing

It brooded ant-eggs, and had one large wing,

One not so large for flying in a ring,

And a long Bird of Paradise’s tail,

(Though these when not in use to fly and trail

It drew back in its body like a snail);

Nor know that he might move it from the spot

The harm was done; from having been star-shot

The very nature of the soil was hot

And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,

Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain

Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.

He moved it roughly with an iron bar,

He loaded an old stone-boat with the star

And not, as you might think, a flying car,

Such as even poets would admit perforce

More practical than Pegasus the horse

If it could put a star back in its course.

He dragged it through the ploughed ground at a pace

But faintly reminiscent of the race

Of jostling rock in interstellar space.

It went for building stone, and I, as though

Commanded in a dream, forever go

To right the wrong that this should have been so.

Yet ask where else it could have gone as well,

I do not know—I cannot stop to tell:

He might have left it lying where it fell.

From following walls I never lift my eye

Except at night to places in the sky

Where showers of charted meteors let fly.

Some may know what they seek in school and church,

And why they seek it there; for what I search

I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;

Sure that though not a star of death and birth,

So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth

To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth,

Though not, I say, a star of death and sin,

It yet has poles, and only needs a spin

To show its worldly nature and begin

To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm

And run off in strange tangents with my arm

As fish do with the line in first alarm.

Such as it is, it promises the prize

Of the one world complete in any size

That I am like to compass, fool or wise.

I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening

To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house

Of one room and one window and one door,

The only dwelling in a waste cut over

A hundred square miles round it in the mountains:

And that not dwelt in now by men or women

(It never had been dwelt in, though, by women,

So what is this I make a sorrow of?)

I came as census-taker to the waste

To count the people in it and found none,

None in the hundred miles, none in the house,

Where I came last with some hope, but not much

After hours’ overlooking from the cliffs

An emptiness flayed to the very stone.

I found no people that dared show themselves,

None not in hiding from the outward eye.

The time was autumn, but how anyone

Could tell the time of year when every tree

That could have dropped a leaf was down itself

And nothing but the stump of it was left

Now bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch;

And every tree up stood a rotting trunk

Without a single leaf to spend on autumn,

Or branch to whistle after what was spent.

Perhaps the wind the more without the help

Of breathing trees said something of the time

Of year or day the way it swung a door

Forever off the latch, as if rude men

Passed in and slammed it shut each one behind him

For the next one to open for himself.

I counted nine I had no right to count

(But this was dreamy unofficial counting)

Before I made the tenth across the threshold.

Where was my supper? Where was anyone’s?

No lamp was lit. Nothing was on the table.

The stove was cold—the stove was off the chimney—

And down by one side where it lacked a leg.

The people that had loudly passed the door

Were people to the ear but not the eye.

They were not on the table with their elbows.

They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks.

I saw no men there and no bones of men there.

I armed myself against such bones as might be

With the pitch-blackened stub of an axe-handle

I picked up off the straw-dust covered floor.

Not bones, but the ill-fitted window rattled.

The door was still because I held it shut

While I thought what to do that could be done—

About the house—about the people not there.

This house in one year fallen to decay

Filled me with no less sorrow than the houses

Fallen to ruin in ten thousand years

Where Asia wedges Africa from Europe.

Nothing was left to do that I could see

Unless to find that there was no one there

And declare to the cliffs too far for echo

“The place is desert and let whoso lurks

In silence, if in this he is aggrieved,

Break silence now or be forever silent.

Let him say why it should not be declared so.”

The melancholy of having to count souls

Where they grow fewer and fewer every year

Is extreme where they shrink to none at all.

It must be I want life to go on living.

“You know Orion always comes up sideways.

Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,

And rising on his hands, he looks in on me

Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something

I should have done by daylight, and indeed,

After the ground is frozen, I should have done

Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful

Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney

To make fun of my way of doing things,

Or else fun of Orion’s having caught me.

Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights

These forces are obliged to pay respect to?”

So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk

Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,

Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming,

He burned his house down for the fire insurance

And spent the proceeds on a telescope

To satisfy a life-long curiosity

About our place among the infinities.

“What do you want with one of those blame things?”

I asked him well beforehand. “Don’t you get one!”

“Don’t call it blamed; there isn’t anything

More blameless in the sense of being less

A weapon in our human fight,” he said.

“I’ll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.”

There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground

And plowed between the rocks he couldn’t move

Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years

Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,

He burned his house down for the fire insurance

And bought the telescope with what it came to.

He had been heard to say by several:

“The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see;

The strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s

A telescope. Someone in every town

Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.

In Littleton it may as well be me.”

After such loose talk it was no surprise

When he did what he did and burned his house down.

Mean laughter went about the town that day

To let him know we weren’t the least imposed on,

And he could wait—we’d see to him to-morrow.

But the first thing next morning we reflected

If one by one we counted people out

For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long

To get so we had no one left to live with.

For to be social is to be forgiving.

Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,

We don’t cut off from coming to church suppers,

But what we miss we go to him and ask for.

He promptly gives it back, that is if still

Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.

It wouldn’t do to be too hard on Brad

About his telescope. Beyond the age

Of being given one’s gift for Christmas,

He had to take the best way he knew how

To find himself in one. Well, all we said was

He took a strange thing to be roguish over.

Some sympathy was wasted on the house,

A good old-timer dating back along;

But a house isn’t sentient; the house

Didn’t feel anything. And if it did,

Why not regard it as a sacrifice,

And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,

Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

Out of a house and so out of a farm

At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn

To earn a living on the Concord railroad,

As under-ticket-agent at a station

Where his job, when he wasn’t selling tickets,

Was setting out up track and down, not plants

As on a farm, but planets, evening stars

That varied in their hue from red to green.

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.

His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing.

Often he bid me come and have a look

Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,

At a star quaking in the other end.

I recollect a night of broken clouds

And underfoot snow melted down to ice,

And melting further in the wind to mud.

Bradford and I had out the telescope.

We spread our two legs as we spread its three,

Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,

And standing at our leisure till the day broke,

Said some of the best things we ever said.[19]

That telescope was christened the Star-splitter,

Because it didn’t do a thing but split

A star in two or three the way you split

A globule of quicksilver in your hand

With one stroke of your finger in the middle.

It’s a star-splitter if there ever was one

And ought to do some good if splitting stars

’Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.

We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?

Do we know any better where we are,

And how it stands between the night to-night

And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?

How different from the way it ever stood?