The Project Gutenberg eBook of Toward the Gulf
Title: Toward the Gulf
Author: Edgar Lee Masters
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7845]
Most recently updated: May 21, 2013
Language: English
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TOWARD THE GULF
By Edgar Lee Masters
CONTENTS
IN THE GARDEN AT THE DAWN HOUR
BERTRAND AND GOURGAUD TALK OVER OLD TIMES
BLACK EAGLE RETURNS TO ST. JOE
"I PAY MY DEBT FOR LAFAYETTE AND ROCHAMBEAU"
DR. SCUDDER'S CLINICAL LECTURE
THE BISHOP'S DREAM OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
TO WILLIAM MARION REEDY
It would have been fitting had I dedicated Spoon River Anthology to you. Considerations of an intimate nature, not to mention a literary encouragement which was before yours, crowded you from the page. Yet you know that it was you who pressed upon my attention in June, 1909, the Greek Anthology. It was from contemplation of its epitaphs that my hand unconsciously strayed to the sketches of "Hod Putt," "Serepta The Scold" ("Serepta Mason" in the book), "Amanda Barker" ("Amanda" in the book), "Ollie McGee" and "The Unknown," the first written and the first printed sketches of The Spoon River Anthology. The Mirror of May 29th, 1914, is their record.
I take one of the epigrams of Meleager with its sad revealment and touch of irony and turn it from its prose form to a verse form, making verses according to the breath pauses:
"The holy night and thou, O Lamp, we took as witness of our vows; and before thee we swore, he that would love me always and I that I would never leave him. We swore, and thou wert witness of our double promise. But now he says that our vows were written on the running waters. And thou, O Lamp, thou seest him in the arms of another."
In verse this epigram is as follows:
O Lamp,
We took as witness of our vows;
And before thee we swore,
He that would love me always
And I that I would never leave him.
We swore,
And thou wert witness of our double promise.
But now he says that our vows were written on the running waters.
And thou, O Lamp,
Thou seest him in the arms of another.
It will be observed that iambic feet prevail in this translation. They merely become noticeable and imperative when arranged in verses. But so it is, even in the briefest and starkest rendering of these epigrams from the Greek the humanism and dignity of the original transfer themselves, making something, if less than verse, yet more than prose; as Byron said of Sheridan's speeches, neither poetry nor oratory, but better than either. It was no difficult matter to pass from Chase Henry:
When I died the priest denied me burial
In holy ground, etc."
to the use of standard measures, or rhythmical arrangements of iambics or what not, and so to make a book, which for the first third required a practiced voice or eye to yield the semblance of verse; and for the last two-thirds, or nearly so, accommodated itself to the less sensitive conception of the average reader. The prosody was allowed to take care of itself under the emotional requirements and inspiration of the moment. But there is nothing new in English literature for some hundreds of years in combinations of dactyls, anapests or trochees, and without rhyme. Nor did I discover to the world that an iambic pentameter can be lopped to a tetrameter without the verse ceasing to be an iambic; though it be no longer the blank verse which has so ennobled English poetry. A great deal of unrhymed poetry is yet to be written in the various standard rhythms and in carefully fashioned metres.
But obviously a formal resuscitation of the Greek epigrams, ironical and tender, satirical and sympathetic, as casual experiments in unrelated themes would scarcely make the same appeal that an epic rendition of modern life would do, and as it turned out actually achieved.
The response of the American press to Spoon River Anthology during the summer of 1914 while it was appearing in the Mirror is my warrant for saying this. It was quoted and parodied during that time in the country and in the metropolitan newspapers. Current Opinion in its issue of September, 1914, reproduced from the Mirror some of the poems. Though at this time the schematic effect of the Anthology could not be measured, Edward J. Wheeler, that devoted patron of the art and discriminating critic of its manifestations, was attracted, I venture to say, by the substance of "Griffy, The Cooper," for that is one of the poems from the Anthology which he set forth in his column "The Voice of Living Poets" in the issue referred to. Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, followed in its issue of October, 1914, with a reprinting from the Mirror. In a word, the Anthology went the rounds over the country before it was issued in book form. And a reception was thus prepared for the complete work not often falling to the lot of a literary production. I must not omit an expression of my gratitude for the very high praise which John Cowper Powys bestowed on the Anthology just before it appeared in book form and the publicity which was given his lecture by the New York Times. Nathan Haskell Dole printed an article in the Boston Transcript of June 30, 1915, in which he contrasted the work with the Greek Anthology, pointing in particular to certain epitaphs by Carphylides, Kallaischros and Pollianos. The critical testimony of Miss Harriet Monroe in her editorial comments and in her preface to "The New Poetry" has greatly strengthened the judgment of to-day against a reversal at the hands of a later criticism.
This response to the Anthology while it was appearing in the Mirror and afterwards when put in the book was to nothing so much as to the substance. It was accepted as a picture of our life in America. It was interpreted as a transcript of the state of mind of men and women here and elsewhere. You called it a Comedy Humaine in your announcement of my identity as the author in the Mirror of November 20, 1914. If the epitaphic form gave added novelty I must confess that the idea was suggested to me by the Greek Anthology. But it was rather because of the Greek Anthology than from it that I evolved the less harmonious epitaphs with which Spoon River Anthology was commenced. As to metrical epitaphs it is needless to say that I drew upon the legitimate materials of authentic English versification. Up to the Spring of 1914, I had never allowed a Spring to pass without reading Homer; and I feel that this familiarity had its influence both as to form and spirit; but I shall not take the space now to pursue this line of confessional.
What is the substance of which I have spoken if it be not the life around us as we view it through eyes whose vision lies in heredity, mode of life, understanding of ourselves and of our place and time? You have lived much. As a critic and a student of the country no one understands America better than you do. As a denizen of the west, but as a surveyor of the east and west you have brought to the country's interpretation a knowledge of its political and literary life as well as a proficiency in the history of other lands and other times. You have seen and watched the unfolding of forces that sprang up after the Civil War. Those forces mounted in the eighties and exploded in free silver in 1896. They began to hit through the directed marksmanship of Theodore Roosevelt during his second term. You knew at first hand all that went with these forces of human hope, futile or valiant endeavor, articulate or inarticulate expression of the new birth. You saw and lived, but in greater degree, what I have seen and lived. And with this back-ground you inspired and instructed me in my analysis. Standing by you confirmed or corrected my sculpturing of the clay taken out of the soil from which we both came. You did this with an eye familiar with the secrets of the last twenty years, familiar also with the relation of those years to the time which preceded and bore them.
So it is, that not only because I could not dedicate Spoon River to you, but for the larger reasons indicated, am I impelled to do you whatever honor there may be in taking your name for this book. By this outline confession, sometime perhaps to be filled in, do I make known what your relation is to these interpretations of mine resulting from a spirit, life, thought, environment which have similarly come to us and have similarly affected us.
I call this book "Toward the Gulf," a title importing a continuation of the attempts of Spoon River and The Great Valley to mirror the age and the country in which we live. It does not matter which one of these books carries your name and makes these acknowledgments; so far, anyway, as the opportunity is concerned for expressing my appreciation of your friendship and the great esteem and affectionate interest in which I hold you.
EDGAR LEE MASTERS.
The following poems were first printed in the publications indicated:
Toward the Gulf, The Lake Boats, The Loom, Tomorrow is my Birthday, Dear Old Dick, The Letter, My Light with Yours, Widow LaRue, Neanderthal, in Reedy's Mirror.
Draw the Sword, Oh Republic, in the Independent.
Canticle of the Race, in Poetry, a Magazine of Verse.
Friar Yves, in the Cosmopolitan Magazine.
"I pay my debt for Lafayette and Rochambeau," in Fashions of the Hour.
TOWARD THE GULF
From the Height of Land
Far north.
From the Lake of the Woods,
From Rainy Lake,
From Itasca's springs.
From the snow and the ice
Of the mountains,
Breathed on by the sun,
And given life,
Awakened by kisses of fire,
Moving, gliding as brightest hyaline
Down the cliffs,
Down the hills,
Over the stones.
Trickling as rills;
Swiftly running as mountain brooks;
Swirling through runnels of rock;
Curving in spheréd silence
Around the long worn walls of granite gorges;
Storming through chasms;
And flowing for miles in quiet over the Titan basin
To the muddled waters of the mighty river,
Himself obeying the call of the gulf,
And the unfathomed urge of the sea!
Spirits of liberty
Leaving your pure retreats
For work in the world.
Soiling your crystal springs
With the waste that is whirled to your breast as you run,
Until you are foul as the crawling leviathan
That devours you,
And uses you to carry waste and earth
For the making of land at the gulf,
For the conquest of land for the feet of men.
Planting your cross in vain,
Gaining neither gold nor ivory,
Nor tribute
For France or Spain.
Making land alone
For liberty!
You could proclaim in the name of the cross
The dominion of kings over a world that was new.
But the river has altered its course:
There are fertile fields
For a thousand miles where the river flowed that you knew.
And there are liberty and democracy
For thousands of miles
Where in the name of kings, and for the cross
You tramped the tangles for treasure.
In laughter and tumult and roaring of voices,
Swirling, dancing, leaping, foaming,
Spirits of caverns, of canyons and gorges:
Waters tinctured by star-lights, sweetened by breezes
Blown over snows, out of the rosy northlands,
Through forests of pine and hemlock,
Whisperings of the Pacific grown symphonic.
Voices of freedom, restless, unconquered,
Mad with divinity, fearless and free:—
Hunters and choppers, warriors, revelers,
Laughers, dancers, fiddlers, freemen,
Climbing the crests of the Alleghenies,
Singing, chopping, hunting, fighting
Erupting into Kentucky and Tennessee,
Into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Sweeping away the waste of the Indians,
As the river carries mud for the making of land.
And taking the land of Illinois from kings
And handing its allegiance to the Republic.
What riflemen with Daniel Boone for leader,
And conquerors with Clark for captain
Plunge down like melted snows
The rocks and chasms of forbidden mountains,
And make more land for freemen!
Clear-eyed, hard-muscled, dauntless hunters,
Choppers of forests and tillers of fields
Meet at last in a field of snow-white clover
To make wise laws for states,
And to teach their sons of the new West
That suffrage is the right of freemen.
Until the lion of Tennessee,
Who crushes king-craft near the gulf.
Where La Salle proclaimed the crown,
And the cross,
Is made the ruler of the republic
By freeman suffragans,
And winners of the West!
Even to the ocean girdled earth,
The out-worn rule of Florida rots your domain.
But the lion of Tennessee asks: Would you take from Spain
The land she has lost but in name?
It shall be done in a month if you loose my sword.
It was done as he said.
And the sick and drunken power of Spain that clung,
And sucked at the life of Chile, Peru, Argentina,
Loosened under the blows of San Martin and Bolivar,
Breathing the lightning thrown by Napoleon the Great
On the thrones of Europe.
Father of Waters! 'twas you who made us say:
No kings this side of the earth forever!
One-half of the earth shall be free
By our word and the might that is back of our word!
In laughter and tumult and roaring of voices!
And the river moves in its winding channel toward the gulf,
Over the breast of De Soto,
By the swamp grave of La Salle!
The old days sleep, the lion of Tennessee sleeps
With Daniel Boone and the hunters,
The rifle men, the revelers,
The laughers and dancers and choppers
Who climbed the crests of the Alleghenies,
And poured themselves into Tennessee, Ohio,
Kentucky, Illinois, the bountiful West.
But the river never sleeps, the river flows forever,
Making land forever, reclaiming the wastes of the sea.
And the race never sleeps, the race moves on forever.
And wars must come, as the waters must sweep away
Drift-wood, dead wood, choking the strength of the river—
For Liberty never sleeps!
And over the graves of the hunters and choppers
The tramp of troops is heard!
There is war again,
O, Father of Waters!
There is war, O, symbol of freedom!
They have chained your giant strength for the cause
Of trade in men.
But a man of the West, a denizen of your shore,
Wholly American,
Compact, clear-eyed, nerved like a hunter,
Who knew no faster beat of the heart,
Except in charity, forgiveness, peace;
Generous, plain, democratic,
Scarcely appraising himself at full,
A spiritual rifleman and chopper,
Of the breed of Daniel Boone—
This man, your child, O, Father of Waters,
Waked from the winter sleep of a useless day
By the rising sun of a Freedom bright and strong,
Slipped like the loosened snows of your mountain streams
Into a channel of fate as sure as your own—
A fate which said: till the thing be done
Turn not back nor stop.
Ulysses of the great Atlantis,
Wholly American,
Patient, silent, tireless, watchful, undismayed
Grant at Fort Donelson, Grant at Vicksburg,
Leading the sons of choppers and riflemen,
Pushing on as the hunters and farmers
Poured from the mountains into the West,
Freed you, Father of Waters,
To flow to the Gulf and be one
With the earth-engirdled tides of time.
And gave us states made ready for the hands
Wholly American:
Hunters, choppers, tillers, fighters
For epochs vast and new
In Truth, in Liberty,
Posters from land to land and sea to sea
Till all the earth be free!
Dream not of disaster,
Sleep the sleep of the brave
In your couch afar from the Father of Waters!
A new Ulysses arises,
Who turns not back, nor stops
Till the thing is done.
He cuts with one stroke of the sword
The stubborn neck that keeps the Gulf
And the Caribbean
From the luring Pacific.
Roosevelt the hunter, the pioneer,
Wholly American,
Winner of greater wests
Till all the earth be free!
Ulysses reincarnate shall come
To guard our places of sleep,
Till East and West shall be one in the west of heaven and earth!
I see a thicket of masts on the river.
But in the prints to be
There will be lake boats,
With port holes, funnels, rows of decks,
Huddled like swans by the docks,
Under the shadows of cliffs of brick.
And who will know from the prints to be,
When the Albatross and the Golden Eagle,
The flying craft which shall carry the vision
Of impatient lovers wounded by Spring
To the shaded rivers of Michigan,
That it was the Missouri, the Iowa,
And the City of Benton Harbor
Which lay huddled like swans by the docks?
You are not Lake Leman,
Walled in by Mt. Blanc.
One sees the whole world round you,
And beyond you, Lake Michigan.
And when the melodious winds of March
Wrinkle you and drive on the shore
The serpent rifts of sand and snow,
And sway the giant limbs of oaks,
Longing to bud,
The boats put forth for the ports that began to stir,
With the creak of reels unwinding the nets,
And the ring of the caulking wedge.
But in the June days—
The Alabama ploughs through liquid tons
Of sapphire waves.
She sinks from hills to valleys of water,
And rises again,
Like a swimming gull!
I wish a hundred years to come, and forever
All lovers could know the rapture
Of the lake boats sailing the first Spring days
To coverts of hepatica,
With the whole world sphering round you,
And the whole of the sky beyond you.
I knew the captain of the City of Grand Rapids.
He had sailed the seas as a boy.
And he stood on deck against the railing
Puffing a cigar,
Showing in his eyes the cinema flash of the sun on the waves.
It was June and life was easy. ...
One could lie on deck and sleep,
Or sit in the sun and dream.
People were walking the decks and talking,
Children were singing.
And down on the purser's deck
A man was dancing by himself,
Whirling around like a dervish.
And this captain said to me:
"No life is better than this.
I could live forever,
And do nothing but run this boat
From the dock at Chicago to the dock at Holland
And back again."
One time I went to Grand Haven
On the Alabama with Charley Shippey.
It was dawn, but white dawn only,
Under the reign of Leucothea,
As we volplaned, so it seemed, from the lake
Past the lighthouse into the river.
And afterward laughing and talking
Hurried to Van Dreezer's restaurant
For breakfast.
(Charley knew him and talked of things
Unknown to me as he cooked the breakfast.)
Then we fished the mile's length of the pier
In a gale full of warmth and moisture
Which blew the gulls about like confetti,
And flapped like a flag the linen duster
Of a fisherman who paced the pier—
(Charley called him Rip Van Winkle).
The only thing that could be better
Than this day on the pier
Would be its counterpart in heaven,
As Swedenborg would say—
Charley is fishing somewhere now, I think.
There is a grove of oaks on a bluff by the river
At Berrien Springs.
There is a cottage that eyes the lake
Between pines and silver birches
At South Haven.
There is the inviolable wonder of wooded shore
Curving for miles at Saugatuck.
And at Holland a beach like Scheveningen's.
And at Charlevoix the sudden quaintness
Of an old-world place by the sea.
There are the hills around Elk Lake
Where the blue of the sky is so still and clear
It seems it was rubbed above them
By the swipe of a giant thumb.
And beyond these the little Traverse Bay
Where the roar of the breeze goes round
Like a roulette ball in the groove of the wheel,
Circling the bay,
And beyond these Mackinac and the Cheneaux Islands—
And beyond these a great mystery!—
Neither ice floes, nor winter's palsy
Stays the tide in the river.
LAKE BOATS
The lake boats
Huddled like swans
Turn and sigh like sleepers——
They are longing for the Spring!
CITIES OF THE PLAIN
The panders who betray the idiot cities
For miles and miles toward the prairie sprawled,
Ignorant, soul-less, rich,
Smothered in fumes of pitch?
See the unfolding and the folding up
Of ring-clipped papers,
And letters which keep drugged the public cup.
The walls hear whispers and the semi-tones
Of voices in the corner, over telephones
Muffled by Persian padding, gemmed with brass spittoons.
Butts of cigars are on the glass topped table,
And through the smoke, gracing the furtive Babel,
The bishop's picture blesses the picaroons,
Who start or stop the life of millions moving
Unconscious of obedience, the plastic
Yielders to satanic and dynastic
Hands of reproaching and approving.
But with their arms concealed,
And rubber heeled.
Here priests and wavering want are charmed.
And shadows fall here like the shark's
In messages received or sent.
Signals are flying from the battlement.
And every president
Of rail, gas, coal and oil, the parks,
The receipt of custom knows, without a look,
Their meaning as the code is in no book.
The treasonous cracksmen of the city's wealth
Watch for the flags of stealth!
Tracks ribbon the streets, and beneath the streets
Wires for voices, fire, thwart the plebiscites,
And choke the counsels and symposiacs
Of dreamers who have pity for the backs
That bear and bleed.
All things are theirs: tracks, wires, streets and coal,
The church's creed,
The city's soul,
The city's sea girt loveliness,
The merciless and meretricious press.
Gray faces and bright eyes, weary and cynical
Discuss fresh wonders of the old cabal.
But nothing of its work in type is hinted:
Taxes are high! The mentors of the town
Must keep their taxes down
On buildings, presses, stocks
In gas, oil, coal and docks.
The mahogany rooms conceal a spider man
Who holds the taxing bodies through the church,
And knights with arms concealed. The mentors search
The spider man, the master publican,
And for his friendship silence keep,
Letting him herd the populace like sheep
For self and for the insatiable desires
Of coal and tracks and wires,
Pick judges, legislators,
And tax-gatherers.
Or name his favorites, whom they name:
The slick and sinistral,
Servitors of the cabal,
For praise which seems the equivalent of fame:
Giving to the delicate handed crackers
Of priceless safes, the spiritual slackers,
The flash and thunder of front pages!
And the gulled millions stare and fling their wages
Where they are bidden, helpless and emasculate.
And the unilluminate,
Whose brows are brass,
Who weep on every Sabbath day
For Jesus riding on an ass,
Scarce know the ass is they,
Now ridden by his effigy,
The publican with Jesus' painted mask,
Along a way where fumes of odorless gas
First spur then fell them from the task.
Like thorns beneath a boiling pot that crackle.
And the angels say to Yahveh looking down
From the alabaster railing, on the town,
O, cackle, cackle, cackle, crack and crack
We wish we had our little Sodom back!
EXCLUDED MIDDLE
Over these daguerreotypes
The balloon-like spread of a skirt of silk emerges
With its little figure of flowers.
And the enameled glair of parted hair
Lies over the oval brow,
From under which eyes of fiery blackness
Look through you.
And the only repose of spirit shown
Is in the hands
Lying loosely one in the other,
Lightly clasped somewhat below the breast. ...
And in the companion folder of this case
Of gutta percha
Is the shape of a man.
His brow is oval too, but broader.
His nose is long, but thick at the tip.
His eyes are blue
Wherein faith burns her signal lights,
And flashes her convictions.
His mouth is tense, almost a slit.
And his face is a massive Calvinism
Resting on a stock tie.
They were married, you see.
The clasp on this gutta percha case
Locks them together.
They were locked together in life.
And a hasp of brass
Keeps their shadows face to face in the case
Which has been handed down—
(The pictures of noble ancestors,
Showing what strains of gentle blood
Flow in the third generation)—
From Massachusetts to Illinois. ...
Long ago it was over for them,
Massachusetts has done its part,
She raised the seed
And a wind blew it over to Illinois
Where it has mixed, multiplied, mutated
Until one soul comes forth:
But a soul all striped and streaked,
And a soul self-crossed and self-opposed,
As it were a tree which on one branch
Bears northern spies,
And on another thorn apples. ...
Come Weissmann, Von Baer and Schleiden,
And you Buffon and De Vries,
Come with your secrets of sea shore asters
Night-shade, henbanes, gloxinias,
Veronicas, snap-dragons, Danebrog,
And show us how they cross and change,
And become hybrids.
And show us what heredity is,
And how it works.
For the secret of these human beings
Locked in this gutta percha case
Is the secret of Mephistos and red Campions.
Let us lay out the facts as far as we can.
Her eyes were black,
His eyes were blue.
She saw through shadows, walls and doors,
She knew life and hungered for more.
But he lived in the mists, and climbed to high places
To feel clouds about his face, and get the lights
Of supernal sun-sets.
She was reason, and he was faith.
She had an illumination, but of the intellect.
And he had an illumination but of the soul.
And she saw God as merciless law,
And he knew God as divine love.
And she was a man, and he in part was a woman.
He stood in a pulpit and preached the Christ,
And the remission of sins by blood,
And the literal fall of man through Adam,
And the mystical and actual salvation of man
Through the coming of Christ.
And she sat in a pew shading her great eyes
To hide her scorn for it all.
She was crucified,
And raged to the last like the impenitent thief
Against the fate which wasted and trampled down
Her wisdom, sagacity, versatile skill,
Which would have piled up gold or honors
For a mate who knew that life is growth,
And health, and the satisfaction of wants,
And place and reputation and mansion houses,
And mahogany and silver,
And beautiful living.
She hated him, and hence she pitied him.
She was like the gardener with great pruners
Deciding to clip, sometimes not clipping
Just for the dread.
She had married him—but why?
Some inscrutable air
Wafted his pollen to her across a wide garden—
Some power had crossed them.
And here is the secret I think:
(As we would say here is electricity)
It is the vibration inhering in sex
That produces devils or angels,
And it is the sex reaction in men and women
That brings forth devils or angels,
And starts in them the germs of powers or passions,
Becoming loves, ferocities, gifts and weaknesses,
Till the stock dies out.
So now for their hybrid children:—
She gave birth to four daughters and one son.
But first what have we for the composition of these daughters?
Reason opposed and becoming keener therefor.
Faith mocked and drawing its mantel closer.
Love thwarted and becoming acid.
Hatred mounting too high and thinning into pity.
Hunger for life unappeased and becoming a stream under-ground
Where only blind things swim.
God year by year removing himself to remoter thrones
Of inexorable law.
God coming closer even while disease
And total blindness came between him and God
And defeated the mercy of God.
And a love and a trust growing deeper in him
As she in great thirst, hanging on the cross,
Mocked his crucifixion,
And talked philosophy between the spasms of pain,
Till at last she is all satirist,
And he is all saint.
And all the children were raised
After the strictest fashion in New England,
And made to join the church,
And attend its services.
And these were the children:
Janet was a religious fanatic and a virago,
She debated religion with her husband for ten years,
Then he refused to talk, and for twenty years
Scarcely spoke to her.
She died a convert to Catholicism.
They had two children:
The boy became a forgerer
Of notorious skill.
The daughter married, but was barren.
Miranda married a rich man
And spent his money so fast that he failed.
She lashed him with a scorpion tongue
And made him believe at last
With her incessant reasonings
That he was a fool, and so had failed.
In middle life he started over again,
But became tangled in a law-suit.
Because of these things he killed himself.
Louise was a nymphomaniac.
She was married twice.
Both husbands fled from her insatiable embraces.
At thirty-two she became a woman on a telephone list,
Subject to be called,
And for two years ran through a daily orgy of sex,
When blindness came on her, as it came on her father before her,
And she became a Christian Scientist,
And led an exemplary life.
Deborah was a Puritan of Puritans,
Her list of unmentionable things
Tabooed all the secrets of creation,
Leaving politics, religion, and human faults,
And the mistakes most people make,
And the natural depravity of man,
And his freedom to redeem himself if he chooses,
As the only subjects of conversation.
As a twister of words and meanings,
And a skilled welder of fallacies,
And a swift emerger from ineluctable traps of logic,
And a wit with an adder's tongue,
And a laugher,
And an unafraid facer of enemies,
Oppositions, hatreds,
She never knew her equal.
She was at once very cruel, and very tender,
Very selfish and very generous
Very little and very magnanimous.
Scrupulous as to the truth, and utterly disregardless of the truth.
Of the keenest intuitions, yet gullible,
Easily used at times, of erratic judgment,
Analytic but pursuing with incredible swiftness
The falsest trails to her own undoing—
All in all the strangest mixture of colors and scent
Derived from father and mother,
But mixed by whom, and how, and why?
Now for the son named Herman, rebel soul.
His brow was like a loaf of bread, his eyes
Turned from his father's blue to gray, his nose
Was like his mother's, skin was dark like hers.
His shapely body, hands and feet belonged
To some patrician face, not to Marat's.
And his was like Marat's, fanatical,
Materialistic, fierce, as it might guide
A reptile's crawl, but yet he crawled to peaks
Loving the hues of mists, but not the mists
His father loved. And being a rebel soul
He thought the world all wrong. A nothingness
Moving as malice marred the life of man.
'Twas man's great work to fight this Giant Fraud,
And all who praise and serve Him. 'Tis for man
To free the world from error, suffer, die
For liberty of thought. You see his mother
Is in possession of one part of him,
Or all of him for some time.
So he lives
Nursing the dream (like father he's a dreamer)
That genius fires him. All the while a gift
For analytics stored behind that brow,
That bulges like a loaf of bread, is all
Of which he well may boast above the man
He hates as but a slave of faith and fear.
He feeds luxurious doubt with Omar Khyam,
But for long years neglects the jug of wine.
And as for "thou" he does not wake for years,
Is a pure maiden when he weds, the grains
Run counter in him, end in knots at times.
He takes from father certain tastes and traits,
From mother certain others, one can see
His mother's sex re-actions to his father,
Not passed to him to make him celibate,
But holding back in sleeping passions which
Burst over bounds at last in lust, not love.
Not love since that great engine in the brow
Tears off the irised wings of love and bares
The poor worm's body where the wings had been:
What is it but desire? Such stuff in rhyme
In music over what is but desire,
And ends when that is satisfied!
He's a crank.
And follows all the psychic thrills which run
To cackles o'er the world. It's Looking Backward,
Or Robert Elsmere, Spencer's Social Statics,
It's socialism, Anarchism, Peace,
It's non-resistance with a swelling heart,
As who should say how truer to the faith
Of Jesus am I, without hope or faith,
Than churchmen. He's a prohibitionist,
The poor's protagonist, the knight at arms
Of fallen women, yelling at the rich
Whose wicked greed makes all the prostitutes—
No prostitutes without the wicked rich!
But as he ages, as the bitter days
Approach with perorations: O ye vipers,
The engine in him changes all the world,
Reverses all the wheels of thought behind.
For Nietzsche comes, and makes him superman.
He dumps the truth of Jesus over—there
It lies with his youth's textual skepticism,
And laughter at the supernatural.
Now what's the motivating principle
Of such a mind? In youth he sought for rules
Wherewith to trail and capture truths. He found it
In James McCosh's Logic, it was this:
Lex Exclusi Tertii aut Medii,
Law of Excluded Middle speaking plain:
A thing is true, or not true, never a third
Hypothesis, so God is or is not.
That's very good to start with, how to end
And how to know which of the two is false—
He hunted out the false, as mother did—
Requires a tool. He found it in this book,
Reductio ad absurdum; let us see
Excluded middle use reductio.
God is or God is not, but then what God?
Excluded Middle never sought a God
To suffer demolition at his hands
Except the God of Illinois, the God
Grown but a little with his followers
Since Moses lived and Peter fished. So now
God is or God is not. Let us assume
God is and use reductio ad absurdum,
Taking away the rotten props, the posts
That do not fit or hold, and let Him fall.
For if he falls, the other postulate
That God is not is demonstrated. See
A universe of truth pass on the way
Cleared by Excluded Middle through the stuff
Of thought and visible things, a way that lets
A greater God escape, uncaught by all
The nippers of reductio ad absurdum.
But to resume his argument was this:
God is or God is not, but if God is
Why pestilence and war, earthquake and famine?
He either wills them, or cannot prevent them,
But if he wills them God is evil, if
He can't prevent them, he is limited.
But God, you say, is good, omnipotent,
And here I prove Him evil, or too weak
To stay the evil. Having shown your God
Lacking in what makes God, the proposition
Which I oppose to this, that God is not
Stands proven. For as evil is most clear
In sickness, pain and death, it cannot be
There is a Power with strength to overcome them,
Yet suffers them to be.
And so this man
Went through the years of life, and stripped the fields
Of beauty and of thought with mandibles
Insatiable as the locust's, which devours
A season's care and labor in an hour.
He stripped these fields and ate them, but they made
No meat or fat for him. And so he lived
On his own thought, as starving men may live
On stored up fat. And so in time he starved.
The thought in him no longer fed his life,
And he had withered up the outer world
Of man and nature, stripped it to the bone,
Nothing but skull and cross-bones greeted him
Wherever he turned—the world became a bottle
Filled with a bitter essence he could drink
From long accustomed doses—labeled poison
And marked with skull and cross-bones. Could he laugh
As mother laughed? No more! He tried to find
The mother's laugh and secret for the laugh
Which kept her to the end—but did she laugh?
Or if she laughed, was it so hollow, forced
As all his laughter now was. He had proved
Too much for laughter. Nothing but himself
Remained to keep himself, he lived alone
Upon his stored up fat, now daily growing
To dangerous thinness.
So with love of woman.
He had found "thou" the jug of wine as well,
"Thou" "thou" had come and gone too many times.
For what is sex but touch of flesh, the hand
Is flesh and hands may touch, if so, the loins—
Reductio ad absurdum, O you fools,
Who see a wrong in touch of loins, no wrong
In clasp of hands. And so again, again
With his own tools of thought he bruised his hands
Until they grew too callous to perceive
When they were touched.
So by analysis
He turned on everything he once believed.
Let's make an end!
Men thought Excluded Middle
Was born for great things. Why that bulging brow
And analytic keen if not for greatness?
In those old days they thought so when he fought
For lofty things, a youthful radical
Come here to change the world! But now at last
He lectures in back halls to youths who are
What he was in his youth, to acid souls
Who must have bitterness, can take enough
To kill a healthy soul, as fiends for dope
Must have enough to kill a body clean.
And so upon a night Excluded Middle
Is lecturing to prove that life is evil,
Not worth the living—when his auditors
Behold him pale and sway and take his seat,
And later quit the hall, the lecture left
Half finished.
This had happened in a twinkling:
He had made life a punching bag, with fists,
Excluded Middle and Reductio,
Had whacked it back and forth. But just as often
As he had struck it with an argument
That it is not worth living, snap, the bag
Would fly back for another punch. For life
Just like a punching bag will stand your whacks
Of hatred and denial, let you punch
Almost at will. But sometime, like the bag,
The strap gives way, the bag flies up and falls
And lies upon the floor, you've knocked it out.
And this is what Excluded Middle does
This night, the strap breaks with his blows. He proves
His strength, his case and for the first he sees
Life is not worth the living. Life gives up,
Resists no more, flys back no more to him,
But hits the ceiling, snap the strap gives way!
The bag falls to the floor, and lies there still—
Who now shall pick it up, re-fasten it?
And so his color fades, it well may be
The crisis of a long neurosis, well
What caused it? But his eyes are wondrous clear
Perceiving life knocked out. His heart is sick,
He takes his seat, admiring friends swarm round him,
Conduct him to a carriage, he goes home
And sitting by the fire (O what is fire?
The miracle of fire dawns on his thought,
Fire has been near him all these years unseen,
How wonderful is fire!) which warms and soothes
Neuritic pains, he takes the rubber case
Which locks the images of father, mother.
And as he stares upon the oval brow,
The eyes of blue which flash the light of faith,
Preserved like dendrites in this silver shimmer,
Some spectral speculations fill his brain,
Float like a storm above the sorry wreck
Of all his logic tools, machines; for now
Since pains in back and shoulder like to father's
Fall to him at the age that father had them,
Father has entered him, has settled down
To live with him with those neuritic pangs.
Thus are his speculations. Over all
How comes it that a sudden feel of life,
Its wonder, terror, beauty is like father's?
As if the soul of father entered in him
And made the field of consciousness his own,
Emotions, powers of thought his instruments.
That is a horrible atavism, when
You find yourself reverting to a soul
You have not loved, despite yourself becoming
That other soul, and with an out-worn self
Crying for burial on your hands, a life
Not yours till now that waits your new found powers—
Live now or die indeed!