I pace the rooms and wait for John’s return.
My heart beats all too fast, I feel a pain
Around my heart, my hands grow cold, I burn
Through neck and cheeks. And thus I live in vain.
John comes at last and says, “There is no mail,
No letter for you.” And with whirling brain
I turn away in silence, growing pale,
And whisper to myself: to be resigned
To wretchedness perhaps is to prevail
O’er wretchedness and win a peace of mind.
To love you so, to thirst for you, to pay
For outward calm with inner storms confined,
To lie awake by night and spend the day
In restless thoughts, is life too hard to bear.
I see you in my troubled dreams alway,
You face me with a grave and haughty air,
Serene, incensed against me who intrude
An interest which you have no heart to share.
Forgive me then my sorrow’s servitude,
To write to you my suffering will ease,
And fill the aching of my solitude.
I have gone forth to Nature to find peace:
The woods are filled with purple lupine now,
Small yellow asters, phlox, and cramoisies
Of columbine and roses, vine and bough.
The wild grape and the cherry haunt the dunes
With odors sweet as love. To cool my brow
I walk the heights upon these afternoons
And watch the blue waste of the sky’s descent.
And yesterday where golden light festoons
With flickering sorcery the way we went
’Twixt sprays of beech and sassafras I stole
Till once again at the hill’s top half-spent
I saw the shore dunes and the waters roll.
We climbed it once together—it was there
The Bacchic madness came into your soul
To take me in your arms. And now I bear
Your coldness, your reproaches, you who call
My longing and my spiritual despair
A mere neurosis, or hysterical
Outcropping to be conquered. It was wrong
To take me in your arms, and then when all
Was not yours then to tell me to be strong,
And urge your marriage vows now I have thought
The problem of my love through. I belong
To you Monsieur; whatever grief is wrought
Of body or of soul to satisfy
The flame is better, and is far less fraught
With mad regret than it can be to lie
In restless torture. O my friend withdraw
Your friendship from me never lest I die!
Yes, I could live and work if I foresaw
Your friendship mine and letters by your hand
Arriving in this lonely place to thaw
The ice around my heart’s flame. Understand
From those I love but little love I need:
Crumbs from your feast you scarce can countermand,
And crumbs are all I ask, and just the meed
Of friendly interest. I abase my pride.
The strong can suffer silently and bleed
As long as strength lasts, keep the blood inside,
Until one weakens when it spurts and drips.
And Pride turns Nature, careless now to hide
The inner bleeding bubbling at the lips.
I write you this without regret or shame.
My strength has left me in the blue eclipse
Of agony. Monsieur, I take the blame,
If any come, of fanning dangerously
The spark that brightened once and would be flame—
Is that not true? Or do you say to me:
“You are no more my pupil, I retrench
“The memory of things that cease to be,
“And go my way with teaching young girls French,
“As I taught you. Two years have passed since then.
“What is this thought that time has failed to quench?
“You who are laureled in the world of men,
“A genius risen like a morning star,
“Does not that glory fill you?” Yet again
I answer you one’s genius burns afar
In useless splendor if it warm no cheek,
Make bright no eye, lead on no darkling spar—
Genius is love, is freedom, it must speak,
Work out its fate from egocentric life;
It is more swift than other feet to seek
Its ruin with its hope, or take the knife
More willingly to breast than those who sink
In involuted growth. To be your wife
I do not dream, I only wish to drink
The cup with you and break the bread with you,
To feel thereby our lives are one and think
We are one creed and one communion, new
In spirit, born anew, that I may have
An altar for my genius, something true
And near in flesh to triumph for, or brave
The world or evil for. Genius is love.
It cannot bear itself alone to save;
It must another rescue, it must prove
Its growing strength in ministry. Monsieur,
Bruise not my soul by ignorance hereof,
My reverend father thinks my thoughts are pure—
If he should read this! But if you dismiss
This letter with a smile and say her cure
Is the reaction of forbidden bliss,
It is most true, but you would not degrade
My love for you with that analysis,
And that alone. For surely God who made
Our souls and bodies so meant we should rise
Through their desires, and does God pervade
This glowing mass of life, these starry skies
With other power? Now scorn me, if you will.
The unburdened heart has tamed its agonies.

All my hair is gray,
My youth is gone, pretense will work no more.
I’m fifty-seven, yet I cling to youth,
Because I cling to love, have never known
Aught but successions of immoderate—what?

Some call it lust—you call it libido.
Well it is urge, creative fire and drives
The artist half-soul mad, as I am mad—
Look how my poor hand trembles, my voice breaks—
No! I’ll go on. I’ll tell you all, be done.
Then if you cannot cure me, there’s a balm
I know myself.

If I had only loved
Elizabeth, who wrote me years ago
Such pleading letters—every man can win
Some woman’s love completely, had she won
My love as well! O what a monstrous world
Where such envenomed fire is, held by Chance
And shot in blindness. So she felt the flame
And looked on me, I felt the flame and looked
Upon this cockatrice.

So as I said
I had been teacher, actor, writer, poet,
Had seen my face on lithographs, felt warm
In every capillary for that face
Which seemed star-guided, noble, to be loved,
Revered, and thus through self-esteem I bore
My failures hoping, buoyed by some success
As the swift years went by.

But on a day
When I was forty-five, looked thirty-five,
No gray hairs then, they called me thirty-five,
My name went round the city, in the press
They hailed me as a genius, I had played
Othello to their liking, was yet young
And promised much, they said. That afternoon
A woman came to see me in my suite,
Wonder and admiration in her eyes.
Her manner halted, as she thumbed a book
Upon the table, while she told her tale:
She had won favor as an amateur,
Could I, the greatest talked of man to-day,
Show her the way to greatness, might it be
A modest part could be assigned to her
When I played mad Othello?

I have found
That when a woman has no business with you
Her calling speaks the oldest one of all.
So true to this I acted. We commenced
And for three months I struggled for the prize.
Her first play was to make me pity her.
She told me of her suffering, her youth,
(She was then thirty-five), her poverty,
Her labor to learn French. And like a man
I pitied her and opened up my purse.
She said, “No! No! this hat and dress will do,
It brushes well.” She would not take a cent.
I saw her daily for a month before
I won her. Though she gave me hands and lips—
There was a fury in her lips, my heart
Seemed like to stop—I could not win the prize.
One day she broke in tears: “You seemed so noble,
So great of mind, are you then like the rest
Who want a woman’s body, nothing else?”
“I want your love,” I said, “your love for mine,
I love you, dearest!” faugh, must I repeat
The gagging words? So I declared the love
I felt too deeply, and to prove my love
I added: “I’ll renounce the gift of love,
My Lady Wonderful, worship you afar.
You would not have me tortured by your eyes,
Nor have me see you often, in this case!”
So I had given love as I had given
All wealth that I could pour of soul, achievement,
Name in the world, all pride, all thought of self
Present or future to this woman, now
For love’s sake I renounced the gift of love.
And so I left her. Well, she called me back.
And though I was a fool, and blinded too,
I saw her thought and won her in an hour.
So then commenced my madness, for she said
It could not be again. The blood I tasted
Could not be drunk. “You love me,” she would say,
“Then bring me not to shame, it will be known
If we go on. I cannot lose my bread.
Librarians cannot have their names in doubt
Who serve the public, as I do.” So it was
The madness braced my will, and unrelenting
I sought her, won her. In a little while
We were adjusted to habitual love.
And I was happy save when I was mad.
For she knew younger men who came to call;
Or take her to the theatre, with one
She corresponded. “Let it be,” she said,
“I must not be in public with you, dear,
Whose name and greatness in the world would point
To our relationship, how could it be
You would be with a woman without station,
Celebrity or wealth, except for this?
These others are a blind.”

I could not solve
Out of the whirling clouds of passion truth—
My days were tortured, in the dreams of sleep
I saw this dragon head I told you of.
And so through heavy venery, and dread,
And anger, doubt, faith, love and much of hate,
I took to drink.

So drinking with her once,
For she could drink me blind, I turned and said:
“You say I am the first, I think you lie.”
She wailed a flood of tears. A hundred eyes
Turned on us in the café where we sat.

We left and walked the park. I goaded her,
Pried out the secret. Why, at twenty-three
She had become the mistress of a man.
It ended just six months before she came
To see me in my suite.

Now here I was:
To hold on to myself I had to hold
This woman, win her wholly, crush her soul,
Destroy her so she would no longer be
My heart’s desire. For I had given all.
And I could see she valued it the less
As time went on. My name, what was it now?
My art, what was it now? She even hinted
I could not act Othello. There was nothing
I could do more to keep her, hold her love,
Her admiration. O how good esteem
Seems to a man who forfeits it to her
Whose body he can have, who cannot have
That sympathy whereby a man is nerved
To daily work and living. What is Art?
No picture would be painted, poem sung
Save for the thought that woman close at hand,
Or somewhere in the world yet to be found
By reason of the picture or the poem,
Will see and love you for it.

Let me say
In passing, and dismiss it, I began
With little sums until I gave her much.
There’s matter of more moment.

I confess,
In spite of my licentious life, the creed
One sees among the artists, where I’ve lived,
To strong belief in woman’s virtue, yes,
In spite of lip avowal of the faith
Of love called free, I have not quite believed it.
But it was in her soul. She sucked that milk,
A child upon her mother’s breast, she said—
It all came out at last from many talks,
And then, just then, I thought I saw foreshadowed
A social change upon the things of sex:
We read together Ann Veronica,
And Bernard Shaw, and laughed and said, at last
We see each other clearly. We have found
A footing for our life. I slept at last.
The dragon vanished from my dreams. I waked
A song upon my lips, left drink alone,
Could face my image in the looking-glass,
And find restored a noble quality,
A strength and genius.

But if love be free
And if you love though only for an hour
Why not the cup of love? Her former friend
Piqued to an interest by my love for her
Came back to see if he had overlooked
A beauty he would have. Well, she confessed
Their night together. It was at the time
My poor canzones which sang our stormy love
Had just been finished. Every artist fool
Writes sonnets or canzones once in his life.
And so I had to add a verse to tell
Her faithlessness—or was it faithlessness?
Since she declared she loved me, did not love
This older friend. But if she did not love him
What was this act? She called it just a trial
Of our love which had stood the test, O God
Such mazes for my soul!

Flushed then with wrath
And drink I beat her cruelly. She stood
With scarce a cry of pain and let me strike,
And said if I considered it was just
To beat her so, she wished to bear the pain.
Then with a cry I ceased. We fell asleep
Stretched on the bed together. When we woke
She kissed me her forgiveness. I returned
The kiss, ah me!

So now the story turns.
There was a woman critic who pursued
My work with hateful words. Before I knew
The cockatrice I found it best to fold
This critic’s column under, never read.
And in a day or two from that on which
I beat my mistress, what should I behold?—
A letter from her—she had left the town
Without my knowing, she was visiting
This critic enemy at her summer home.
And in this mail I found my poor canzones
Returned to me, and in the letter this:
“My friend says for some reason you would try
To compromise me by this wretched verse,
So I return it to you, go and burn.
I shall not see you more—so she advises,
And so I think. I wish you well no less.
You are a little old to rise to fame,
Or excellence in acting, yet go on.
Perhaps there is not aught beside to do,
And it will occupy your mind, good-bye.”

So shortly everywhere I seemed to sense
The feeling that they deemed me foul and base.
While we were friends I made her known to artists,
And writers in the city. With this start
She had gone on and multiplied her friends
Among this folk. I saw it all at once
As one sees dawn from darkness. Then
The social standard melted, gave away
To all that had been written for some years.
Free love had won at last. And we who kept
Our love in hiding, she who lied to keep
Her name as one who lived a maiden’s life,
And I who doubted, hated her because
She was not freshly mine, we, she and I,
Stepped to a world all new, she to enjoy
And I to perish. I was weak from loss
Of blood from wounds she gave me, spent for love
Poured for her sorrow, for she grieved and wept
That I was not her early love, her love
At love’s beginning. I went here and there
To build her life up, make it rich, repair
The injuries of her youth, retrieve the days
Which had brought loneliness. Forbear with me—
I thought I could tell all in just a word—
Yes, this is it—She learned what was my strength
And took it for her own, found out my faults
And struck me there. She gave me confidence
And trust, I fancied. On analysis
She had concealed herself, there had not been
Clear understanding with us. So she took
My friends, and friends are never wholly friends,
And made them hers, through these made other friends,
Explored my havens, my alliances,
My secret powers of prestige in the world.
And I awoke to find the world my foe!
And every desk of every editor
Silent for knowledge of me, breaking silence
In just a word of hate. You see she loosed
This story like a mist which creeps through cracks
That I had compromised her. Then behold
I who had helped to bring this era in
Of sex equality, yes, in spite of all,
My ingrained feelings I have spoken of,
Found myself robbed of her by just the creed
I had upheld, and saw her live with him
Who was her friend, before I knew her, yes,
And justified by those whom she had feared,
Because they hated me, and pitied him
Bound to a woman in a loveless life
Who would not free him, let him marry her.

Then the last atom of my strength I summoned
To play Othello. It was death or life!
Soul triumph or soul ruin. But you see
The cockatrice had sent the word around
And sharpened every critic eye. I faced
An audience of one mind, could sense it all
Where hatred, mild amusement were well mixed
To poison, paralyze creative power,
And even break my memory. But I said
Show now your genius, drink the hatred in
Till all your spirit sparkles as a star
When the north wind of winter blows at night.
Nothing opposes but a woman’s hate.
Rise on its wreckage. So I spurred myself.
And even when I saw her critic friend
Limned from the mass of faces, lost my clue
And waited for the prompter, then my rage
Upheld me—yes, but wait—the rest is brief.

I had not acted through the strangle scene
When I heard calls and bells, the curtain fell,
My understudy led me from the stage.
Out in the night we went—I knew not where—
It was a night of drink, and I awoke
To strange surroundings in a scented room,
A woman with light hair lay by my side
“How did I get here”—then the woman laughed—
She was a Fury, for the Furies had me.
Out of the house I ran, from place to place,
All day went wandering in the city, thus
My wanderings of ten years began, they seem
Ten centuries. What do you think of this?
I’m fifty-seven, with a bad complex,
Can you unravel it and make me well?

You, who lost faith in me, will not
Believe this last confession, made
To lift your spirit from the shade
Wherein it walks and views the spot
Of my offense. But when I saw
That our love’s life must have an end,
I looked back o’er our path with awe
And traced it toward us to the sign
Where our ways severed, yours and mine.
There stood Remorse’s dreaded shape!
Your Disbelief! Your Self-Contempt!
I saw our love was not exempt
From ruin and could not escape.
We could not separate and smile,
And keep a faithful thought the while
Of understanding (like a spring
Hidden, refreshing, murmuring)
As friend sometimes takes leave of friend.
Then what was left? It was this thought
That at the last came forth to slay
Your love, without a warning brought
Ere my lips tightened to betray!

For as our love found depths too deep;
As absence almost deadened sense;
As often I awoke from sleep
And looked for hours at you, all tense,
Lest you awake and see my eyes,
Where the one thought of purest love
Shone like a fixed star’s paradise,
I learned to know that Self above—
Making the heart’s hierarchy pure—
Stands the archangel Truth, preferred—
Throned over Love which can endure
Only where Truth has stood, unstirred.
Watchful and with his torch of stars
Held o’er Love’s face, although it shows
The forehead’s pain, the bosom’s scars,
The cheeks bleached out from secret tears
In memory of impalpable blows,
Shed in the night’s long solitude.
You see I could not give you truth!
There was the Shadow in my life
Cast by the fierce Sun of my youth.
And as our day fell to the west
The Shadow lengthened and the strife
’Twixt Love and Truth within my breast
Waxed fiercer. Heaven’s deathless blue
Leaned on my hungering soul and pained
Its wings, as if a joy were lost,
Or never had been quite attained,
Or captured at too great a cost.
I could not give you truth all true.
My love for you and then the thirst
For all your love, made me accursed
Of fear that if you knew me first,
Just as I am, your heart would cease
To cherish mine. And then much more
Was this fear venom to my peace
When all the world spread out before
Our astonished eyes, as our own world,
And we its children, each for each.

This was the sleepless worm which curled
In my heart’s petals, at the root
Where my heart’s sweetness had its source.
You never saw the worm! My speech
Poised like a bee who knows the loot
Of honey’s gone, and turns his course.
I kept the petals closed, and you
Breathed at their tips, but would have known
All of their fragrance, or of blight.
That’s love—to have no place where light
And understanding have not shone.
Your face reproached me—I who knew
No sweet or bitter essences
Can be withheld from Love that keeps
An onward flight, which ever sees,
Or would see, all in the heart’s deeps.

Then Life came, and with lifted sword
Laid on our souls his dread command;
“Say your farewells, part hand from hand,
You the adorer, and adored.
Duty is seeking you! And Grief
Would have her child return and see
The changeless halls of Misery,
And the bare board and darkened hearth.”
I reeled with anguish as the earth
Sank from my feet. For oh the end
Seemed far as death! And when it came
It was my hope, my soul’s desire
To part as friend may part from friend,
And that you’d keep alive my name
Bright as an altar’s quenchless fire.
It could not be! How could it be?
I was not truth! I was not true—
I kept my soul’s real self from you.
Then I bethought me: “Since his earth
Is Autumn-stricken with a doubt
That I am worth not his love’s worth,
Were it no better he should know
Disloyalty made definite
By a suspected past re-knit,
And see our love a play played out,
Than to live through the soft decline
Of our bright day to solemn eve—
A sunset of remembrance—where
He walks devoured by love and hate—
Love for the love I strove to give,
Hate for a thought intuitive:
Some newer love her heart hath won
Or some first love hath won her back.
No, to my faith, he says, “I’ll cleave,
Believing that I can’t believe.”
“Slow death to love! Exquisite rack!”
Ah me! I had not made this fate—
The warp was stretched, the woof was spun,
The roof-tree laid long years before
You entered at the unbolted door.
“Then what is best? What can be done?
To give him back his pride and strength,
And even his peace of mind at length?
Better a quick blow! Better blood!
To brace the soul and poise the brain
And make him what he was again.”
Just then the Shadow near me stood
Who stepped aside for you. He took
With unabated comradeship
My hand in his. That closed our book.
I woke to hear the water drip
Blown out of heavens low and dim.
He brushed my tears off with his hand—
Nor clouds nor memory trouble him.
And my one thought of you was this:
I’ve cured you with this sacrifice—
The hate has come to you I planned.
The hate that may take form in words,
For scorn like this: “I found a seam
“Right at the contact of our love.
“No recreative fire can warm
“And fuse fine gold with lifeless dross,
“Or worthy metal make thereof.”
This killed your love and wrecked your dream!
This is my soul’s confession. Wait,
A trickster in a hooded form
Stands by as we begin to pull
The weaving beam, and throws between
The warp and woof a ball of wool.
It catches and is woven in
The colors, spoils the conscious blend,
Changes the pattern to the end.
Whatever it be I call it fate.
In misery or in happiness
We must live on awhile no less.
Shall we be master weavers, climb,
Or leave the loom, or waste the time?
Or guide the shuttle till the threads
Weave clear or turn to worthless shreds?

There were seven nights of the moon
This August, beloved.
There were nights before the seven
When we scarcely saw the moon,
Or perhaps as we canoed, ere the sun sank,
We saw her as a transparent tissue of white
Against a sky as white.
But when we first saw the moon
She had risen before the sun had sunk.
Then the next night she was brighter
With the evening planet above her,
Despite the tongues of fire in the west
Where the sun had set on fire
Great coils of cloud!
And then there were those nights between
Her growth and her o’erflowing fullness
When hand in hand we walked in your garden
Amid the Chinese balloons and coreopsis,
Hibiscus, marigold, hydrangeas,
Under the rose arches,
And by the hedge of California privet,
And looked at the lake,
And the moon in the sky
And the moon on the lake.

And do you remember what we saw
As we stared at the wake of the moon
On the lake?
The ripples made blacknesses,
And the moon made silver splendors,
And as we stared we saw
In the shadows of waves
Running into the light of the moon on the water
Youths and maids and children
Coming from darkness into the light in a dance,
Joining hands, falling into embraces,
Hurrying to evanishment at the path of light
Where the moon had paved the water.
I shall never see the moon on the water
Without seeing these youths and maids and children,
And without thinking of that night
Of the full moon!

This was the night
We saw the moon rise, from the very first,
Across the lake o’ertopping the forest.
A spire of pine stood up
Against a sky made pale as of the northern lights.
But in a moment a bit of fire lit the spire of the pine
As it were a candle lighted.
And she rose so fast that I took my watch
To time the rising of the moon
Free and clear of the spire.
And she rose so fast that as we gazed
She cleared the spire,
And soared with such silent glory above the forest,
And sailed to the southwest of the spire.
And at that moment the whippoorwills
Began to sing in the woodlands near—
We had not heard them before in all this summer.
And we stood in the loggia
In the silence of our own thoughts,
In the silence of the full moon!

And it was then that the pressure of your hand
Gave me a meaning of sorrow.
It was then that the pressure of your hand
Spoke, as flame which turns in the wind,
Of a change in your heart.
But if not a change, of another’s heart
Toward whom you turned.

And I sit in the loggia to-night
Waiting for the moon to rise,
She will not rise till midnight,
And then she will rise, a poor half wreck of herself.
No whippoorwill has sung to-night,
And none will sing.
And if there are youths and maids and children
Hurrying into the dance on the water,
Embracing and fading in light,
I shall not see.
No, in this darkness where I breathe
The scent of the sweet alyssum
Which you planted and tended
I shall wait for midnight,
And the rise of our ruined moon.

In the darkness of the loggia
Under a sky that hopes for no moon to-night,
Save the wasted moon of midnight,
I am filled with a deep happiness
And a thankfulness to the Power
Behind the sky:
I am filled with a joy as wide and deep as nature
That my love for you
Can live without your love for me,
And asks nothing of you,
And nothing for you
Save that you find what you seek!