Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Page 172
Where I am king,
And fight the fire with fire!
My blaze is not as wide as the world,
Nor tall for the world to see;
But the flames I make
For life’s sweet sake,
Are between the fire and me.
That fire would burn in wantonness
All things that life must use;
Some things I lay
In the dragon’s way
And burn because I choose.
The sky is black, the air is red,
The earth is a flaming sea;
You must not steal nor take man’s life,
You must not covet your neighbor’s wife,
And woman must cling at every cost
To her one virtue, or she is lost —
Preach about the old sins, Preacher!
Not about the new!
Preach about the other man, Preacher!
The man we all can see!
The man of oaths, the man of strife,
The man who drinks and beats his wife,
Who helps his mates to fret and shirk
When all they need is to keep at work —
Preach about the other man, Preacher!
Not about me!
A TYPE.
I AH too little, said the Wretch,
For any one to see.
Among the million men who do
This thing that I am doing too,
Why should they notice me?
My sin is common as to breathe;
It rests on every back.
And surely I am not to blame
Where everybody does the same,
Am not a bit more black
And so he took his willing share
In a universal crime,
Thinking that no reproach could fall
On one who shared the fault of all,
Who did it all the time.
Then Genius came, and showed the world
What thing it was they did;
How their offence had reached the poles
With stench of slain unburied souls, And all men cowered and hid.
Then Genius took that one poor Wretch
For now the time was ripe;
Stripped him of every shield and blind,
And nailed him up for all mankind
To study — as a type!
COMPROMISE.
IT is well to fight and win —
If that may be;
It is well to fight and die therein —
For such go free;
It is ill to fight and find no grave
But a prison-cell;
To keep alive, yet live a slave —
Praise those who fell!
But worst of all are those who stand
With arms laid by,
Bannerless, helpless, no command,
No battle-cry.
They live to save unvalued breath,
With lowered eyes;
In place of victory, or death,
A compromise!
PART OF THE BATTLE.
THERE is a moment when with splendid joy,
With flashing blade and roar of thundering guns
And colors waving wide where triumph stands,
The last redoubt is carried; we have won!
This is the battle t We have conquered now!
But the long hours of marching in the sun,
The longer hours of waiting in the dark,
Deadly dishonored work of hidden spy,
The dull details of commissariat,
Food, clothing, medicine, the hospital,
The way the transportation mules are fed,
These are the battle too, and victory’s price.
And we, in days when no attack is feared
And none is hoped, no sudden courage called,
Should strengthen our intrenchments quietly,
Review the forces, exercise the troops,
Feeling the while, not “ When will battle come?”
But,” This is battle! We are conquering now!”
STEP FASTER, PLEASE.
OF all most aggravating things,
If you are hot in haste,
Is to have a man in front of you
With half a day to waste.
There is this one thing that justifies
The man in the foremost place:
The fact that he is the man in front,
The leader of the race.
But, for Heaven’s sake, if you are ahead,
Don’t dawdle at your ease!
You set the pace for the man behind;
Step faster, please!
A NEW YEAR’S REMINDER.
BETTER have a tender conscience for the record of your house,
And your own share in the work which they have done,
Though your private conscience aches
With your personal mistakes,
And you don’t amount to very much alone,
Than to be yourself as spotless as a baby one year old,
Your domestic habits wholly free from blame,
While the company you stand with
Is a thing to curse a land with,
And your public life is undiluted shame.
For the deeds men do together are what saves the world to-day —
By our common public work we stand or fall —
And your fraction of the sin
Of the office you are in
Is the sin that’s going to damn you, after all!
OUT OF PLACE.
CELL, poor little cell,
Distended with pain,
Tom with the pressure
Of currents of effort
Resisted in vain;
Feeling sweep by you
The stream of nutrition,
Unable to take;
Crushed flat and inactive,
While shudder across you
Great forces that wake;
Alone — while far voices
Across all the shouting
Call you to your own;
Held fast, fastened close,
Surrounded, enveloped,
How you starve there alone!
Cell, poor little cell,
Let the pain pass — don’t hold it!
Let the effort pass through you!
Let go! And give way!
You will find your own place;
You will join your own people;
See the light of your day!
LITTLE CELL.
LITTLE Cell! Little Cell! with a heart as big as heaven,
Remember that you are but a part!
This great longing in your soul
Is the longing of the whole,
And your work is not done with your heart)
Don’t imagine, Little Cell,
That the work you do so well
Is the only work the world needs to do!
You are wanted in your place
For the growing of the race,
But the growing does not all depend on you!
Little Cell! Little Cell! with a race’s whole ambition,
Remember there are others growing, too!
You’ve been noble, you’ve been strong;
Rest a while and come along;
Let the world take a turn and carry you!
THE CHILD SPEAKS.
GET back! Give me air) Give me freedom and room,
The warm earth and bright water, the crowding sweet bloom
Of the flowers, and the measureless, marvellous sky,
All of these all the time, and a shelter close by
Where silence and beauty and peace are my own
In a chamber alone.
Then bring me the others! “ A child” is a crime;
It is “children” who grow through the beautiful time
Of their childhood up into the age you are in.
“A child” must needs suffer and sicken and sin;
The life of a child needs the life of its kind,
O ye stupid and blind!
Than the best of your heart and the best of your brain!”
The face of all beauty! The soul without stain!
Your noblest! Your wisest! With us is the place
To consecrate life to the good of the race!
That our childhood may pass with the best you can give,
And our manhood so live!
The wisdom of years, the experience deep
That shall laugh with our waking and watch with our sleep,
The patience of age, the keen honor of youth.
To guide us in doing and teach us in truth,
With the garnered ripe fruit of the world at our feet,
Both the bitter and sweet!
What is this that you offer? One man’s narrow purse!
One woman’s strained life, and a heart straining worse!
Confined as in prisons — held down as in caves —
The teaching of tyrants — the service of slaves —
The garments of falsehood and bondage — the weight
Of your own evil state.
And what is this brought as atonement for these?
For our blind misdirection, our death and disease;
For the grief of our childhood, the loss and the wrong;
For the pain of our childhood, the agony strong;
For the shame and the sin and the sorrow thereof —
Dare you say it is love?
Love? First give freedom, the right of the brute!
The air with its sunshine, the earth with its fruit.
Love? First give wisdom, intelligent care,
That shall help to bring out all the good that is there.
Love? First give justice! There’s nothing above!
And then you may love!
TO A GOOD MANY.
O BLIND and selfish! Helpless as the beast
Who sees no meaning in a soul released
And given flesh to grow in — to work through!
Think you that God has nothing else to do
Than babble endlessly the same set phrase?
Are life’s great spreading, upward-reaching ways
Laid for the beasts to climb on till the top
Is reached in you, you think, and there you stop!
They were raised up, obedient to force
Which lifted them, unwitting of their course.
You have new power, new consciousness, new sight;
You can help God! You stand in the great light
Of seeing him at work. Yon can go on
And walk with him, and feel the glory won.
And here you sit, content to toil and strive
To keep your kind of animal alive!
Why, friends! God is not through!
The universe is not complete in you.
You’re just as bound to follow out his plan
And sink yourself in ever-growing Man
As ever were the earliest, crudest eggs
To grow to vertebrates with arms and legs.
Society holds not its present height
Merely that you may bring a child to light;
But you and yours live only in the plan
That’s working out a higher kind of man;
A higher kind of life, that shall let grow
New powers and nobler duties than you know.
Rise to the thought! Live in the widening race!
Help make the State more like God’s dwelling-place!
New paths for life divine, as yet untrod,
A social body for the soul of God)
HOW WOULD YOU?
HALF of our misery, half our pain,
Half the dark background of our self-reproach,
Is thought of how the world has sinned before.
We, being one, one with all life, we feel
The misdemeanors of uncounted time;
We suffer in the foolishness and sins
Of races just behind us, burn with shame
At their gross ignorance and murderous deeds;
We suffer back of them in the long years,
Of squalid struggling savagery of beasts,
Beasts human and subhuman; back of them
In helpless creatures eaten, hunted, torn;
In submerged forests dying in the slime;
And even back of that in endless years
Of hot convulsions of dismembered lands,
And slow constricting centuries of cold.
So in our own lives, even to this day,
We carry in the chambers of the mind
The tale of errors, failures, and misdeeds
That we call sins, of all our early lives.
And the recurrent consciousness of this
We call remorse. The unrelenting gauge,
Now measuring past error, this is shame.
And in our feverish overconsciousness,
A retroactive and preactive sense,
Fired with our self-made theories of sin,
We suffer, suffer, suffer — half alive,
And half with the dead scars of suffering.
Friends, how would you, perhaps, have made the world?
Would you have balanced the great forces so
Their interaction would have bred no shock?
No cosmic throes of newborn continents,
No eras of the earth-encircling rain,
Uncounted scalding tears that fell and fell
On molten worlds that hotly dashed them back
In storms of fierce repudiated steam?
Would you have made earth’s gems without the fire,
Without the water, and without the weight
Of crushing cubic miles of huddled rock?
Would you have made one kind of plant to reign
In all the earth, growing mast high, and then
Keep it undying so, an end of plants?
Would you have made one kind of animal
To live on air and spare the tender grass,
And stop him, somehow, when he grew so thick
That even air fell short. Or would you have
All plants and animals, and make them change
By some metempsychosis not called death?
For, having them, you have to have them change,
For growth is change, and life is growth; and change
Implies — in this world — what we miscall pain.
You, wiser, would have made mankind, no doubt,
Not slowly, awfully, from dying brutes
Up into living humanness at last,
But fresh as Adam in the Hebrew tale;
Only you would have left the serpent out,
And left him, naked, in the garden still.
Or somehow, dodging this, have still contrived
That he should learn the whole curriculum
And never miss a lesson — never fail —
Be born, like Buddha, all accomplished, wise.
Would you have chosen to begin life old,
Well-balanced, cautious, knowing where to step,
And so untortured by the memory
Of childhood’s foolishness and youth’s mistakes?
Or, born a child, to have experience
Come to you softly without chance of loss,
Recurring years each rolling to your hand
In blissful innocent unconsciousness?
O dreamers with a Heaven and a Hell
Standing at either end of your wild rush
Away from the large peace of knowing God,
Can you not see that all of it is good?
Good, with the postulate that this is life,
And that is all we have to argue from.
Childhood means error, the mistakes that teach;
But only rod and threat and nurse’s tale,
Make childhood’s errors bring us shame and sin.
The race’s childhood grows by error too,
And we are not attained to manhood yet.
But
grief and shame are only born of lies.
Once see the lovely law that needs mistakes,
And you are young forever. This is Life.
A MAN MUST LIVE.
A MAN must live. We justify
Low shift and trick to treason high,
A little vote for a little gold
To a whole senate bought and sold,
By that self-evident reply.
But is it so? Pray tell me why
Life at such cost you have to buy?
In what religion were you told
A man must live?
There are times when a man must die.
Imagine, for a battle-cry,
From soldiers, with a sword to hold,
From soldiers, with the flag unrolled,
This coward’s whine, this liar’s lie,
A man must live!
IN DUTY BOUND.
IN duty bound, a life hemmed in
Whichever way the spirit turns to look;
No chance of breaking out, except by sin;
Not even room to shirk —
Simply to live, and work.
An obligation pre-imposed, unsought,
Yet binding with the force of natural law;
The pressure of antagonistic thought;
Aching within, each hour,
A sense of wasting power.
A house with roof so darkly low
The heavy rafters shut the sunlight out;
One cannot stand erect without a blow;
Until the soul inside
Cries for a grave — more wide.
A consciousness that if this thing endure,
The common joys of life will dull the pain;
The high ideals of the grand and pure
Die, as of course they must,
Of long disuse and rust.
That is the worst. It takes supernal strength
To hold the attitude that brings the pain;
And they are few indeed but stoop at length
To something less than best,
To find, in stooping, rest.
DESIRE.
Lo, I desire! Sum of the ages’ growth —
Fruit of evolving eras — king of life —
I, holding in myself the outgrown past
In all its ever-rising forms — desire.
With the first grass-blade, I desire the sun;
With every bird that breathes, I love the air;
With fishes, joy in water; with my horse,
Exult in motion; with all living flesh,
Long for sweet food and warmth and mate and young;
With the whole rising tide of that which is,