CONSCIENCE
REWARD AND PUNISHMENT
SYMPATHY
STATISTICS
PARABLE
VISION
SOCIETY
GOOD SOCIETY
FRIENDS AND FOES
SPHINX
MATERIALS OF A STORY
THE KING DINES
LABOR AND CAPITAL
EQUALITY
JUDGMENT DAY
MORTALITY
ANOTHER DAY
SOME ONE ELSE
LIFE
WEATHER-BREEDER
PEONAGE
RACE
TEMPERAMENT
WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT?
NOVEMBER
A WEFT of leafless spray
Woven fine against the gray
Of the autumnal day,
And blurred along those ghostly garden tops
Clusters of berries crimson as the drops
That my heart bleeds when I remember
How often, in how many a far November,
Of childhood and my children’s childhood I was glad,
With the wild rapture of the Fall,
Of all the beauty, and of all
The ruin, now so intolerably sad.
MIDWAY
SO blithe the birds sang in the trees,
The trees sang in the wind,
I winged me with the morning breeze,
And left Care far behind.
But now both birds and trees are mute
In the hot hush of noon;
And I must up and on afoot,
Or Care will catch me soon.
TIME
DO you wish me, then, away?
You should rather bid me stay:
Though I seem so dull and slow,
Think before you let me go!
Whether you entreat or spurn
I can nevermore return:
Times shall come, and times shall be,
But no other time like me.
Though I move with leaden feet,
Light itself is not so fleet;
And before you know me gone
Eternity and I are one.
FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION
I
INNOCENT spirits, bright, immaculate ghosts!
Why throng your heavenly hosts,
As eager for their birth
In this sad home of death, this sorrow-haunted earth?
Beware! Beware! Content you where you are,
And shun this evil star,
Where we who are doomed to die,
Have our brief being and pass, we know not where or why.
II
We have not to consent or to refuse;
It is not ours to choose:
We come because we must,
We know not by what law, if unjust or if just.
The doom is on us, as it is on you,
That nothing can undo;
And all in vain you warn:
As your fate is to die, our fate is to be born.
THE BEWILDERED GUEST
I WAS not asked if I should like to come.
I have not seen my host here since I came,
Or had a word of welcome in his name.
Some say that we shall never see him, and some
That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know
Why we were bid. How long I am to stay
I have not the least notion. None, they say,
Was ever told when he should come or go.
But every now and then there bursts upon
The song and mirth a lamentable noise,
A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys
Dumb in our breasts; and then, some one is gone.
They say we meet him. None knows where or when.
We know we shall not meet him here again.
COMPANY
I THOUGHT, “How terrible, if I were seen
Just as in will and deed I had always been!
And if this were the fate that I must face
At the last day, and all else were God’s grace,
How must I shrink and cower before them there,
Stripped naked to the soul and beggared bare
Of every rag of seeming!” Then, “Why, no,”
I thought, “Why should I, if the rest are so?”
HEREDITY
THAT swollen paunch you are doomed to bear
Your gluttonous grandsire used to wear;
That tongue, at once so light and dull,
Wagged in your grandam’s empty skull;
That leering of the sensual eye
Your father, when he came to die,
Left yours alone; and that cheap flirt,
Your mother, gave you from the dirt
The simper which she used upon
So many men ere he was won.
Your vanity and greed and lust
And each your portion from the dust
Of those that died, and from the tomb
Made you what you must needs become.
I do not hold you aught to blame
For sin at second hand, and shame:
Evil could but from evil spring;
And yet, away, you charnel thing!
TWELVE P. M.
TO get home from some scene of gayety,
Say a long dinner, and the laugh and joke,
And funny story, and tobacco smoke,
And all the not unkindly fatuousness
Of fellow-beings not better and not worse
Than others are, but gorged with course on course,
And drenched with wine; and with one’s evening dress
To take off one’s perfunctory smile, and be
Wholly and solely one’s sheer self again —
Is like escaping from some dull, dumb pain;
And in the luxury of that relief,
It is, in certain sort and measure, as if
One had put off the body, and the whole
Illusion of life, and in one’s naked soul
Confronted the eternal Verity.
CHANGE
SOMETIMES, when after spirited debate
Of letters or affairs, in thought I go
Smiling unto myself, and all aglow
With some immediate purpose, and elate
As if my little, trivial scheme were great,
And what I would so were already so:
Suddenly I think of her that died, and know,
Whatever friendly or unfriendly fate
Befall me in my hope or in my pride,
It is all nothing but a mockery,
And nothing can be what it used to be,
When I could bid my happy life abide,
And build on earth for perpetuity,
Then, in the deathless days before she died.
IN THE DARK
HOW often, when I wake from sleep at night,
I search my consciousness to find the ill
That has lurked formlessly within it, still
Haunting me with a shadowy affright;
And try to seize it and to know aright
Its vague proportions, and my frantic will
Runs this way and runs that way, with a thrill
Of horror, to all things that ban or blight!
Then, when I find all well, it is as though
The moment were some reef where I had crept
From the wide waste of danger and of death,
And for a little I might draw my breath
Before the flood came up again, and swept
Over it, and gulfed me in its deeps below.
TO-MORROW
OLD fraud, I know you in that gay disguise,
That air of hope, that promise of surprise:
Beneath your bravery, as you come this way,
I see the sordid presence of To-day;
And I shall see there, long ere you are gone,
All the dull Yesterdays that I have known.
LIVING
HOW passionatel
y I will my life away
Which I would give all that I have to stay;
How wildly I hurry, for the change I crave,
To hurl myself into the changeless grave!
IF
YES, death is at the bottom of the cup,
And every one that lives must drink it up;
And yet between the sparkle at the top
And the black lees where lurks that bitter drop,
There swims enough good liquor, Heaven knows,
To ease our hearts of all their other woes.
The bubbles rise in sunshine at the brim;
That drop below is very far and dim;
The quick fumes spread and shape us such bright dreams
That in the glad delirium it seems
As though by some deft sleight, if so we willed,
That drop untasted might be somehow spilled.
SOLITUDE
AH, you cannot befriend me, with all your love’s tender persistence!
In your arms’ pitying clasp sole and remote I remain,
Rapt as far from help as the last star’s measureless distance,
Under the spell of our life’s innermost mystery, Pain.
RESPITE
DROWSING, the other afternoon, I lay
In that sweet interlude that falls between
Waking and sleeping, when all being is seen
Of one complexion, and the vague dreams play
Among the thoughts, and the thoughts go astray
Among the dreams. My mother, who has been
Dead almost half my life, appeared to lean
Above me, a boy, in a house far away,
That once was home, and all the troubled years
That have been since were as if they were not.
The voices that are hushed were in my ears,
The looks and motions that I had forgot
Were in my eyes; and they disowned the tears
That now again beneath their lids are hot.
QUESTION
SHALL it be after the long misery
Of easeless pillows, and the waste of flesh
In sickness, till some worn and widening mesh
Frays out at last, and lets the soul go free?
Or, shall some violent accident suddenly
Dismiss it, or some black cloud in the brain
Lower till life maddens against the amain?
Where, in what land, or on what lonely sea?
When, in the light of what unrisen sun?
Under what fatal planet? There is none
Can tell, or know aught but that it shall be:
The one thing certain which all other things
Have taught my being in its inmost springs
To feel the sole impossibility.
HOPE
WE sailed and sailed upon the desert sea
Where for whole days we alone seemed to be.
At last we saw a dim, vague line arise
Between the empty billows and the skies,
That grew and grew until it wore the shape
Of cove and inlet, promontory and cape;
Then hills and valleys, rivers, fields, and woods,
Steeples and roofs, and village neighborhoods.
And then I thought, “Sometime I shall embark
Upon a sea more desert and more dark
Than ever this was, and between the skies
And empty billows I shall see arise
Another world out of that waste and lapse,
Like yonder land. Perhaps — perhaps — perhaps!”
THE BURDEN
I WRITHED beneath my burden, fumed and groaned.
My burden that had felt and heard me, moaned:”
You do not know what misery is, nor what
The bitterest part is of our common lot.
The strength I load in you with my loath weight,
My weakness would so gladly own its fate.
Think, once, how much more dreadful it must be
To be the burden than bear it, and pity me!”
CALVARY
IF He could doubt on His triumphant cross,
How much more I, in the defeat and loss
Of seeing all my selfish dreams fulfilled,
Of having lived the very life I willed,
Of being all that I desired to be?
My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?
CONSCIENCE
JUDGE me not as I judge myself, O Lord!
Show me some mercy, or I may not live:
Let the good in me go without reward;
Forgive the evil I must not forgive!
REWARD AND PUNISHMENT
YOU are the best and the worst of everything you require.
If you have looked on shame willingly, yours is the shame.
You are the evil you mean, and you are the good you desire;
You shall be for yourself both the praise and the blame.
SYMPATHY
FRIEND, neighbor, stranger, as the case may be,
You who are sitting in the stall next me,
And listening also to this pitiless play
That says for me all that I would not say,
And follows me, however I wind about,
And seems to turn my whole life inside out:
I wonder, should I speak and be the first
To own just where in my soul it hurt worst,
And you revealed in yours the spot its flame
STATISTICS
SO many men, on such a date of May,
Despaired and took their hopeless lives away
In such another place, it would appear
The assassinations averaged so and so,
Through August after August, scarce below
A given range; and in another one,
March after March, it seems there were undone
So many women still about the same,
With little varying circumstance in their shame;
Burglaries, arsons, thefts, and forgeries
Had their own averages as well as these;
And from these figures science can discern
The future in the past. We but return
Upon our steps, although they seem so free.
The thing that has been is that which shall be.
Dark prophet, yes! But still somehow the round
Is spiral, and the race’s feet have found
The path rise under them which they have trod.
Your facts are facts, yet somewhere there is God.
PARABLE
THE young man who had great possessions dreamed
That once again he came to Christ and seemed
To hear Him making answer as before,
“Sell all thou hast and give unto the poor,
And come and follow me.”
And now he did
In all immediately as Jesus bid.
Then some of them to whom he gave his wealth
Mocked at him for a fool or mad, by stealth
Or openly; and others he could see
Wasting his substance with a spendthrift glee;
And others yet were tempted, and drawn in
The ways of sin that had not dreamed of sin:
Others, besides, that took were robbed and killed:
Some that had toiled their whole lives were unwilled
By riches, and began the life accurst
Of idleness, like rich men from the first.
Some hid his money in the earth, a root
From which should grow a flower of deadly fruit;
Some kept, and put it out at usury,
And made men slaves with it that had been free.
The young man’s dream was broken with his grief,
And he awoke to his immense relief,
And wept for joy, and cried, “He could not know
What dire results from His behests would flow!
I must not follow Him, but I can fulfil
The spirit, if not the lette
r, of His will.
Seeing the things I have been shown in sleep,
I realize how much better ‘twere to keep
The means that Providence has bestowed on me,
Doubtless for some wise purpose, and to be
The humble agency and instrument
Of good to others not intelligent
Enough to use the gifts of God aright.
“He rose up with a heart at peace, and light;
And thenceforth none of the Deserving Poor
Ever went empty-handed from his door.
VISION
WITHIN a poor man’s squalid home I stood:
The one bare chamber, where his work-worn wife
Above the stove and wash-tub passed her life,
Next the sty where they slept with all their brood.
But I saw not that sunless, breathless lair,
The chamber’s sagging roof and reeking floor;
The smeared walls, broken sash, and battered door;
The foulness and forlornness everywhere.
I saw a great house with the portals wide
Upon a banquet room, and, from without,
The guests descending in a brilliant line
By the stair’s statued niches, and beside
The loveliest of the gemmed and silken rout
The poor man’s landlord leading down to dine.
SOCIETY
I LOOKED and saw a splendid pageantry
Of beautiful women and of lordly men,
Taking their pleasure in a flowery plain,
Where poppies and the red anemone,
And many another leaf of cramoisy,
Flickered about their feet, and gave their stain
To heels of iron or satin, and the grain
Of silken garments floating far and free,
As in the dance they wove themselves, or strayed
By twos together, or lightly smiled and bowed,
Or curtseyed to each other, or else played
At games of mirth and pastime, unafraid In their delight; and all so high and proud They seemed scarce of the earth whereon they trod.
II
I looked again and saw that flowery space
Stirring, as if alive, beneath the tread
That rested now upon an old man’s head
And now upon a baby’s gasping face,
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1154
