Or mother’s bosom, or the rounded grace
Of a girl’s throat; and what had seemed the red
Of flowers was blood, in gouts and gushes shed
From hearts that broke under that frolic pace.
And now and then from out the dreadful floor
An arm or brow was lifted from the rest,
As if to strike in madness, or implore
For mercy; and anon some suffering breast
Heaved from the mass and sank; and as before
The revellers above them thronged and prest.
GOOD SOCIETY
YES, I suppose it is well to make some sort of exclusion,
Well to put up the bars, under whatever pretence;
Only be careful, be very careful, lest in the confusion
You should shut yourself on the wrong side of the fence.
FRIENDS AND FOES
BITTER the things one’s enemies will say
Against one sometimes when one is away,
But of a bitterness far more intense
The things one’s friends will say in one’s defence.
SPHINX
WE who are nothing but self, and have no manner of being
Save in the sense of self, still have no other delight
Like the relief that comes with the blessed oblivion freeing
Self from self in the deep sleep of some dreamless night.
Losing alone is finding; the best of being is ceasing
Now and again to be. Then at the end of this strife,
That which comes, if we will it or not, for our releasing,
Is it eternal death, or is it infinite life?
MATERIALS OF A STORY
I MET a friend of mine the other day
Upon the platform of a West End car;
We shook hands, and my friend began to say
Quickly, as if he were not going far,
“Last summer something rather in your way
Came to my knowledge. I was asked to see
A young man who had come to talk with me
Because I was a clergyman; and he
Told me at once that he had served his time
In the state-prison for a heinous crime,
And was just out. He had no friends, or none
To speak of; and he seemed far gone
With a bad cough. He said he had not done
The thing. They all say that. You cannot tell
He might not have been guilty of it. Well,
What he now wanted was some place to stay,
And work that he could do. I managed it
With no great trouble. And then, there began
The strangest thing I ever knew. The man,
Who showed no other signs of a weak wit,
Was hardly settled in his place a week
When he came round to see me, and to speak
About his lodging. What the matter was
He could not say, or would not tell the cause,
But he must leave that place; he could not bear
To stay. I found another room, but there
After another week he could not stay.
Again I placed him, and he came to say
At the week’s end that he must go away.
So it went on, week after week, and then
At last I made him tell me. It appears
That his imprisonment of fifteen years
Had worn so deep into the wretch’s brain
That any place he happened to remain
Longer than one day in began to seem
His prison and all over again to him;
And when the thing had got into this shape,
He was quite frantic till he could escape.
Curious, was not it? And tragical.”
“Tragical? I believe you! Was that all?
What has become of him?” “Oh, he is dead.
I told some people of him, and we made
A decent funeral for him. At the end
It came out that his mother was alive —
An outcast — and she asked our leave to attend
The ceremony, and then asked us to give
The silver coffin plate, carved with his name,
And the flowers, to her.” “That was touching. She
Had some good left in her infamy.”
“Why, I don’t know! I think she sold the things,
Together with a neck-pin and some rings
That he had left, and drank....
But as to blame....
Good-morning to you!” and my friend stepped down
At the street crossing. I went on up town.
THE KING DINES
TWO people on a bench in Boston Common,
An ordinary laboring man and woman,
Seated together,
In the November weather
Slit with a thin, keen rain;
The woman’s mouth purple with cold and pain,
And her eyes fixed as if they did not see
The passers trooping by continually,
Smearing the elm leaves underfoot that fall
Before her on the miry mall;
The man feeding out of the newspaper
Wrapped round the broken victuals brought with her,
And gnawing at a bent bone like a dog,
Following its curve hungrily with his teeth,
And his head twisted sidewise; and beneath
His reeking boots the mud, and the gray fog
Fathomless over him, and all the gloom
Of the day round him for his dining-room.
LABOR AND CAPITAL
A SPITEFUL snow spit through the bitter day
In little stinging pellets gray,
And crackling on the frozen street
About the iron feet,
Broad stamped in massy shoes
Sharpened and corked for winter use,
Of the huge Norman horses plump and round,
In burnished brass and shining leather bound,
Dragging each heavy fetlock like a mane,
And shaking as they pull the ponderous wain
With wheels that jar the ground
In a small earthquake, where they jolt and grind,
And leave a span-wide track behind:
And hunched upon the load
Above the Company’s horses like a toad,
All hugged together
Against the pitiless weather,
In an old cardigan jacket and a cap
Of mangy fur,
And a frayed comforter
Around his stiffened chin, too scant to wrap
His purple ears,
And in his blinking eyes what had been tears,
But that they seemed to have frozen there ere they ran,
The Company’s man.
EQUALITY
THE beautiful dancing-women wove their maze,
With many a swift lascivious leer and lure
For the hot theatre, whose myriad gaze
Burned on their shamelessness with eyes impure.
Then one that watched unseen among them — dread,
Mystical, ineffable of presence — said,”Patience!
And leave me these poor wanton ones:
Soon they shall lie as meek and cold as nuns;
And you that hire them here to tempt your lust
Shall be as all the saints are, in the dust.”
JUDGMENT DAY
BEFORE Him weltered like a shoreless sea
The souls of them that had not sought to be,
With all their guilt upon them, and they cried,
They that had sinned from hate and lust and pride,
“Thou that didst make us what we might become,
Judge us!” The Judge of all the earth was dumb;
But high above them, in His sovereign place,
He lifted up the pity of His face.
MORTALITY
HOW many times have I lain down at night,
And longed to fall into that gulf of sleep
Whose dreamless deep
Is haunted by no memory of
The weary world above;
And thought myself most miserable that IMust impotently lie
So long upon the brink
Without the power to sink
Into that nothingness, and neither feel nor think!
How many times, when day brought back the light
After the merciful oblivion
Of such unbroken slumber,
And once again began to cumber
My soul with her forgotten cares and sorrows,
And show in long perspective the gray morrows,
Stretching monotonously on,
Forever narrowing but never done,
Have I not loathed to live again and said,
It would have been far better to be dead,
And yet somehow, I know not why,
Remained afraid to die!
ANOTHER DAY
ANOTHER day, and with it that brute joy,
Or that prophetic rapture of the boy
Whom every morning brings as glad a breath
As if it dawned upon the end of death!
All other days have run the common course,
And left me at their going neither worse
Nor better for them; only, a little older,
A little sadder, and a little colder.
But this, it seems as if this day might be
The day I somehow always thought to see,
And that should come to bless me past the scope
And measure of my farthest-reaching hope.
To-day, maybe, the things that were concealed
Before the first day was, shall be revealed,
The riddle of our misery shall be read,
And it be clear whether the dead are dead.
Before this sun shall sink into the west
The tired earth may have fallen on his breast,
And into heaven the world have passed away...
At any rate, it is another day!
SOME ONE ELSE
LIVE my life over? I would rather not.
Though I could choose, perhaps, a fairer lot,
I cannot hope I should be worthier it,
Or wiser by experience any whit.
Being what I am, I should but do once more
The things that brought me grief and shame before.
But I should really fancy trying again
For some one else who had lived once in vain:
Somehow another’s erring life allures;
And were I you, I might improve on yours.
LIFE
ONCE a thronged thoroughfare that wound afar
By shining streams, and waving fields and woods,
And festal cities and sweet solitudes,
All whither, onward to the utmost star:
Now a blind alley, lurking by the shore
Of stagnant ditches, walled with reeking crags,
Where one old heavy-hearted vagrant lags,
Footsore, at nightfall limping to Death’s door.
WEATHER-BREEDER
OH, not to know that such a happiness
To be wished greater were to be made less;
That one drop more must make it spill in tears
Of agony that blisters and that sears;
That the supreme perfection of thy bliss
Alone could mother misery like this!
PEONAGE
HOW tired the Recording Angel must begin
To be of setting down the same old sin,
The same old folly, year out and year in,
Since I knew how to err, against my name!
It makes me sick at heart and sore with shame
To think of that monotony of blame,
For things I fancied once that I should be
Quits with in doing; but at last I see
All that I did became a part of me,
And cannot be put from me, but must still
Remain a potent will within my will,
Holding me debtor, while I live, to ill.
RACE
I
LEAVE me here those looks of yours!
All those pretty airs and lures:Flush of cheek and flash of eye;
Your lips’ smile and their deep dye;
Gleam of the white teeth within;
Dimple of the cloven chin;
All the sunshine that you wear
In the summer of your hair;
All the morning of your face;
All your figure’s wilding grace;
The flower-pose of your head, the light
Flutter of your footsteps’ flight:I own all, and that glad heart
I must claim ere you depart.
II
Go, yet go not unconsoled!
Sometime, after you are old,
You shall come, and I will take
From your brow the sullen ache,
From your eyes the twilight gaze
Darkening upon winter days,
From your feet their palsy pace,
And the wrinkles from your face,
From your locks the snow; the droop
Of your head, your worn frame’s stoop,
And that withered smile within
The kissing of the nose and chin:
I own all, and that sad heart
I will claim ere you depart.
III
I am Race, and both are mine,
Mortal Age and Youth divine:Mine to grant, but not in fee;
Both again revert to me
From each that lives, that I may give
Unto each that yet shall live.
TEMPERAMENT
WHERE love and hate, honor and infamy,
Change and dissolve away, and cease to be;
Where good and evil in effect are one
In the long tale of years beneath the sun;
Where like the face a man sees in a glass
And turns from, character itself shall pass —
Out of the mystery whence we came we bring
One thing that is the one immutable thing,
Through which we fashion all that we do here,
Which is the body of our hope and fear,
The form of all we feel and all we know,
The color of our weal and of our woe,
And which alone, it may be, we shall bear
Back to that mystery when we go there.
WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT?
IF I lay waste and wither up with doubt
The blessed fields of heaven where once my faith
Possessed itself serenely safe from death;
If I deny the things past finding out;
Or if I orphan my own soul of One
That seemed a Father, and make void the place
Within me where He dwelt in power and grace,
What do I gain by that I have undone?
The Poems
Atlantic Monthly office, Ticknor & Fields, 124 Tremont Street, Boston, c.1868 — after returning to America in 1865 and settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Howells wrote for various magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly. In January 1866 James Fields offered him a position as assistant editor, which Howells accepted after negotiating a higher salary. After five years, in 1871 Howells was made editor and remained in that role until 1881.
LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
THE PILOT’S STORY.
FORLORN.
PLEASURE-PAIN.
IN AUGUST.
THE EMPTY HOUSE.
BUBBLES.
LOST BELIEFS.
LOUIS LEBEAU’S CONVERSION.
CAPRICE.
SWEET CLOVER.
THE ROYAL PORTRAITS.
THE FAITHFUL OF THE GONZAGA.
THE FIRST CRICKET.
THE MULBERRIES.
BEFORE THE GATE.
CLEMENT.
BY THE SEA.
SAINT CHRISTOPHER.
ELEGY ON JOHN BUTLER HOWELLS,
THANKSGIVING.
A SPRINGTIME.
IN EARLIEST SPRING.
THE BOBOLINKS ARE SINGING.
PRELUDE.
THE MOVERS.
THROUGH THE MEADOW.
GONE.
THE SARCASTIC FAIR.
RAPTURE.
DEAD.
THE DOUBT.
THE THORN.
THE MYSTERIES.
THE BATTLE IN THE CLOUDS.
FOR ONE OF THE KILLED.
THE TWO WIVES.
BEREAVED.
THE SNOW-BIRDS.
VAGARY.
FEUERBILDER.
AVERY.
BOPEEP: A PASTORAL.
WHILE SHE SANG.
A POET.
CONVENTION.
THE POET’S FRIENDS.
NO LOVE LOST.
PHILIP — To Bertha.
FANNY — To Clara.
POSTSCRIPT.
THE SONG THE ORIOLE SINGS.
PORDENONE.
THE LONG DAYS.
NOVEMBER
MIDWAY
TIME
FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION
THE BEWILDERED GUEST
COMPANY
HEREDITY
TWELVE P. M.
CHANGE
IN THE DARK
TO-MORROW
LIVING
IF
SOLITUDE
RESPITE
QUESTION
HOPE
THE BURDEN
CALVARY
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?
LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
A POET.
A SPRINGTIME.
ANOTHER DAY
AVERY.
BEFORE THE GATE.
BEREAVED.
BOPEEP: A PASTORAL.
BUBBLES.
BY THE SEA.
CALVARY
CAPRICE.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 1155
