Part 9

Thy condition, good sooth, has no seeming of sweet; It walks our first crags, it is flint for the tooth, For the thirsts of our nature brine. But manful has met it, manful will meet. And think of thy privilege: supple with youth, To have sight of the headlong swine, Once fouling thee, jumping the dips! As the coin of thy purse poured out: An animal’s holiday past: And free of them thou, to begin a new bout; To start a fresh hunt on a resolute blast: No more an imp-ridden to bournes of eclipse: Having knowledge to spur thee, a gift to compare; Rubbing shoulder to shoulder, as only the book Of the world can be read, by necessity urged. For witness, what blinkers are they who look From the state of the prince or the millionnaire! They see but the fish they attract, The hungers on them converged; And never the thought in the shell of the act, Nor ever life’s fangless mirth. But first, that the poisonous of thee be purged, Go into thyself, strike Earth. She is there, she is felt in a blow struck hard. Thou findest a pugilist countering quick, Cunning at drives where thy shutters are barred; Not, after the studied professional trick, Blue-sealing; she brightens the sight. Strike Earth, Antaeus, young giant, whom fortune trips! And thou com’st on a saving fact, To nourish thy planted worth.

Be it clay, flint, mud, or the rubble of chips, Thy roots have grasp in the stern-exact: The redemption of sinners deluded! the last Dry handful, that bruises and saves. To the common big heart are we bound right fast, When our Mother admonishing nips At the nakedness bare of a clout, And we crave what the commonest craves.

This wealth was a fortress-wall, Under which grew our grim little beast-god stout; Self-worshipped, the foe, in division from all; With crowds of illogical Christians, no doubt; Till the rescuing earthquake cracked. Thus are we man made firm; Made warm by the numbers compact. We follow no longer a trumpet-snout, At a trot where the hog is tracked, Nor wriggle the way of the worm.

Thou wilt spare us the cynical pout At humanity: sign of a nature bechurled. No stenchy anathemas cast Upon Providence, women, the world. Distinguish thy tempers and trim thy wits. The purchased are things of the mart, not classed Among resonant types that have freely grown.

Thy knowledge of women might be surpassed: As any sad dog’s of sweet flesh when he quits The wayside wandering bone! No revilings of comrades as ingrates: thee The tempter, misleader, and criminal (screened By laws yet barbarous) own.

If some one performed Fiend’s deputy, He was for awhile the Fiend. Still, nursing a passion to speak, As the punch-bowl does, in the moral vein, When the ladle has finished its leak, And the vessel is loquent of nature’s inane, Hie where the demagogues roar Like a Phalaris bull, with the victim’s force: Hurrah to their jolly attack On a City that smokes of the Plain; A city of sin’s death-dyes, Holding revel of worms in a corse; A city of malady sore, Over-ripe for the big doom’s crack: A city of hymnical snore; Connubial truths and lies Demanding an instant divorce, Clean as the bright from the black. It were well for thy system to sermonize. There are giants to slay, and they call for their Jack.

Then up stand thou in the midst: Thy good grain out of thee thresh, Hand upon heart: relate What things thou legally didst For the Archseducer of flesh. Omitting the murmurs of women and fate, Confess thee an instrument armed To be snare of our wanton, our weak, Of all by the sensual charmed. For once shall repentance be done by the tongue: Speak, though execrate, speak A word on grandmotherly Laws Giving rivers of gold to our young, In the days of their hungers impure; To furnish them beak and claws, And make them a banquet’s lure.

Thou the example, saved Miraculously by this poor skin! Thereat let the Purse be waved: The snake-slough sick of the snaky sin: A devil, if devil as devil behaved Ever, thou knowest, look thou but in, Where he shivers, a culprit fettered and shaved; O a bird stripped of feather, a fish clipped of fin!

And commend for a washing the torrents of wrath, Which hurl at the foe of the dearest men prize Rough-rolling boulders and froth. Gigantical enginery they can command, For the crushing of enemies not of great size: But hold to thy desperate stand. Men’s right of bequeathing their all to their own (With little regard for the creatures they squeezed); Their mill and mill-water and nether mill-stone Tied fast to their infant; lo, this is the last Of their hungers, by prudent devices appeased. The law they decree is their ultimate slave; Wherein we perceive old Voracity glassed. It works from their dust, and it reeks of their grave. Point them to greener, though Journals be guns; To brotherly fields under fatherly skies; Where the savage still primitive learns of a debt He has owed since he drummed on his belly for war; And how for his giving, the more will he get; For trusting his fellows, leave friends round his sons: Till they see, with the gape of a startled surprise, Their adored tyrant-monster a brute to abhor, The sun of their system a father of flies!

So, for such good hope, take their scourge unashamed; ’Tis the portion of them who civilize, Who speak the word novel and true: How the brutish antique of our springs may be tamed, Without loss of the strength that should push us to flower; How the God of old time will act Satan of new, If we keep him not straight at the higher God aimed; For whose habitation within us we scour This house of our life; where our bitterest pains Are those to eject the Infernal, who heaps Mire on the soul. Take stripes or chains; Grip at thy standard reviled. And what if our body be dashed from the steeps? Our spoken in protest remains. A young generation reaps.

The young generation! ah, there is the child Of our souls down the Ages! to bleed for it, proof That souls we have, with our senses filed, Our shuttles at thread of the woof. May it be braver than ours, To encounter the rattle of hostile bolts, To look on the rising of Stranger Powers. May it know how the mind in expansion revolts From a nursery Past with dead letters aloof, And the piping to stupor of Precedents shun, In a field where the forefather print of the hoof Is not yet overgrassed by the watering hours, And should prompt us to Change, as to promise of sun, Till brain-rule splendidly towers. For that large light we have laboured and tramped Thorough forests and bogland, still to perceive Our animate morning stamped With the lines of a sombre eve.

A timorous thing ran the innocent hind, When the wolf was the hypocrite fang under hood, The snake a lithe lurker up sleeve, And the lion effulgently ramped. Then our forefather hoof did its work in the wood, By right of the better in kind. But now will it breed yon bestial brood Three-fold thrice over, if bent to bind, As the healthy in chains with the sick, Unto despot usage our issuing mind. It signifies battle or death’s dull knell. Precedents icily written on high Challenge the Tentatives hot to rebel. Our Mother, who speeds her bloomful quick For the march, reads which the impediment well. She smiles when of sapience is their boast. O loose of the tug between blood run dry And blood running flame may our offspring run! May brain democratic be king of the host! Less then shall the volumes of History tell Of the stop in progression, the slip in relapse, That counts us a sand-slack inch hard won Beneath an oppressive incumbent perhaps.

Let the senile lords in a parchment sky, And the generous turbulents drunken of morn, Their battle of instincts put by, A moment examine this field: On a Roman street cast thoughtful eye, Along to the mounts from the bog-forest weald. It merits a glance at our history’s maps, To see across Britain’s old shaggy unshorn, Through the Parties in strife internecine, foot The ruler’s close-reckoned direct to the mark. From the head ran the vanquisher’s orderly route, In the stride of his forts through the tangle and dark. From the head runs the paved firm way for advance, And we shoulder, we wrangle! The light on us shed Shows dense beetle blackness in swarm, lurid Chance, The Goddess of gamblers, above. From the head, Then when it worked for the birth of a star Fraternal with heaven’s in beauty and ray, Sprang the Acropolis. Ask what crown Comes of our tides of the blood at war, For men to bequeath generations down! And ask what thou wast when the Purse was brimmed: What high-bounding ball for the Gods at play: A Conservative youth! who the cream-bowl skimmed, Desiring affairs to be left as they are.

So, thou takest Youth’s natural place in the fray, As a Tentative, combating Peace, Our lullaby word for decay.— There will come an immediate decree In thy mind for the opposite party’s decease, If he bends not an instant knee. Expunge it: extinguishing counts poor gain. And accept a mild word of police:— Be mannerly, measured; refrain From the puffings of him of the bagpipe cheeks. Our political, even as the merchant main, A temperate gale requires For the ship that haven seeks; Neither God of the winds nor his bellowsy squires.

Then observe the antagonist, con His reasons for rocking the lullaby word. You stand on a different stage of the stairs. He fought certain battles, yon senile lord. In the strength of thee, feel his bequest to his heirs. We are now on his inches of ground hard won, For a perch to a flight o’er his resting fence.

Does it knock too hard at thy head if I say, That Time is both father and son? Tough lesson, when senses are floods over sense!— Discern the paternal of Now As the Then of thy present tense. You may pull as you will either way, You can never be other than one. So, be filial. Giants to slay Demand knowing eyes in their Jack.

There are those whom we push from the path with respect. Bow to that elder, though seeing him bow To the backward as well, for a thunderous back Upon thee. In his day he was not all wrong. Unto some foundered zenith he strove, and was wrecked. He scrambled to shore with a worship of shore. The Future he sees as the slippery murk; The Past as his doctrinal library lore. He stands now the rock to the wave’s wild wash. Yet thy lumpish antagonist once did work Heroical, one of our strong. His gold to retain and his dross reject, Engage him, but humour, not aiming to quash. Detest the dead squat of the Turk, And suffice it to move him along. Drink of faith in the brains a full draught Before the oration: beware Lest rhetoric moonily waft Whither horrid activities snare. Rhetoric, juice for the mob Despising more luminous grape, Oft at its fount has it laughed In the cataracts rolling for rape Of a Reason left single to sob!

’Tis known how the permanent never is writ In blood of the passions: mercurial they, Shifty their issue: stir not that pit To the game our brutes best play.

But with rhetoric loose, can we check man’s brute? Assemblies of men on their legs invoke Excitement for wholesome diversion: there shoot Electrical sparks between their dry thatch And thy waved torch, more to kindle than light. ’Tis instant between you: the trick of a catch (To match a Batrachian croak) Will thump them a frenzy or fun in their veins. Then may it be rather the well-worn joke Thou repeatest, to stop conflagration, and write Penance for rhetoric. Strange will it seem, When thou readest that form of thy homage to brains!

For the secret why demagogues fail, Though they carry hot mobs to the red extreme, And knock out or knock in the nail (We will rank them as flatly sincere, Devoutly detesting a wrong, Engines o’ercharged with our human steam), Question thee, seething amid the throng. And ask, whether Wisdom is born of blood-heat; Or of other than Wisdom comes victory here;— Aught more than the banquet and roundelay, That is closed with a terrible terminal wail, A retributive black ding-dong? And ask of thyself: This furious Yea Of a speech I thump to repeat, In the cause I would have prevail, For seed of a nourishing wheat, Is it accepted of Song? Does it sound to the mind through the ear, Right sober, pure sane? has it disciplined feet? Thou wilt find it a test severe; Unerring whatever the theme. Rings it for Reason a melody clear, We have bidden old Chaos retreat; We have called on Creation to hear; All forces that make us are one full stream. Simple islander! thus may the spirit in verse, Showing its practical value and weight, Pipe to thee clear from the Empty Purse, Lead thee aloft to that high estate.— The test is conclusive, I deem: It embraces or mortally bites. We have then the key-note for debate: A Senate that sits on the heights Over discords, to shape and amend.

And no singer is needed to serve The musical God, my friend. Needs only his law on a sensible nerve: A law that to Measure invites, Forbidding the passions contend. Is it accepted of Song? And if then the blunt answer be Nay, Dislink thee sharp from the ramping horde, Slaves of the Goddess of hoar-old sway, The Queen of delirious rites, Queen of those issueless mobs, that rend For frenzy the strings of a fruitful accord, Pursuing insensate, seething in throng, Their wild idea to its ashen end. Off to their Phrygia, shriek and gong, Shorn from their fellows, behold them wend!

But thou, should the answer ring Ay, Hast warrant of seed for thy word: The musical God is nigh To inspirit and temper, tune it, and steer Through the shoals: is it worthy of Song, There are souls all woman to hear, Woman to bear and renew. For he is the Master of Measure, and weighs, Broad as the arms of his blue, Fine as the web of his rays, Justice, whose voice is a melody clear, The one sure life for the numbered long, From him are the brutal and vain, The vile, the excessive, out-thrust: He points to the God on the upmost throne: He is the saver of grain, The sifter of spirit from dust. He, Harmony, tells how to Measure pertain The virilities: Measure alone Has votaries rich in the male: Fathers embracing no cloud, Sowing no harvestless main: Alike by the flesh and the spirit endowed To create, to perpetuate; woo, win, wed; Send progeny streaming, have earth for their own, Over-run the insensates, disperse with a puff Simulacra, though solid they sail, And seem such imperial stuff: Yes, the living divide off the dead.

Then thou with thy furies outgrown, Not as Cybele’s beast will thy head lash tail So præter-determinedly thermonous, Nor thy cause be an Attis far fled. Thou under stress of the strife Shalt hear for sustainment supreme The cry of the conscience of Life: Keep the young generations in hail, And bequeath them no tumbled house!

There hast thou the sacred theme, Therein the inveterate spur, Of the Innermost. See her one blink In vision past eyeballs. Not thee She cares for, but us. Follow her. Follow her, and thou wilt not sink. With thy soul the Life espouse: This Life of the visible, audible, ring With thy love tight about; and no death will be; The name be an empty thing, And woe a forgotten old trick: And battle will come as a challenge to drink; As a warrior’s wound each transient sting. She leads to the Uppermost link by link; Exacts but vision, desires not vows. Above us the singular number to see; The plural warm round us; ourself in the thick, A dot or a stop: that is our task; Her lesson in figured arithmetic, For the letters of Life behind its mask; Her flower-like look under fearful brows.

As for thy special case, O my friend, one must think Massilia’s victim, who held the carouse For the length of a carnival year, Knew worse: but the wretch had his opening choice. For thee, by our law, no alternatives were: Thy fall was assured ere thou camest to a voice. He cancelled the ravaging Plague, With the roll of his fat off the cliff. Do thou with thy lean as the weapon of ink, Though they call thee an angler who fishes the vague And catches the not too pink, Attack one as murderous, knowing thy cause Is the cause of community. Iterate, Iterate, iterate, harp on the trite: Our preacher to win is the supple in stiff: Yet always in measure, with bearing polite: The manner of one that would expiate His share in grandmotherly Laws, Which do the dark thing to destroy, Under aspect of water so guilelessly white For the general use, by the devils befouled.

Enough, poor prodigal boy! Thou hast listened with patience; another had howled. Repentance is proved, forgiveness is earned. And ’tis bony: denied thee thy succulent half Of the parable’s blessing, to swineherd returned: A Sermon thy slice of the Scriptural calf! By my faith, there is feasting to come, Not the less, when our Earth we have seen Beneath and on surface, her deeds and designs: Who gives us the man-loving Nazarene, The martyrs, the poets, the corn and the vines. By my faith in the head, she has wonders in loom; Revelations, delights. I can hear a faint crow Of the cock of fresh mornings, far, far, yet distinct; As down the new shafting of mines, A cry of the metally gnome. When our Earth we have seen, and have linked With the home of the Spirit to whom we unfold, Imprisoned humanity open will throw Its fortress gates, and the rivers of gold For the congregate friendliness flow. Then the meaning of Earth in her children behold: Glad eyes, frank hands, and a fellowship real: And laughter on lips, as the birds’ outburst At the flooding of light. No robbery then The feast, nor a robber’s abode the home, For a furnished model of our first den! Nor Life as a stationed wheel; Nor History written in blood or in foam, For vendetta of Parties in cursing accursed. The God in the conscience of multitudes feel, And we feel deep to Earth at her heart, We have her communion with men, New ground, new skies for appeal. Yield into harness thy best and thy worst; Away on the trot of thy servitude start, Through the rigours and joys and sustainments of air. If courage should falter, ’tis wholesome to kneel. Remember that well, for the secret with some, Who pray for no gift, but have cleansing in prayer, And free from impurities tower-like stand. I promise not more, save that feasting will come To a mind and a body no longer inversed: The sense of large charity over the land, Earth’s wheaten of wisdom dispensed in the rough, And a bell ringing thanks for a sustenance meal Through the active machine: lean fare, But it carries a sparkle! And now enough, And part we as comrades part, To meet again never or some day or soon.

Our season of drought is reminder rude:— No later than yesternoon, I looked on the horse of a cart, By the wayside water-trough. How at every draught of his bride of thirst His nostrils widened! The sight was good: Food for us, food, such as first Drew our thoughts to earth’s lowly for food.

TO THE COMIC SPIRIT