The Nature of an Action

I

Here is a room with heavy-footed chairs,

A glass bell loaded with wax grapes and pears,

A polished table, holding down the look

Of bracket, mantelpiece, and marbled book.

Staying within the cluttered square of fact,

I cannot slip the clumsy fond contact:

So step into the corridor and start,

Directed by the compass of my heart.

II

Although the narrow corridor appears

So short, the journey took me twenty years.

Each gesture that my habit taught me fell

Down to the boards and made an obstacle.

I paused to watch the fly marks on a shelf,

And found the great obstruction of myself.

I reached the end but, pacing back and forth,

I could not see what reaching it was worth.

In corridors the rooms are undefined:

I groped to feel a handle in the mind.

Testing my faculties I found a stealth

Of passive illness lurking in my health.

And though I saw the corridor stretch bare,

Dusty, and hard, I doubted it was there;

Doubted myself, what final evidence

Lay in perceptions or in common sense?

III

My cause lay in the will, that opens straight

Upon an act for the most desperate.

That simple handle found, I entered in

The other room, where I had never been.

I found within it heavy-footed chairs,

A glass bell loaded with wax grapes and pears,

A polished table, holding down the look

Of bracket, mantelpiece, and marbled book.

Much like the first, this room in which I went.

Only my being there is different.