IT was not strange, I imagine, that when we came home from our drives and crept upstairs to our rooms afterward I was often too excited to go to sleep. I didn’t even undress and open my bed, but lay across it with my head beside the lamp and a paper and pencil in front of me. For those nights out of doors often filled me with an ecstasy that made me able to write a poem. When that ecstasy came it completely possessed me, as if my body were a musical instrument suddenly taken and played upon by an unseen hand. The boldness and strength and happiness that were natural to me and to which I was denying their natural outlet refused to be denied and to be made sickly and fearful, and they poured through my veins then in an action of delight that was healthy and bold and strong. I forgot who or where I was and I made a sort of buzzing, humming noise like a top spinning or a bee. I felt a vibration like music all through me as if my blood were actually singing. And as though I were driven by that music which was formless yet felt as if it had the force of a dynamo, I crouched over my pad and held my pencil slavishly quick and intense, ready to serve this marvelous buzzing happiness at the moment when like surcharged atmosphere it should condense and form precious words that would drop onto my paper from the end of my pencil.
I was not conscious of my buzzing until after the rapture left me. Then I heard the tail end of it, like the merry-go-round breaking down, and I thought for a split second how queer it was. But everything was queer in those days and my buzzing didn’t astonish me. To me that involuntary sound was something natural, a sort of Om, the murmur of Ecstasy at the heart of things. I had found in it and my poetry a new way of worshiping the ineffable charm of life which had so troubled me and enthralled me when I was a child.
My poems were small ones, brief songs, and usually one was written complete before the rapture left me, and afterward it lay there on the paper in front of me, something visible that I could hold in my hands and admire, like a damp newborn kitten that I could lick and fondle and believe to be as wonderful as the joy in which it was conceived. It was wonderful, I thought, to have captured out of the invisible world something that was visible, a little entity, an organism, a whole thing, like a poem. Then was the only time when I felt really at ease and tranquil in the world. I used to lie and stare around me in a kind of blissful emptiness.
The next step in the poem’s existence came the next day when, returning to my other dimension of shyness and fear, I struggled for half the day before I could bring myself to give the poem to my brother to read. He would take it into his hands very seriously as if I were honoring him with something valuable. But in spite of his deference toward me there was so much of the critic and the judge in him that I always waited in painful suspense for what he would say. Often he made some criticism, but time after time he said with quietness and authority, “That is a wonder.” Once he said, “That seems to me pure genius.” His praise was like a magic cloak that he put around me, canceling my predicament as swiftly and entirely as Cinderella’s was canceled when she found herself dressed for the ball.
I was awed and a little frightened by his attitude toward me. He talked and talked about my writing, and from the way he talked it seemed that I had in my care something very precious for which I must be responsible. He said he thought I was a very rare person. He said I was capable of knowing and feeling great things. He said I had a destiny before me. He filled me with enormous dreams.