Selections

“. . . . Me next to sleep, all that is left of Eden,”

—The one who speaks is not remarkable

In the great city, circa 1930,

His state is not uncommon in the world,

O, by no means, sleepless and seeking sleep

As one who wades in water to the thighs,

Dragging it soft and heavy near the shore;

For now his body’s lapse and ignorance

Permits his heavy mind certain loose sleeves,

Loose sleeves of feeling drawing near a drowse:

He knows of dark and sleep the unity,

He knows all being’s consanguinity,

All anguish sinks into the first of seas,

The sea which soothes with softness ultimate

—Thus he descends,

and coughs, coughs!

the old cold comes,

Jack-in-the-box, the conscious mind snaps up!

—He wakes,

his fuzzed gaze strains the dark,

And at the window’s outline looks, in shock,

To see a certain whiteness glitter there,

Snow! dragging him to the window

With hurried heart. The childhood love still lives in him,

Like a sweet tooth in grown-up married girls,

December’s white delight, a fourth year wish,

The classic swan disguised in modern life,

Freedom and silence shining in New York!

But, standing by the window, sees the truth,

Four stories down the blank courtyard on which

The moonlight shines, diagonal and pale

—And high, the moon’s half-cut and glittering shell

Shines like the ice on which electric shines—

Says to himself, “How each view may be false!”

And then the whole thing happens all over again,

Waking, walking to the window, looking out,

Seeking for snow in May, a miracle

Quick in the dozing head’s compelled free mix

—He sees the snow which is not snow, but light,

The moonlight’s lie, error’s fecundity

Fallen from the dead planet near the roof—

Absolute dark and dream space fall on him,

And he through dark and space begins to fall,

At first afraid, then horrified, then calm.

Then the wide stillness in which dream belief

Begins, prepared for all. And he begins

Once more to tell himself all that he knows

Over and over and over and over again,

All of the lives that have come close to his,

All of his life, much mixed in memory

Many a night through which he cannot sleep,

Many a year, over and over again!

But now a voice begins, strange in the dark,

As from a worn victrola record, needle

Which skims and whirrs, a voice intoned

As of a weak old man with foreign accent,

Ironic, comic, flat and matter of fact,

With alternation measured, artificial,

moaned,

And yet with sympathy, simpatico

as if

A guardian angel sang!

Then other voices,

Bodiless in the dark, entered in chorus:

“He must tell all, amazed as the three Magi

When they beheld the puking child! All is

Not natural! That’s Life, the Magi too

Might have remarked to one another, Life

Full of all things but what one would expect—”

And he who listened said then to himself,

“A daemon, a daemon, no doubt: who else?

Such as was heard by Socrates, perhaps,

Or an angel, the angel who struggled with Jacob,

If Jacob lived, if angels also live—”

To which one voice cried back, as if in echo,

“Rome and romance of Death, what Mutt and Jeff,

Quixote, Alcestis, Jacob, Uncle Sam,

Hamlet and Holmes look down on all of you!

What King and Queen of Hearts as playing cards?

What President or Pharaoh on a coin?

—Your mind, kept waiting by a desperate hope

For the epiphany which starlight seems

Here where Long Island like a liner slants

To the great city, Europe’s last capital,

Now must suppose in Being’s surprises nothing less

Than singers who have soared through many keys,

Justice, Forgiveness, and Knowledge in their cries!—”

“A number of the dead have come to you,

O Hershey Green!”

“Have come to me?” he cried,

He shouted out, rapt in the absolute dark,

As one who in an empty valley bound by rocks

Shouts and awaits with some hope something more

Than merely his own voice in echo bruised,

And merely his own heart,

“Have come to you!

Hallucination holds you by the head,

Many a night you told yourself your life,

Tell it to us, we have no more to do,

Tell it to the immortal dead in the stone

And the chill of their—O so this is it!—conclusion . . .”

“Is this a true thing?” Hershey Green in the dark

And stillness spoke out again, leaning to hear

If once again his speech would bring back speech,

“O it is true enough! Many are dead.

Come, with your endless story,” one voice said,

“Hallucination leads you by the hand,

This is the way to freedom and to power,

This is the way to knowledge and to hope,

This is the way the world begins and ends,

Logos, man’s inner being going out—”

~

The child was born late at night in the middle of winter.

Jack Green was overwhelmed with joy, excited and exalted as never before in his life. An hour after the child was dragged headfirst with the help of instruments

From his mother’s womb, Jack Green called his relatives and his friends to tell them that he had a son. Snow had begun to fall from the low-hanging sky,

Pink-grey with the city lights, when Jack Green woke relatives and friends from the warmth of sleep: his emotion overflowed and demanded expression and required surrounding and answering voices,

He had to tell everyone! His mother-in-law said to him, They are sleeping, they will be angry. But he could not be stopped,

He spoke with warmth to people he had been cool to for years. His joy placed him outside himself,

He called his brother Albert and spoke with eloquence over the instantaneous miles, saying he had been wrong and on such an occasion

All must be forgiven. Everyone is always wrong all the time, answered Albert, wakened from sleep, too little awake in early morning

To know exactly what he was saying—

“The tears are icicles upon his cheeks

As the poor boy arrives at his first breath—”

“O Life is wonderful beyond belief

Here most of all, in parenthood’s great pleasure . . .”

“What egotism is so sharp and deaf

(Sharp as the knife and deaf as rock), which lives

That it can quite resist the infant’s face,

The fresh identity, the bawling life?”

“Ravished is Everyman by the small sight!

Faced by the double face and breathing twice

—The harder that the ego pained itself (like ice,

Pressed to the skin, a heavy iron-like pain),

The greater joy abounds! joy overflows . . .”

“This I always find touching, that great joy

Cannot contain itself, but overflows,

The body must run up and down the stairs,

Shout the good news and kiss the passing stranger,

—Joy drives such overwhelming energy—

Any move will express, dance out, and free

The body from the terrifying pleasure—”

“The father’s joy is a new class of joy,

—First Abraham, after his hopeless years—”

“Forgiveness for his brother and his friends!

Success is kind when quite secure and sure,

Success must buy the drinks, hand out cigars

(These actions are the same as sorrow’s tears!),

And is in this emotion just as blind

And self-absorbed as invalids, as cruel

As disappointment!

At two o’clock in the morning,

Jack Green must call his relatives and friends!”

“Thus may new goodness make the evil good

—I am a hopeless optimist, I know!”

The day came when the child was to be given a name, a name announcing the unique inimitable psyche,

And the tiny foreskin was to be cut with the knife which reached across five thousand years from Palestine,

Making him with this last turn of the knife even unto coitus fully a member of the people chosen for wandering and alienation.

Eva wished to name him Noah, after her dead father, who had come to America with his anger, but her mother did not want her to use that name.

Eva turned over a dozen names in her mind, unable to decide which one she liked best until

She thought of the neighbor’s child, four years of age, fat and happy,

Whom Eva had looked at fondly and fondled during her barren unhappy years. His name was Harold, but he called himself Hershey, a German version, because he was obsessed with chocolate, and amused adults had come to call him Hershey, Hershey Bar, struck by the quaintness,

Extending the smile of amusement at the child with this poem. And Eva had vowed in a moment of delight with the child, that if she had a child, she would name him Hershey, for, looking at him, she saw the image of what she wanted her child to be:

She decided in a moment, Baby Green was named Hershey, howling his pain and ignorance when his foreskin was cut,

And all thought twenty years in advance of the next generation—

“Lo, with what tenderness he speaks his name,

As if he spoke a scandal or a fame!”

“Why not? It is a sign of the self’s darkness,

The private darkness of the individual

The anguished darkness of the struggling will,

The sound which means the ego is alone,

The bass of harbor boats, alone, alone!

The pathos of departure’s fogbound moan,

The self’s self-exile from the womb and home—”

“The basis of the art of poetry,

The hard identity felt in the bone—”

“The basis of the art of music, too,

The self-same darkness flows from orchestras,

The brilliant congress of the instruments

Merely goes walking in what wilderness—”

“His name might have been Noah: beautiful!

Suggests so much a boat on desperate seas—”

“Hershey, I think, is best, the Hershey Bar,

A bitter chocolate or a milk sweet chocolate

—Such is the self, knowing and gnawing the body,

When the decayed teeth of the Pleasure-Principle

Bite it, by the sweet senses’ candies pained!”

“There is a joke which grows within my mind:

Here is a stadium and cheering crowd,

Pigeons pass overhead, and one lets go

(Nature’s necessities are all his life),

—The one man wet amid the 70,000

Cries out, Here are 70,000 faces,

Why did that pigeon have to pick on me?

—The joke of individuality!

O what a practical joke on everyone,

Something is always new under the sun!”

“Enough, dear friend in this, the last illness,

Now let us shift the image for the boy—”

“Let us regard the deities once more,

Augment his story with our world-wide views,

He pleads for it, he looks for it himself

—Let us look down from heights, from Everest—”

“Or from a star, or from Eternity,

O from Eternity, that is, from Death:

What huge divinities move near the child,

Small as a pebble by a mountain side!”

“Lo, by a mountain range! which, lumbering,

Booming and thundering, begins to quake

—As if Creation first cracked nothingness!

Concussion’s stroke rides through the city air—

No lesser trope can be as adequate,

The grandson of two Noahs, running away!

—How many other deities are near!—”

“Europe, America, and Israel,

—Israel bearing, as the boy just said,

The knife which cut the foreskin Moses knew,

Comes for five thousand years from Palestine!”

“How many other deities are near,

And soon, the Great War’s shocking scrimmages!”

“—How wise in intuition of his life

The bawling baby screaming at the knife!”

“But let the obsessed boy renew his story,

So interesting, leaning to what comes next—”

~

“America, America! O Land

Whence come chiefly the poor hurt peoples

Who for a reason good or bad cannot endure

Or be endured by the old Vaterland

—Being a Jew, or being a younger son, being

A Quaker, or among the wise who think

The world may end on any seventh day,

A most dynamic and dramatic view of Life—”

“That Barnum knew America quite well,

He knew the gold rush which the populace

Would run to as to fires. And he knew

The love of freaks, the hatred of the norm,

The passion for monstrosity and shock!”

“Land of the failure! land of the refugee!

Land of the gold like oranges on trees,

Land of the European man who holds

St. Patrick’s Day or Budapest in him

—Moving in such a crowd, Jack Green grew fat

With this world’s goods!”

“Lo, the relation here

Between the immigrant and immigrant

New come: just as the card sharp to the hilt

Uses his victims’ greed, which is in him

Sharper perhaps, but under strict control

(Knowledge of weakness is a mighty strength!)

—Self-knowledge marks the cards and takes the pot

And gives moral dominion to the soul!”

“Thus it is, thus it has always been!

The criminal like the saint needs discipline!”

“What an America! Adams and James

Return how many times to Europe’s shore

As the new troops pass them, in reverse,

(O heavy irony of all such passages!)

And heartsick go to the grave, crying aloud

—We did not know the causes of our lives,

We know at last we did not know our lives!”

“‘Who is Vermeer?’ asked Pierpont Morgan then,

And paid one hundred thousand dollars when

It was explained to him. He was a king!

A financier! master of many hearts!

—Mark Twain preferred cigar store Indians

To all the noble statues which he toured

In Florence and in Rome. He sneered for fun!

—‘I never in my life had any fun,

I never did the things I wished to do!’

Mourned a tycoon, who owned America!

—Red caps, glass beads, and many other things

Little in value first he gave to them,

And stared for gold among most beautiful trees:

O clemens, o pia, o dulces Maria!

This was the first day of America!

All of these immigrants ruined by the ride!”

~

Hershey’s ego defined itself further by means of father, mother and brother.

During these years, when the fog of infancy, blooming and booming, slowly lifted,

Hershey often sat in the window-seat which looked out on a street in the middle of which

A trolley passed, yellow and red in broad stripes, sparking the wire,

Delighting him more than any other object! It was to him a thing of inexhaustible interest, ever-renewed,

A kind of boat, sliding, skating, singing, stopping, and beginning again,

Presenting him with movement which is the beginning of drama, an obvious miracle passing at regular intervals:

And thus it was that when, one day, a middle-aged friend of Eva Green brought her son’s fiancée to the apartment, and when the engaged girl, who was very pretty, drew the child to her

And kissed him! as if he were her future, his plump childness pleasing her, then did he cry out joyously,

‘Trolley, trolley!” his first metaphor, the swift perception of a resemblance between different things. For he meant to say

The pretty lady who kisses me delights me like the trolley.

All the adults were delighted and applauded him and petted him,

Until his success grew warm in him, although he hardly knew why—

“Come now, this is too good, too pure a sign!

Kissed by the fiancée, the girl engaged

In going to the fête where privacies

Mix in the act which makes societies

—Too pat, too easy, and too pure a sign!”

“A fiancée; the quintessential flower:

Who better shall draw from the little boy

The first of all the many metaphors

With which he will enact his hope and fear?”

“How in this death we need the metaphor:

We go from trope to trope like acrobats!”

“Surprises, Being’s surprises everywhere,

—Cumuli clouds full of ontologies!”

“We in our death enjoy this very much,

Seeing how one thing is another thing

In certain ways, a girl being a rose

In certain ways, a poet being a train

(Because he takes you where you have not been),

Painting as light, sleep as essential sin

(Being a desperate abandonment). . . .”

“Light is the heroine of all the paintings,

The camera is the hero of the screen!”

“Such metaphors are pleasant. But some come

Which show us with their light how much we missed

(Who were not those on whom nothing is lost)

When we were there and could; and might have loved . . .”

“How much we did not see when we were there,

Walking through Life self-blinded by desire

—Such metaphors like the rack torture us

With utter memory and that remorse

Forever late, which is the greatest pain!”

~

“Now I will really know how good it is

To have the sleep of Eden, like a tree,

I will bear this in mind like a man reprieved

(O how their voices influence my voice!)

And make myself think of the horror which

I have escaped! enjoying everything,

Taking keen pleasure in the smallest things,

Tying my laces, or sharpening a pencil—”

Yet as he spoke, he feared it was not true,

And yet enjoyed it all as he enjoyed

Soft drinks on summer days after a game,

Gulped down to drown the throat’s pulsating need—

His pride rose with these thoughts, vainglorious,

—O like a raving fire leaping up!

He told himself all that his mind might do,

Half-doubting and half hoping it was true:

“As Adam named the beasts, with careful love,

I name the animals and the divinities

Who walk about this newfoundland, America,

(Europe the greatest thing in North America!

For instance, as one voice just said to me)

—As Socrates, who questioned everything

Because his love was great, because he loved

Life very much, but not too much, and not

Enough to accept a life without the stars,

Thus now I’ll flick the salt of intellect

Upon all things, the critical salt which makes

All qualities most vivid and acute—

As Joseph, I’ll enact my sweet revenge

In basic psychological reviews,

Accuse the innocents who perjured me,

Me innocent: showing sublimely then,

The Justice who uncovers innocence,

Omniscient, generous, O all forgiving

And most successful brother who displays

How he was right throughout, in his conceit,

All dreams come true, and every feat performed—”

Then said a far-off singer in his style

Breaking in suddenly on Hershey’s peace,

“Let go this braggadocio, young man!

. . . Dunamos, dynamite, puissance, Power,

Divinity secretly close to the will

Like May beside the leaf: listen and speak,

The chorus is an ancient well-known goodness,

Like bread and wine, although more difficult. Cause

Is the secrecy and mystery. The Seed

Is marvellous. Let us look down on it. The Star . . .

Everything is a part and in the pit

Of all the nexi, darkness is cat-black,

In between sleeping and waking, part by part

(And once the sun blared like a lion, and once

The starlight fell like a petal, piercing the eye—)”

And then another ghost assumed the theme,

“Lincoln is on a penny in the mind,

A canton of the spirit! Rises and speaks!

And Jeeves and Cinderella show the boat

We all are in, the rotten ship of state!

Chaplin shuffles and tips his hat! Then runs!

John Bull and Uncle Sam are not cartoons

But heavy actual bullies boxing through us!

They move through all of us, like summer fine:

Keep thinking all the time, O New York boy!

Go back,

In each, all natural being once more lives!

The subtile serpent which the apple brought

To Mamma and to Papa, starting all!

Caesar and Caesar’s pal also in you,

Also the servant and the comedian,

—Lo, he has set the world in each man’s heart!

And both the lamb and lion are quick in you,

The mountain and the lake, the tree and stone

All of these kinds their being must renew

—When you lie down to sleep, they rise in you!”

“Let us fly off and tour the world awhile,

Freely and frankly, going from branch to branch,

To show the boy trouvailles within the mind,

Many Americas found suddenly,

Surprise upon surprise upon surprise!”

“As, once I saw two nuns, like cameras;

There they were, taking pictures of modern life!”

“Remember this, young man, as we fly on,

Verdi at eighty-seven kneeled beneath

The bed to find a fallen collar-stud,

And apoplexy struck him down. Alas!

“Twas this he left out of his operas,

—Of actuality, the ragged richness!

Bend down under the bed and look for this!

O hear the children coming home from school,

And hear the gunshots of the starting car,

And hear the thin strings of the telephone,

And Sister’s ennui, practising her scales,

And see the cinders and the broken glass—”

“And yet, behold the heart within these things:

Change jingled in his pocket like gay pleasure,

And his checked tie was what an attitude.

In his lapel a flower quoted Nature—”

“And more and more, behold the dialectic,

How light brings shadow, how the evil, good,

And how each eminence needs lowness near,

And how each eminence brings straining Iago,

And too much good makes too much sorrow soon—”

“The mind skates like a falling star! the mind

Speeds between heaven and earth like Light itself!”

“The gold, the vivid, and the actual

Will melt like flakes upon the open hand,

The mind in memory alone can live

(How many times I climbed on hands and knees

This Himalaya, depth on every side),

The memory alone can hold the self!

Logos alone can understand the blue—”

“If one but knew, if one knew Being-hood,

—This is as if we sat after a dinner,

And heard of many years in unity,

Or noble lords and ladies who have left

The city struck by plague, passing the time—”

“In us, all natural being once more lives,

—A skein of geese, a walk of snipe,

A murmuration of starlings, an exultation

Of larks, a watch of nightingales, a host

Of sparrows, a cast of hawks, a pride of lions,

a sloth of bears,

A route of wolves, a rag of colts,

a mute of hounds,

A cowardice of curs, a shrewdness of apes,

A luxury of nymphs, a lilt of mares,

A round of girls, a dark of plays, a jig

Of vaudeville, a crowd of joys

—Blue grapes and yellow pears beside a jar!

—All of this life and more, much more in us!

Later we will unmask, singing our names!”

“—Her privates we, yet ignorant in death,

We wait to see Eternity’s worst views—”

Then said another singer in his style,

“In medias res, in the middle of Life,

In the middle of everything, sick boy,

—Where is the first of consciousness, where is

Where first-hand memory begins for you—”

“Eden, image of many complex thoughts

About beginning, hangs just like a picture

In many living rooms in the Western World;

Later, we might consider it; not now, later—”

“Begin in any place in consciousness,

Life and each part of Life is infinite,

Infinitely divisible, traversable,

And visible! seek out the motives there—”

“O seek, he means the depths of the Past from which

The soul’s moves rise as grasses from the earth—”

~

And then one day Hershey played by the door of the apartment house, when three of the other boys, always friends before now, members of the kindergarten class,

Took up the janitor’s hose, coiled serpentine on the sidewalk, and suddenly turned it on Hershey, crying,

You are a Jew! a Jew! Hershey ran away all wet from the baptismal flood of the communal mind,

He ran away to his mother, asking her what was wrong, what was being a Jew?

But she did not answer, he did not know so well, wetly, and sensuously, until far later years.

She took his hand and rang the doorbell where one of his opponents lived,

And protested to his mother in a loud self-righteous tone, which made Hershey ashamed, although he hardly knew why,

But knew that more than he understood defended and offended him,

And knew with passion that laughter thrown at him by boys pitted against him was one of the worst pains, and that other boys turning on him

Stripped him, even if he ran to his mother, stripped him and left him alone, naked, wet and ashamed.

And then one day when his father gave him a fountain pen, and he lost it the very next day,

Playing in the empty lot behind the apartment house. He went and told his mother and begged her then, securing her promise,

Not to tell his father. But when in the evening his father came to see him go to bed, his father asked him and asking smiled,

Where his fountain pen was? When Hershey began to lie, Jack Green smiled still more broadly, the lying child was a joke, or the lying child was himself,

And said to the poor pajama’d boy that he knew he had lost his fountain pen, and gave him another one, his own, a better one, the best, and for some time admired by him,

And then Hershey knew such joy as Adam might have known, had his father brought him back to a greater Eden,

Making his loss his gain. But in the midst of his joy, Hershey saw that his mother had betrayed him,

He saw there was a communication between his parents which would always betray him.

Because he was a child.

“Poor boy, how education comes to you!

Learning to be a Jew, attacked because

A Jew, born to the long habit of pain

And alienation, of the people chosen for pain. . . .”

“Attacked for the first time because you are

A kind, a class! as you were not yourself,

The pain of the sole psyche insufficient,

The naked surd’s self-torture not enough!”

“Thus to begin, in sudden dripping shock,

Abstractions’ mastery, as if a teacher

Taught species, genus, higher genera,

Slapping his student’s face as if to say

This is what faceness is, learn it through pain:

How better than in shock to learn of terms?”

Hershey felt now as when his hands and arms

Fell asleep, powerless, too weak in strength

To hold a cigarette, or hold a pin. . . .

“Now of betrayal, now these far-off singers

Will speak of parents’ and betrayals’ first—”

Hershey prepared himself, speaking these words,

Once more in mimicry of what he heard—

“The loss of faith’s virginity, the sense

That anyone might lie, as when the earth’s

Flatness turned out to be a curving lie,

Falseness objective in the turning world

—The sense that always underneath the face

Many a motive hid the truth, prepared

Illusions, made the mirage, deceived!”

“Life is a lie! Life is a long long lie,”

Another far voice cried, “Death is a news

Life painted differently! What have we now

But this eternal knowledge and regret,

Not an oblivion . . . at best, a sweet drugged sleep

When we are lucky! the sleep of hospitals—

True, one gets used to pain as one gets used

To living near a waterfall or trains,

But I cannot believe I will become

Used to regret, return, the infinite

Apocalypse of all that might have been,

Millions of instances shown in these lives,

Every future untrue and every hope,

Even in satisfaction, vain and false,

Since no success is terminus, serene. . . .”

“The hanged man like a sack upon a tree

Cannot believe the freedom of the will—”

~

“Happy as some in May, in the May morning,

When sunlight stamps gold coins on the blazed gaze,

And on the river does the diamond-dance,

—These sensuous skins, alas, obsess the life—”

“O Sun of Nature! source of all the forces,

All blooms, all snakes, and Botticelli’s views

Of both of these, and Nature as a dance:

(Light is the heroine of every picture—)”

“O what a glory has the turning world!

And that is why some say that God himself

Took on this flesh:

to be God was not enough

To feel in blues and greens of natural life

Immediacies they have, like any kiss—”

“I hardly know just what it means to me,

But when I hear the word, my soul soars,

Strong as a gull over the evil shores

Of this unending terrifying night—”

“Hear how he speaks like us, now more and more—”

“Again, go back, see how Christ’s story lives,

Born in the winter, risen from the year

As once in Palestine—

“If you were wise!

Like the three Magi all your attitudes,

Expecting any kind of Paradise,

In any poverty or paradox!”

“See how the Bible rules the consciousness

Of the West for two thousand years:

O, what a book!”

“Bible and Ovid too! who brings to us

Leda, Medea, Psyche, she who wished

To look at Love’s forbidden hidden face,

Long before Sigmund Freud looked down on it,

And saw the serpent climbing up the stairs—”

“Psyche arrived after the birth of Christ!”

“The Sistine Chapel is the Western mind!”

“The snow: obsessed with it! This we must know

And understand; his love of it unceasing

In the deep mind beneath the conscious mind

Whence many motives rise up to command!”

“The gift! the bicycle! the gift of motion,

As he had loved the street-car years ago,

Since motion, as the Stagirite once said,

Is being’s deepest wish, most general form. . . .”

“Gift from the doubted wished-for nameless Ahhhhhhhh

—Amid snatches of sleep, dreaming of snow!”

~

“Manic-depressive Lincoln, national hero!

How just that this great nation, being conceived

In liberty by fugitives should find

—Strange ways and plays of monstrous History—

This Hamlet-type to be the President—”

“This failure, this unwilling bridegroom,

This tricky lawyer full of black despair—”

“He grew a beard, becoming President,

And took a shawl as if he guessed his rôle,

Though with the beard he fled cartoonists’ blacks,

And many laughed and were contemptuous,

And some for four years spoke of killing him—”

“He was a politician—of the heart!—

He lived from hand to mouth in moral things!

He understood quite well Grant’s drunken-ness!

It was for him, before Election Day,

That at Cold Harbor Grant threw lives away

In hopeless frontal attack against Lee’s breastworks!”

“O how he was the Hamlet-man, and this,

After a life of failure made him right,

After he ran away on his wedding day,

Writing a coward’s letter to his bride—”

“How with his very failure, he out-tricked

The florid Douglas and the abstract Davis,

And all the vain men who, surrounding him,

Smiled in their vanity and sought his place—”

“Later, they made him out a prairie Christ

To sate the need coarse in the national heart—”

“His wife went insane, Mary Todd too often

Bought herself dresses. And his child died.

And he would not condemn young men to death

For having slept, in weakness. And he spoke

More than he knew and all that he had felt

Between outrageous joy and black despair

Before and after Gettysburg’s pure peak—”

“He studied law, but knew in his own soul

Despair’s anarchy, terror and error,

—Instruments had to be taken from his office

And from his bedroom in such days of horror,

Because some saw that he might kill himself:

When he was young, when he was middle-aged,

How just and true was he, our national hero!”

“Sometimes he could not go home to face his wife,

Sometimes he wished to hurry or end his life!”

“But do not be deceived. He did not win,

And, it is plain, the South could never win

(Despite the gifted Northern generals!)

—Capitalismus is not mocked, O no!

This stupid deity decided the War—”

“In fact, the North and South were losers both:

—Capitalismus won the Civil War—”

“—Capitalismus won the Civil War,

Yet, in the War’s cruel Colosseum,

Some characters fulfilled their natures’ surds,

Grant the drunkard, Lee the noble soldier,

John Brown in whom the Bible soared and cried,

Booth the unsuccessful Shakespearean,

—Each in some freedom walked and knew himself,

Then most of all when all the deities

Mixed with their barbarous stupidity

To make the rock, root, and rot of the war—”

“This is the way each only life becomes,

Tossed on History’s ceaseless insane sums!”

~

“A wise man says, Religion is what man

Does with his solitude: what a remark!

—We know, do we not know? what some men do

When left alone: Arnauld declared that Man

Was capable of any monstrous act

When left in solitude in his own room

—Pascal, his pupil, on the other hand,

Observed that all our trouble and our pain

Sprang from the failure to stay in one’s room?

—Les extrêmes se touchent: these poles which meet

Define a circle of uneasiness,

Somewhat a swaying sea. We are but sailors—”

“The early morning light becomes a sign:

It is the snow! Even as sometimes snow

Stands for the early morning light. These shifts

Show Baudelaire and Freud were well-advised,

Saying, Man walks through a dark wood of symbols,

All his life long, no matter what he does—”

“I when I heard of God from black despair

Rose always like a bird; quickly, lightly,

Prone in the former life to utter sadness

Because my efforts fell short many times:

I said to myself, ‘An infinite God!

If such a being really exists, he hears

What I am saying now. Does He not know

All, look at all, see all with perfect views?

And if He hears me, is it not possible

—Although I am not sure—that He will help me?

Is it a profanation of the pure Idea

Which makes me think that He really exists

To think that He will aid me in my pain?

Can I be sure?’”

“I too would think these thoughts, also unsure,

—And yet, thinking these thoughts I always rose,

I was less desperate, I could endure

My dark body’s awkward brutality,

I could endure my soul’s black guilt which hoped

The world would end, and all things, screaming, die,

Because I was in my ambition stopped

The while my brother, friend, and enemy

Succeeds with seeming spontaneity,

And wins the girl, acclaim, the world’s applause!

Yes! when I thought of God Himself an sich,

It was enough, although I knew He judged,

Judging the world in me! . . . Infinite joy

Flooded me then, as if I came to the shore

Of the cold sea upon a summer’s day,

And let my dear dark body be by water’s silk

All over touched and known! This was my stay,

My hope, my wish, my ground, my good, my God!”

“Will Hershey Green go down this old abyss

Of thought in days to come, since now he asks

Questions and answers of the Catholic boy?

—How can he help but go, being what he is?”

“The Sunday-looking people, like big flowers,

Know many shades, however secular:

They know the heart hangs down, a Christmas stocking,

They feel strange drafts, however warm the May,

They know that Nature sails like a Zeppelin

Precarious aloft in a dark void:

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God!

—He marks the fall of sparrows, verily!”

“Everything happens in the mind of God,

This is the play it is, ever since Eden!”

“Let me revive my passions, far from this,

Although as relevant to the agonist,

Let me go off upon a candid cadenza,

Running through memories as shuffling cards:

—Branded by parents with identity,

(Mama and Papa who with private parts

Most irresponsibly began this crise,)

I sailed the seven seas, I saw the Czar,

Millions of mighty men sang through my soul,

The stars stretched out senseless as alphabets,

I thought the world was anybody’s fun!

Gemütlichkeit was like the sunlight then!

The golded charging and electric earth

Appealed to me, full of such plants and sweets!

I saw the infamy which made me rich,

Capitalismus native to the heart,

Nothing like that before for egotism,

Never such forms and such fine playing fields!

I saw the evil of the average man

—Clio! between your legs obscenities

Performed and pushed! Jesus and Socrates

Downed by the populace with happiness,

—I saw all modern life in Street & Smith,

Promised virility, and social charm,

Strong muscles and trapped breasts hailed in the ads,

Yet Life was wonderful, beyond belief,

Wine was a light, and all the arts were lights,

The dancers with their discipline destroyed

The chaos and the waste of Broadway crowds,

They with their limbs an inner order knew,

They took it. with an easy willingness,

I took it too, from an orchestra seat

—But when will the houselights of the universe

Go on? You! You! trapped in your childhood!

Let us go back to the past, quickly and smoothly

The dark water closes its lips on today—”

~

“O Father of all hearts, give this poor boy the power

To speak his naked heart without excessive nausea,

O Dream behind the Dream, give him the strength

To see himself with disgust full depth and full length!”

“The history of Life repeats its endless circle,

over and over and over again,

In the new boy, in the new city, in the time forever new,

forever old,

—All of the famous characters are glimpsed again,

All the well-known events; yet something new,

Unique, undying, free, blessèd or damned!”

“Everything happens in the mind of God:

This is all

You need for wondrous hope, and this we give,

Sleepless Atlantic boy!”

“O no!

You do not give that, but give greater darkness,

All this is but a fixed hallucination

Made by the passion of imagination:

This may be false, if I know anything,

I do not know that all is in the mind of God,

I do not have that hope miraculous,

I am more certain of all other things,

The bed, the darkness, and my dear dark body

Are with me, certain,

God is a dream! And this is what

I do not know and have to know. O if

I only knew that! then what other lights on all—”

Thus Hershey Green, drawn in the opera,

Thrilled and enthralled by each new aria!

“Poor New York boy, with what finality

You will in time say,—and triumphantly!—

O what a metaphysical victory

The first morning and night of death must be!”

END OF BOOK ONE