Part 3 — JOHN IN PRISON (St. Luke, Chapter XVI. St. Matthew, Chapter XI.) (continued 2)

Son of the freer Republic, child of a day More joyous and more vital and more blest At the feast of Life; great heart, wise and gay, Forgiving and compassionate, though ever stressed Between the thorns, seeing afar the flower; And living from hour to hour In laughter for your wounds, or with a sigh For the thickening brambles that around you pressed:— April has come to me again and May Since that July When you sank gladly to a coveted rest, Almost with your words to me upon your lips: That immortality Is not a promise, but a threat; that sleep However eternal, or however deep No more the worn out heart equips For life again; cannot make whole A liver and a dreamer, and a soul That climbed, as you did, earth’s precipitous steep.

You who had lived with books and walked the city Of statesman and of priest, Of money changer, theorist, And knew the human heart thereby, Saw with clairvoyant eye Behind my irony and laughter, pity; Behind indifference desire; At the core of me unquenchable fire, Walled with impenetrable ice. This I confess: I strewed adversities to your love With pride, with slow forgiveness Of the world’s ways. Yet for the strength thereof, Born of that mystic brotherhood, which can rise From kindred spirits, none the less Was your love mine, even to the end. You were my brother, O my friend!

The wages of Wisdom is Death:— Shame, Fear, Want, Hate, Lust, Strife and Enmity, All these you lived, and living them through You survived them, but still knew Their quality. At last from them made free You stood in blossom, perfecter of bloom At the touch of the sickle than ever in all your years. Pure flame had conquered the reek and fume Of the gross fuel of your nature, feeding The light that lighted us, but to consume Itself at last. O soul of eyes and ears Open and heeding Signs of all fair and foul in the land, all climes, Riches of dead epochs, ancient times. O, human, worldly Augustine, in your tower Watching the wavering lines of Want or Power, Hailing and warning, Stilites of the rite Of Epicurus (that happiness at the last Is freedom) viewing the misty age Atop a pillar of Zeus, and holding fast, Through change and weariness, to work, in spite Of clear conviction, nothing can assuage The soul’s desire. Though the flesh has food, And water, and is satisfied, Yet the soul must hunger for hope, for explanation Of this insoluble task of life, defied By every test of the human soul, still wooed By flitting lights of faith and intimation. Yet if soul father us could soul not do For souls of us what water for our thirst Accomplishes? Promethean, this you knew: The restless search with which man’s soul is cursed; Yet brooding on it, still you dreamed Of a city for all nations, consecrate To the creative spirit of God in man; Guardian angels were to you revealed In labor with man’s fate, Uplifting the human spirit, like a flame, Consoled, redeemed, Strengthened and purified and healed, To the silent, eternal life from whence it came.

To this you have gone. I saw your artist hands That had so little rest Folded in quietness upon your breast. Whether the dead find peace, or loose the bands Of some intenser rhythm, still with peace Your face was sealed, as of a great surcease: Like sculpture, tideless streams, Or winter woods, or windless skies, Or sleep that has no dreams. Those spheres of flame, your ever wandering eyes, Were turned within to a realm more deep, Where death’s great secret seemingly was known As some clear, mild Simplicity! Or ’twas sleep Of the unborn that stilled them, or the void Of the dead seed never sown.... You were no more to me, whatever death is. I stood alone Empty of hand, save for the heritage Of what you were: A voice, a light, a music of deep tone, Which life made richer, and the age, And something of heaven employed To be for us our best interpreter. You were our star of empire lighting The path of peoples more and more To a freer day! O, voice of you which woke Rapt listeners over the earth. Out of your ashes wings of memory soar To carry the message of your life and word. Death of your body was the clearer birth Of the spirit of you, shining afar Upon our day and days to be: As evening winds blow coldly, yet make free From mist and hovering cloud The Western Star!

He had the bluest eyes I ever saw, And a smiling face like a bed of yellow daisies, And a voice around the house like a pet crow. And he went whistling through the yard and rooms, His hands grimed up with grease about machines, Which he could take apart and put together. And he could run a motor boat or a car. Or mend a telephone or a dynamo. And he knew novels, poetry and science. And he could swim, and box and run a race. And on a morning I went in his room And saw his naked body, saw his shoulders As broad as a great wrestler’s, and his arms As big as mine. He started to play bear, And took me in his arms and hugged me so I felt my ribs crack. Then I wondered when He had quit wearing stockings and knee breeches, And when it was he slipped to seventeen, Became a man. And so the war came on. He tried to be a flyer, for he knew What engines were and all about machines And he knew trigonometry, and chemistry, And wireless telegraphy—but his age Debarred him from the flyers; so he chafed And did not whistle as he used to do, But growled a little like a yearling bear. And then his face grew bright again: he had gone, Enlisted in the army, came to me, His face all glowing: “Everything I am You taught to me,” he said; “to love the truth, To love democracy and America. And now we have a war, the very first When men could fight to bring democracy. Our country turned against the revolution In France, which was a democratic cause, But now we war to bring democracy To peoples everywhere, and I am off. God moves among us, and to serve and die Are blessings, I am happy, and am off.” He terrified me with his shining face, His blue eyes, beautiful body, slim and strong. St. George was not more beautiful. I was awed, And said to him: “You terrify me, boy. There are plenty of men to go, await the call; Go if they call you, but you have your school, And if you go you’ll never go to school Again, and that will leave you half prepared For life, you’ll feel it all the rest of life.” But he stood up so straight and stern and shining And said: “I owe this service to you, Dad, For what you’ve been and taught me, and I owe it To God and to my country.” So it was He terrified me, and I said: “My boy, I am not wise enough, after all, to say What you should do. Perhaps you have a vision— You are America come to herself; A vision and a mission and a glory Perhaps, perhaps. I step aside. Go on!” They took him to a camp, and in a week I went to see him. He was in a pen Like a prize porker, looked a little down. He had been shot with vaccines of all sorts. He didn’t say much. Two weeks after that I saw him and he had a cold he caught From doing picket duty in the rain And sleeping on a mattress soaked with rain. The food was pretty good, not very good. He whispered: “All the pin-heads in the world Have got the jobs of officers. I’m surprised. I know more mathematics than they do, And more of everything. I thought an officer Was educated. Well, I am surprised.” He said the boys were dying right and left Because they had no care. And on a day When he came home to visit for a while He was stricken with the flu. I telephoned The officer, who raved and said no trick Would go with him. He’d send for him. He did, And took him out with a raging temperature, And back to camp. He almost died for that. And, when he got up, wobbled for some weeks. And about the time he stood up fairly strong They shipped him off to Europe; and they went Yelling like tigers smelling blood, and God Seemed farthest from their thoughts. Well, so it went. And after while we had the armistice, The war was over, but no letter came. Where was he? Dead? We couldn’t learn a thing. Until at last this boy who went to fight For God and for democracy landed up In Russia fighting democracy, as America Fought France in eighteen hundred—for a letter Came to us telling where he was. And there He stayed some months and fought for covenants Arrived at in the open, independence Of little and big peoples, for the sea’s Freedom, or democracy, I’m not sure, For one of these or all, I am not sure. He got through anyway, or they got through With him, perhaps, for he came back at last, One eye out and one leg gone, and he’d lost God, so he said, and didn’t use the word Democracy at all, and, as for war, He said to me: “What is it? Everything Has its own idea, and the idea of war Is killing people? That’s our job, that’s war! And everybody yells atrocities, And everybody does ’em—what the hell Do people think war is, a Sunday School? I want some money, Dad, for I am broke; And I can’t work at much now, and, by God, I think I’ll write my story. So they’ll know They use you, and they fool you, and you die That some one may make money selling stuff, Or grab off lands or commerce. Hell’s delight! When I was sick in Russia, had delusions, I saw a snake so big he wrapped the world And swallowed it with everybody in it. You see, the snake’s the money-men, big business, The schemers, human buzzards, who eat up Young fellows and the kids, and lay on fat With fresh young blood that wants to shed itself For God and truth! I killed a Russian soldier And said: ‘You bastard,’ as I stuck him through, You hate yourself, so you just kill to glut Your hatred of yourself, your cruelty Which lusts, as it can masquerade behind The mask of duty. Give me a dollar, Dad, To get some cigarettes and some shaving blades.”

Under a sky as green as a juniper berry The yellow sands of the dunes, in clefts and curves Run up and down, until the horizon swerves At Michigan City, twenty miles from Gary. Scrawls and grotesqueries of giants who laugh At the storm’s puffed cheeks, the water’s pilfering hands! Like the beat of a heart traced by a cardiograph, Their sky-line lifts and lulls, With the eternal pulse Of air and the sands. The dunes are a quilt of yellow, green and gray Spread to the Calumet River. Peaked by giant children who play Circus with feet for poles. Fantastic dunes, Protean hills, and migratory tents Of invisible gypsies, changing with the moon’s Replenished and exhausted valleys of light. Forests of pine and oak arise On many a height, And down the steep descents Flourish and vanish from sight, Under the restless feet of the wandering hills. They trace in sand the changes of the skies When the sun of evening smelts Great towers of cloud or battlements, And levels them, or warps Their shapes to broken walls, Or twisted scraps, Or floors of emerald strewn with lion pelts.... Here there are water-falls; Lakes bright as mercury, and pools Green as the mosses, where hepaticas And asters scurry before the gesturing wind; Cool hollows, scented brakes Of bramble, fern and cane; Great marshes where the flags leap like green snakes, Bordered with garish gules Of pye-weed; over whose wastes the crane Flaps the slow rhythm of extended wings. And on whose reeds the blackbird sings A quaver of blue water, March’s fire. Between the feet of the dunes and the trampling troops Of waves along the shore the sand is pounded Into a broad mosaic firm and smooth, Whereon are strewn old reels, between the groups Of blackened hut and booth. Boats lie here where they grounded, Like skeletons in the desert ribbed and black, Scaled with the water’s scurf. The shore is the moat between the ruined rampart Of the dunes, whose shifting is stayed By splotches of thickets, trees and turf, And the invading surf. Here phantom mists descend, and the wrack Of autumn clouds fade into the air when storms Harry the water, and the sand is flayed By the whip of the wind. There is forever here the futile fashioning Of hills, and their leveling; The growth of forests and their burial; Pools filled and rivers changed or dried Between the spoiling winds, and the mystical Hands of the tide! Branches as gnarled as an ancient olive tree Stream cherry blossoms like blown snow Toward the blue of the lake, a hundred feet below. They have been sand, now being blossoms drift With the winds whose spirit cannot be Quieted or given shrift. By night they howl or whine As if they asked for words, or a sign To tell of the sand and seeds and spores Which build and root, bear blossoms, seed, And change the uplands and the shores; Destroy, make over, mend Without use, without end In an endless cycle of sand and seed, Of wind and the washing of waves; They would tell why forests grow and find their graves; And hills glide to their sepulchres, Even as cities sink and pass away: Old Memphis, or old Bactria....

Seas, mountains, rivers, hills, forests and plains, Our earth that floats in heaven’s translucent sphere, And keeps us fosterlings, though man attains— As a spider winds the nerve white gossamer From its own being, and unwinding sails The heights—the secrets of the stars, the sheer Chasms of space, and tears the vaporous veils From Force and Distance. Nature! At the last Our breast of consolation! Man exhales Thereon the spirit which was an him cast From that same breast at birth. But what you are Remains, or on the mind of man is glassed As you, remaining; while the farthest star, The changing moon, the lessening sun, the sands Of buried cities toll our calendar Of dying days. Waters by star light, lands That slip or climb; leaves, blossoms, fruits contain The flesh of wonder perished, and the hands That sought with zeal or laughter, but in pain To know you and themselves. Still nourishing, Destroying, but unriddled, you remain! Immeasurable Arc! To which our brief existence Is a point, if relative, not understood. With you endowed with motion and persistence, Contained within you, is life evil, good? Is life not of you? Is there aught without By which to judge this restless brotherhood Of will and water, and to quiet doubt That life is good? And may the scheme deny Itself when it is all, and rules throughout, Knows no defeat, except as forces vie Within it, striving? But, O Nature, you Mother of suns and systems, what can lie As God beyond you, making you untrue To larger truth or being? You are all! And man who moves within you may imbrue His hands in war, or famine on him fall Out of your eyeless genius, yet what wrong Is wrought to your creating, magical Renewal, scheme? What arbiter more strong Than you are judges discord for the strife That stirs upon our earth, wherever throng Thoughts, forces, fires. What is evil? Life! Even as life is struggle, whether it smite, Or lift, as waves to waves in will are rife With enmity. Whatever is, is right. Like insects on a drift weed water tossed The sea of nature moves in man’s despite, While generations flourish and are lost. Ether of the ethereal energy Which whirls the atoms: Will in man. And soul Which is to light as light to flame: the free Soaring of man’s thought. This is the dole And tragedy of man: He has outgrown His kinship with the beasts that kept him whole, Through thought, which is not instinct, but would own The unerring realm of instinct. Like a sun He flares his thought in storms of fire, has flown His symmetry and sphere, has wandered, won No orbit for the beast’s, which he has marred, Departed from; must finish what’s begun, Until he be in spirit moved and starred, Instinct regained to thought, his sun created As far as flames have leaped; or leave the scarred Black cavities of his hopes to beings fated To grow therefrom to what he failed to reach. Something within him drew the gods, and mated His spirit to celestial powers. The breach Between him and the beast is fixed. He sinks In tangled madness, anger, railing speech, Below the ape, or else he rises, links His being to a life to which he climbs, A realm of thought harmonious, while he thinks. This is the tragedy of man, and Time’s Colossal task laid on him: Roll he must The stone up to the peak against the slimes, And fasten it, or let it make him dust, Escaped his hand and crushing, still confess That you, O Mighty Mother, still are just Who fling him down to failure, nothingness. This is the tragedy of man: to learn Your secret wishes, having learned to press The heights of life, or ignorant still to burn With questioning; and on this stage of earth Live as they lived of old in a return, Endless of useless labor, madder mirth. Labor or Mirth! No matter—but to man, And for an hour! And after that the sleep. Waking or sleeping man fulfills the plan Of you, O Mother. Other thought may creep On man’s defeated spirit, make him say That you should weep, O Mother, if he weep. But we are but ephemera in a play Of tangled sun light, and the universe Of ages counts the minutes of our day, And makes them of the ages. And the curse That man deems his is not upon the far And infinite existence. It could nurse No evil in great spaces, sun and star As great as man’s to man, and not lie down To death as man does. Hence if you unbar To us, O Nature, nothing better, crown Our hour with folly still, you give us rest Among the mountains, meadows, and unclown Our idiot brows, and on your infinite breast Rock us eternally under the infinite sky.