And when my Joy was born, I held it in my arms and stood on the house-top shouting, “Come ye, my neighbours, come and see, for Joy this day is born unto me. Come and behold this gladsome thing that laugheth in the sun.”
But none of my neighbours came to look upon my Joy, and great was my astonishment.
And every day for seven moons I proclaimed my Joy from the house-top—and yet no one heeded me. And my Joy and I were alone, unsought and unvisited.
Then my Joy grew pale and weary because no other heart but mine held its loveliness and no other lips kissed its lips.
Then my Joy died of isolation.
And now I only remember my dead Joy in remembering my dead Sorrow. But memory is an autumn leaf that murmurs a while in the wind and then is heard no more.
To me, fair friend, you never can be old, For as you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride, Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned In process of the seasons have I seen, Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned, Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green. Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand, Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived; So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand, Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived: For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred: Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.
Above the fresh ruffles of the surf Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand. They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks, And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed Gaily digging and scattering.
And in answer to their treble interjections The sun beats lightning on the waves,
When you get in on a try you never learn it back umpteen times the tenth part of a featured world in black and in back it’s roses and fostered nail bite rhyme sling slang, a song that teaches without travail of the tale, the one you longing live and singing burn
It’s insane to remain a trope, of a rinsing out or a ringing whatever, it’s those bells that . . .
Where, like a pillow on a bed A pregnant bank swell'd up to rest The violet's reclining head, Sat we two, one another's best. Our hands were firmly cemented With a fast balm, which thence did spring; Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread Our eyes upon one double string; So to'intergraft our hands, as yet Was all the means to make us one, And pictures in our eyes to get Was all our propagation. As 'twixt two equal armies fate Suspends uncertain victory, Our souls (which to advance their state
"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried, As he landed his crew with care; Supporting each man on the top of the tide By a finger entwined in his hair.
"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice: That alone should encourage the crew.
Welcome to your day of sanity! Come in and close the door it will likely lock behind you and you will be home alone waste disposal will take care of your needs : at long last undisturbed phenomena without the heavy metal background of the street will be yours for observation and response : do you have visions? do you think? Your mouth do you open it for more than medication? I should know I know that I should know : we’ve watched centuries erode the fortress drain the moat the poet’s clumsy beast has reached its home and prey we wither in the gridlock of our power only the guns remain and are in use pure accident is beauty to be glimpsed your trembling only further clouds your sight I in my home you in your other place harmonize the fading anthem of an age the cracked bell of our liberty keeps time a penny for the corpse you left behind keep on recycling all that you have heard before call it a double bind much like the dead bolt that locked the door that keeps you safe and sane : ho — hum — harry who? oh that’s just a phrase found in a time capsule capped and sealed and shot up in the air : no I cannot tell you where it fell to earth that page was torn out years ago it’s chance that we have a fragment of that language left : do your archaeology before a mirror the canyons and the barren plains are clear but where to dig for a ruined golden age a fiction we were served with breakfast flakes say have you forgot this day of sanity? No problem the heavy key was thrown away as soon as the door was closed and locked you’re safe : some day the asylum may be torn down to make way for a palace of the mad it does not follow that anything will change : choose your executioner by lot almost everyone is trained and competent there are different schools of course check out degrees fees can become an issue of your choice and some may be in service or abroad as usual nothing’s simple it’s all a part of the grand unraveling that must take place before the new line can be introduced : prepare now don’t be shocked when the music starts the year’s fashions may feature pins and nails.
I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension Fallen from my prime, when company Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention, Before time took my leafy hours away.
My wisdom, ripe with body’s ruin, found Itself tart recompense for what was lost In false exchange: since wisdom in the ground Has no apocalypse or pentecost.
If Heaven has into being deigned to call Thy light, O Liberty! to shine on all; Bright intellectual Sun! why does thy ray To earth distribute only partial day? Since no resisting cause from spirit flows Thy universal presence to oppose; No obstacles by Nature’s hand impressed, Thy subtle and ethereal beams arrest;
Hatred and vengeance, my eternal portion, Scarce can endure delay of execution, Wait, with impatient readiness, to seize my Soul in a moment.
Damned below Judas: more abhorred than he was, Who for a few pence sold his holy master. Twice betrayed, Jesus me, the last delinquent, Deems the profanest.
Man disavows, and Deity disowns me: Hell might afford my miseries a shelter; Therefore hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths all Bolted against me.
Felix Randal the farrier, O is he dead then? my duty all ended, Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it, and some Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?
Sickness broke him. Impatient, he cursed at first, but mended Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!
This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears. My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears, Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;
How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
In one corner of the ward somebody was eating a raw chicken. The cheerful nurses did not see. With the tube down my throat I could not tell them. Nor did they notice the horror show on the TV set suspended over my windowless bed. The screen was dead
Come, Holy Spirit, bending or not bending the grasses, appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame, at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada. I am only a man: I need visible signs. I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction. Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
I He who has never tasted the grapes of Canaan can only view them from Pisgah.
I have my tides, O sea-foamed Venus, dearer than watercress, pipkins, thyme and clymene. You once held me by the cord of my navel, but I have not died to live in Mahomet’s paradise.
Would that I could gather up my love to me as one does one’s fate, or measure her nature as God does the sea.
We are a weary race that hates seedtime. Poor Persephone, who is Maying springtime, and the coming up of flowers! We remember only what we seed, and Persephone goes down into the earth after Spring and Summer vegetation only because Pluto gave her pomegranate seeds to remember him, but if the seed perish, Persephone will die, and memory shall pass from the earth.
A man of humble blood, with a soul of Kidron, needs a Rachel, but I labored for years in the weary fields for Leah.II The world is a wound in my soul, and I have sought the living waters in meditation, and the angelical fountains in the desert of Beersheba for solitude, for what health there is in friendship comes when one is alone.
I shed tears on the Mount of Olives because people no longer care for each other, but my friends have lacked the character for the vigil. There is no Cana wine in human affections that are not always awake, for people who do not trouble about each other are foes.
It is humiliating being the lamb and bleating to each passerby, “Feed me!” What is the use of saying that men are stones when I know I am going to try to turn them into bread.
I am afraid to say that people are truthful. When a man tells me he is honest I press my hand close to my heart where I keep my miserable wallet. If he says he has any goodness in him, I avoid him, for I trust nobody who has so little fear of the evils that grow and ripen in us while we imagine we have one virtuous trait. These demons lie in ambush in the thick, heady coverts of the blood, where hypocrisy and egoism fatten, waiting to mock or betray us in any moment of self-esteem.
I have no faith in a meek man, and regard anyone that shows a humble mien as one who is preparing to make an attack upon me, for there is some brutish, nether fault in starved vanity.
Yet once a friend leaned as gently on my coat as that disciple had on the bosom of the Saviour, and I went away, not knowing by his affection whether I was the John Christ was said to have loved most. I whispered thanks to my soul because he leaned upon me, for I shall never know who I am if I am not loved.
V Much flesh walks upon the earth void of heart and warm liver, for it is the spirit that dies soonest.
Some men have marshland natures with mist and sea-water in their intellects, and are as sterile as the Florida earth which De Soto found in those meager, rough Indian settlements, and their tongues are fierce, reedy arrows. They wound and bleed the spirit, and their oaks and chestnut trees and acorns are wild, and a terrible, barren wind from the Atlantic blows through their blood as pitiless as the primitive rivers De Soto’s soldiers could not ford.
Do not attempt to cross these mad, tumid rivers, boreal and brackish, for water is unstable, and you cannot link yourself to it.
There are also inland, domestic men who are timid pulse and vetch, and though they may appear as stupid as poultry rooting in the mire, they are housed people, and they have orchards and good, tamed wine that makes men loving rather than predatory; go to them, and take little thought of their ignorance which brings forth good fruits, for here you may eat and not be on guard for the preservation of your soul.
People who have domestic animals are patient, for atheism and the stony heart are the result of traveling: sorrow never goes anywhere. Were we as content as our forefathers were with labor in the fallow, or as a fuller with his cloth, or a drayman with his horses and mules, we would stay where we are, and that is praying.
There are men that are birds, and their raiment is trembling feathers, for they show their souls to everyone, and everything that is ungentle or untutored or evil or mockery is as a rude stone cast at them, and they suffer all day long, or as Paul remarks they are slain every moment.
God forgive me for my pride; though I would relinquish my own birthright for that wretched pottage of lentils which is friendship, I mistrust every mortal.
Each day the alms I ask of heaven is not to have a new chagrin which is my daily bread.
Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly, May gaze thro’ these faint smokes curling whitely, As thou pliest thy trade in this devil’s-smithy— Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?
He is with her, and they know that I know Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—I am here.
Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste, Pound at thy powder,—I am not in haste! Better sit thus and observe thy strange things, Than go where men wait me and dance at the King’s.
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