The world was a dream of beauty, an ache of loveliness,
An ache that I felt in my body,
A phallic pain,
As though I must unite myself like the sky with the earth …
It was unbearable …
For everything spoke of death, everything whispered in my ears, “James you will die …
Hence, the transciency, the will-o'-the-wisp evanescence of beauty,
The too brief morning, the shadow that grew with afternoon,
The coming of the fear of darkness, the menace of the night …
I lived with death and life …
I lay sweating and trembling in bed in blackness …
I moaned to myself and prayed …
What was that in the corner glimmering bulky and pale?
Did it move? Was it crouching? Would it come to the bedside and clutch me?
And the window … who was rattling the window and beginning to push it up?
Were those eyes in the blackness at the foot of the bed?
How should I live all night? how should I survive the ordeal?
Mother was in the next room: I might have called her …
I could not: I should rather die than have her know I was a coward …
Then, suddenly, I opened my eyes …
It was bright morning … sunlight flooded in …
The room was simple and sweet … shadows were gone …
The curtain was blowing in the breeze … was it Spring? Summer?
I smelt faint honeysuckle, I heard the gay sounds of carts …
My heart leaped with abandonment of joy …
So deep the terror, the very taking away of it filled me with laughter and rhapsody …
I went in bare feet on the cool floor and flung up the window …
I saw the glow and colour of earth, trees, countryside, roads and the sky;
I praised God without thinking of him;
I was mad with love; I wanted only to shout and dance;
I wanted only to kiss and clasp, and run down the road through the sunlight …
Then, after breakfast, grammar …
I sat under the maple tree and tried to look at my book …
It was meaningless …
My glance wandered over the glazed air of the tremulous fields,
Over the waving corn, over the green orchard, over the hills,
I saw the happy children playing down at the brook-side,
I saw a butterfly in sunlight fluttering about the porch-pillars of the farm-house,
I saw a chipmunk flitting along the grey stone-wall …
Phantasy possessed me … I lounged and dreamed …
I saw that beautiful white and gold lady and her soft rose cheeks and her smiling eyes …
And everything was too beautiful …
Too beautiful the blue of the sky, green of the earth,
Too poignant the gleam of wonder in butterfly wings,
Too aching lovely the summer fields, the glaze of the morning …
My throat was clutched with tears …
I wanted to weep my life out on that gentle bosom of my dreams …
The pain of sex was mine … the mystic something that pulsed between earth and sky,
Danced in a rhythm down the wayward quick-step of the brook,
Throbbed in the glaze, waved through the leaves of the maple at the caress of the winds,
Flowed sinuous through the moving body of a young girl in shadow and shine down the road,
The beating of my heart, the quickening phallic pulsation,
The dream of nakedness in nature, of a covert in the woods, and moss, and silence,
And the white and gold body that melted coolly with mine …
Till the Magic Carpet of dream bore me half-delirious, half-maddened, in a strange stupor,
Into the mystic love-gardens of the Thousand Nights and One,
Whence I returned, exhausted, dull …
And now my great friend the sun was starting down the ominous, portentous slope …
He would leave me … he would leave me to death and darkness …
He would abandon me with a last backward glory of shouting colors;
Earth would grow cold, the damp edge in, the blackness take all …
I was an outcast, an exile, abandoned … there was no help for me …
I must go again to the Terror, I must go again to the ever-present monster of darkness …
I must go to the cold sweat and the incessant shivering,
I must lie and think: “I am alive now and I am I:
Suppose something kills me? Will I see it killing me? Will I know I am dead?
Or will I stop being at all?”
And at that last thought my body would become a stone of revolt …
I would freeze with protest …
What! This “I,” this intensely vivid, defiant, aching, ecstatic self
To be cheaply trampled under heel, stamped out in the mud like a beetle?
Was I to be scattered, and cease?
O, only one who has felt this terror knows what it is to live!
It is when you look death in the face and recoil
That you live with sting and passion in every atom of your being …
I no longer know that terrible ecstasy of mere existence
When to draw a breath is a voluptuous miracle,
And such a swim of beauty pours over the brain
That only song is vent and release …
But I knew it then …
Did I say the days were happy?
They, too, held their anguish … anguish of desire and fear …
Though I loved the woods, could I venture into them alone?
Were there not chimerical beasts? Were there not snakes?
I think I was afraid of my shadow in those days …
I think the Dark Presence was always near me, whispering, “James, James, James, you are going to die” …
Always, I could love life so, because I hated death so …
I hated the abyss on which I walked …
I accused creation of treachery and malicious trickery
So to bring me to life, to offer me such a feast of beauty and joy,
To fill me with immortal delights, with loves and powers,
And then to stand back of me like a shadow tarnishing all,
Poisoning the sun and earth and the air,
Sickening my body,
Threatening to snatch me into nothingness without preparation or warning …
Every mouthful might be my last, every joy might be cut in career;
I was defenceless, hopeless, lost and alone …
And nobody bothered his head about it!
Every one else went gaily along as if he were an immortal!
My neighbours were godlike in their unconscious sufficiency!
Some of them even loved to go to bed and to go to sleep …
What was I, so unlike them, a stranger, a coward, a despicable baby?
Or did I know, and they didn't? Was it mine alone, this ghastly secret of death?
Did I say I loved life and hated death?
Ah, not so, not so …
Really, I didn't know it, but I was a lover of death …
It is the Walts who love life; who plunge like swimmers into the sea of the roaring streets,
Who transform with immediate love the shattered and squalid slums,
Who take in their arms the roughs and cripples and monsters of the world,
Who hear in noise the music of the marching race,
And in confusion see the God at work …
Not I! not I!
Somewhere midway between life and death was the garden I was seeking …
A garden wrought all of the wonder and beauty of the earth,
Wrought of the images of mountains, meadows and cities,
And images of people,
And in the heart of it the Belovèd …
And there I should wander and with a magic wand raise new civilizations,
Build and break empires, set armies a-clash in smoky battles,
Anoint the gods and set the dusk upon them …
Sit at my ease and watch the light-draped maidens dance …
I would be Aladdin …
I would be the God of the Looking-Glass World …
It was the “mirror held up to nature” … it was the world of art …
I was always the artist to my finger-tips …
Yes, I was one who hated both life and death …
I wanted to live in the safety within the mirror
Where the images of life and death blended in timeless beauty,
And there was neither the hard task, the heavy responsibility,
The sweat, the noise, the nervous tension of earth,
Nor yet the ghastly oblivion, the “nothing, nothing” of death …
What should such creatures as I do “crawling between heaven and earth”?
A widow with six children: a delicate, sensitive woman:
Americans of the middle class:
A dark and handsome family, gentle and home-loving …
Mother-hen with her chicks wandering from place to place, country and city …
But the faint stigmata of being Jews like a shadow upon them …
The Mother was the air they breathed, the doctrine they imbibed …
The quivering tentacles of her nerves were rooted in the children's hearts …
Her dark in-dwellings, her great fears, her loves and hopes,
Her passions, poignancies of experience,
Her mean health, headaches, colds, sore throats,
Those, and much else, entered the souls of her children …
Mother and I were much alike:
And yet I must be much different:
I was the eldest son, and an immense burden was laid on my shoulders …
What can I say of my father? He died when I was six …
I think of him mainly as dark and tall, with warm magnetic love,
With ringing laughter and deep-bassed singing, a vivid and brilliant person,
Passionate over his large family, a democrat and a doer;
He charms me through and through, he is strangely, lovably human,
His rough cheek rubs against mine, he smells rich of tobacco …
I am in disgrace: I am sent supperless to bed, and lie in blackness:
I am sobbing loud sobs of desolate exile, despairing guilt:
I may expect no mercy, no help, no assuagement nor healing …
My father enters softly; he lies down on the bed beside me;
He takes me in his arms …
I am soothed, quiet … I have never been so happy in all my days …
O, I love him … I have found the beloved …
Found the haven, the heaven of arms I long for …
I fall asleep on his shoulder …
Quiet and hush … it is a sunny autumn afternoon …
The four-story brown-stone house is uncannily silent …
I am a tailor: I am cutting and sewing a pair of pants for my little brother:
My aunt is there, taking my mother's place … both mother and father are sick …
My little grandmother comes in, walks softly, inaudibly by me …
She carefully pulls down the shades, making the room yellow …
I confront her: “Why do you pull down the shades, grandma?”
It is hard for her to speak: I see red around her eyes: she is crying …
She says there is too much sunlight …
Then she looks at me, hesitates, takes me by the arm,
Whispers in my ears, “James, your father is dead” …
I am proud she has told me the secret …
I go on fitting the pants on my brother: they are rather tight for him …
Two days have passed … it is morning … the house is full of miracles …
I am led down to my mother's room: she lies in bed, so pale, so thin, so poor …
Her tears flow as she kisses me …
I smell flowers—lilies, roses, violets—I shall never forget that smell …
I am taken down in the long parlour where my father always sang so darkly
“Old Black Joe,” and “Suwanee River,” and “Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground” …
There are people there: uncles and aunts: grandpa and grandma …
There are camp-stools, and a black-cloth coffin smothered in flowers …
I am full of wonder: my aunt raises me in her arms to say good-bye to my father …
I say, “Good-bye, father” …
She says: “Promise your father you will take his place” …
I begin, “I promise,”—then I see my father …
See his dark quiet face, the eyes in sleep, the hands laid on the breast,
The black dress-suit, the stiff collar and shirt …
And now my infancy is ended …
For this is death; I have come face to face with my enemy, death …
A lightning-bolt of the inexorable truth goes slaying the babe through me and through me …
My beloved lies dead … I shall never see my father again …
Death has taken him from me …
O broken heart of a child … even now, saying this, I go blind with hot tears …
The child, held there, promising, broke in wild sobs of anguish,
And was mercifully taken away …
Servant-girls soothed me, saying, “He is an angel now,”
And religion began for me …
Like a primitive I accepted the immortality of the soul …
Thereafter, in dark hours, I shut myself in the little top-floor room,
And knelt and beseeched my father to come to me,
Poured my young love out of my heart's cup before him,
And a little found my God …
But now I must take his place: I must hurry and be a man …
Strange task for the dreamy little singer and artist!
I became immensely responsible toward my brothers and sisters,
Tried to companion my mother and share in her problems,
Grew sober, alert and grave …
And then through all the years ran this double strain:
“I must be my father,” “I must be a singer” …
The artist and man contended in me, hating each other …
Out of the conflict grew the abrupt ambition,
The dream of empire and of conquest,
Of wealth, world-power, prestige,
To be all things that my little world expected of a man …
And against it all, I wanted, not to be my father,
But to be the child encircled by my father's love …
I wanted to go from the hard weary world, the torture of existence,
The clash and dust of my brain,
Into that cell of abnegation and quiet
Where the invisible Beloved hovers,
And I should give birth to the divine child,
My inspired song, my poem, born in love …
So I wished often I could remain a child …
So I wished only to be an artist …
And so, torn as in two, at last I merged man and artist,
And out of my art made my ambitious conquering career,
Sold my love for power, converted religion into livelihood,
And gave the artist in me to be a semi-harlot of the press …
It was then I had an ancient complaint called “the dead soul,”
And knew a few brittle years of hard, bright winnings …
Had my own family, my place in the world, my appetites,
And came to the pit of cold despair …
Those were my most American days:
In those days I could celebrate America with Walt's own gusto …
But the Walts find their souls in the huge love they pour over terrible facts,
The James's only lose their souls, being more lovers of Gods, than men …
I must smile now:
I suddenly see a picture of that sober little fellow
Gravely conferring with his mother …
He is always ready to discuss things with her:
She interests him in books and pictures:
They talk practical problems together …
He is, indeed, the little father …
He compels his brothers and sisters to join his great imaginings,
His games, inventions, plays:
He bosses them around …
He begins to dream of being the father of the world …
From the very depths of his fear of the world
Springs an ardour to conquer it …
He learns about Napoleon and Lincoln and Jesus Christ …
Shall he be a soldier, a statesman, a millionaire or a saviour?
Which father shall he be?
Demosthenes the stammerer became a great orator,
Pale sickly Bonaparte held Europe in his eagle-talons,
The crude youth of Avon wrote Hamlet and King Lear,
The railsplitter sat in the White House,
The child in the manger became the redeemer of mankind …
Fearful, timorous, bossy, over-masculine, shy girlish James,
Under his weight of fears, the slave of Demon Death,
By what path should he climb to the throne of God and hurl the bearded governor from his seat?
I do not expand here:
I would sometimes stand in a dizziness and crass excitement of ambition
So great, I had rapidly to walk it off;
I could hardly at such moments live with myself …
I was already throned and crowned, high over the heads of the awe-struck multitudes,
The Earth a marble in my pocket …
And one day I was in Central Park with my mother …
(Do I dream this or is it so?)
Over the walk came swinging an old giant of pink and white,
His collar open, his flowing luminous beard blowing in the wind, his head bare,
Hat in his pendulous hand …
And she told me he had to do this because of pains in his head …
Every day he walked from one end of Central Park to the other …
He was a poet:
His name was Walt Whitman …
I see him still rounding the hill poised like a sun-god against the blue sky …
My father had an early edition of Leaves of Grass …
I looked in, shocked, repelled, attracted: a burst of health seemed to envelope me:
A sea-breeze blew from that book scattering vapours of death:
I had found my opposite—it would be years before I loved him …
For I was lulled in old sweet songs: rhymes were like lullabies in my brain …
And I remembered in adolescence away with my sister by a little wild lake
My one-volume Shakespeare, and the dream of magic that swept me away …
I could not have told what I was reading …
I could not grasp the plot, the thought, the people …
I was riding the cataracts of sheer sound, of the spheral music …
I wept, exulted, despaired over the drip of tones …
It was the same with Wagner:
My brother and I accidentally hearing Tristan and Isolde from a high gallery,
And suddenly the scarf waved and the opera house burst wide open and became the sky dense with suns,
And I rose a comet of exultant song among the audient planets …
Walt has said of himself: “Whatever that boy saw, that he became” …
It was not exactly so with me …
Whatever I saw that was great, that I seemed to become …
I had various teachers …
There was one when I was fourteen:
He taught chastity, brotherhood, social work, unselfishness …
He lived among the poor …
And he was under a relentless good man of powerful brain
Who was thinking out new religions and teaching ethics …
A Jew, this last … an intellectual Messiah …
The Messiah-dream is deep in the Jew
For he needs a Messiah …
Jesus, the Jew, out of this need was born out of Jewry:
He fulfilled the Jew in himself by overcoming the Jew …
So, through these teachers I became puritan and good,
A saint by day, a voluptuary in secret in the fearful night,
And gradually the image of Jesus came to dominate me …
Gradually I blended my Napoleon, my Lincoln, my Shakespeare, my Wagner and Jesus
Into a Messiah who should conquer and save the world through song …
Nay, more: a Messiah who should be a song …
And I? I was Mary …
No more the father of the world, but its holy mother …
The sorrowing world needing to be reborn …
It was so I became an inspired artist …
Only years later could I understand what I had been doing …
For always in the midst of failure and fear, and when I felt trampled and despairing,
I withdrew from others in violent black mood,
I withdrew into storm-cloud,
I withdrew actually from the love of mother or wife or child
Back to the love of the shadow-parent, my God,
I entered the mirror of images,
I was enclosed in the black womb of the greater self,
I lay as one dead …
And then I arose and found my courage and began to struggle,
Set up in my spirit the rhythm of love with this God,
And in a spasm of the love-act and the need of birth,
This rhythm ran with words, became the rhythm of song …
For I had made the mystic discovery:
At thirteen years, in the wood, beside a brook,
At fifteen, in longshore streets at sunset,
At nineteen, on Morningside Heights coming from college,
The mystic vision flashed open the world … I saw the God in things …
I had come over the headlands to the shore of that silver sea
Which lies in the spirit of man,
That sea which has washed the brains of all our immortals,
Whose waves, running whitely in, break songs of the ages on our human coasts,
Bring timeless wisdom and revelation. …
And I, reaching into myself in darkness of storm,
Pitiably little, a waif blown out of the world,
Became one with the Dæmon,
Became the supernatural mother,
And the terrific tide of song poured through me,
And I knew myself no mere mortal but a God,
And that my song was verily Christ …
So the defeated boy, terrified of life and of death,
The least of these, could be first;
He could in the ecstasy and agony of creation transcend mortality:
He could reach by magic the goals of ambition,
He could bring to the Earth a revelation, a religion …
How well this should have been
Had the fruit been equal to the vision and passion …
But look, here it was, the poor crude little song …
And the great world roared on unaware of the new-born Christ …
Was it then the Christ? O harrowing doubt!
Down I plunged again into the abyss of self-contempt …
I would turn from song, I would conquer the world direct,
I would be a man …
I essayed, and failed … song lured me again …
Again the storm-cloud, again the agony,
Again the triumph of music and vision …
And so I turned to song as the drunkard to whiskey …
I debauched myself with music …
I lived only for the terrible divine hours of Dionysiac madness …
Song was my comfort, my stay …
Not that there was no counter-current …
Like a drunkard, I tried to cure myself:
I was cruel in self-dicipline …
I tried ever to live the religion of my songs …
To be interested in others, to join good causes, to work among the poor,
And last, and greatest, to learn how to love …
Love? What did I love but the God with whom I became one,
The God I almost ousted like a triumphant Satan? …
I sang love, but did not love …
And yet in a way I was all love …
I was all a dream of women …
And it was because women were so beautiful, and I beauty's slave,
That I downed them, cheapened them in my heart;
I had been lost else in the whirlpool of white bodies
Where youth goes down in desire …
I saved myself, turning from love of women to love of the great God …
To the love that knows no sweat and pain of the dust in it,
No nesting, mating, breeding, drudging …
But I must love: I turned, and married …
A little boy was born. . . . I must play the father …
We were poor and penniless … I must play the man …
I warped the divine song into stories of the poor which I sold to the press …
Harsher grew the discipline, greater the need of money …
We lived, not like the poor, but comfortably and middle-class …
I must make great swollen sums from my art …
More and more I must change my writing to something bright and casual …
I must grow more popular …
And as this came about, I felt for the first time death in me …
Something was gone … some precious flame was extinguished …
I was like a hollow shell adumbrating old echoes out of a dead past …
I grew listless, sick, and turned to the comforts and sleeknesses of life …
Now I was seeking a Saviour for myself …
I that had been a Saviour, now needed one …
In death I sought for life …
New knowledge came …
My marriage broke open and showed itself for what it was,
No marriage, on either side …
I had been no husband, I had no wife …
The marriage ended … I went off to a life of lonely poverty …
And in that life, in anguish, listening, brooding,
I heard from far-off the murmur of the divine music coming like a turning tide back to me,
I heard in my depths the pure song,
The soul returned with music …
I could not question: I could only give glad tears of rejoicing and joy …
I shaped that glory as it came: I wrought my book …
You may understand it now: that book of birth …
Is this all there is to report?
Was it all abysmal weakness and monstrous egotism?
Or is there not something in the very nature of such as I that delights in exposing frailty
Where a Walt exults in himself?
Partly that:
And partly that the world wasn't made for the Hamlets, the Dantes, the Raskolnikoffs and the Poes …
Through the eyes of the world they see themselves black and base …
They must be Gods and Demons, lest they be scum among men …
But these men have also the Prince in them …
This poor James was also charming and magnetic …
A handsome lad, with face like a cherub, open and generous …
Many women and girls could yearn over him, though they felt him too much of the spirit for passionate love …
He was too modest if anything, put no one beneath him, treated all alike,
Served, waited and fetched, loved to be a teacher, romped with the children,
Read poetry aloud with a sensuous voice, very musical and rich,
Had in him some gift of soothing and cooling the fever of others …
He would lie for hours with his boys and pat them to sleep …
And he had almost a genius for friendship …
With the true friend, he was sensitive, subtle, moving on waves of understanding,
Weaving deep talk and vistas of vision …
In truth, with whomever he was at the time, he identified himself
And warmly lived inside the life of the other …
Simple people often loved him, children came running to him …
He could do excellent work also in his jobs …
Was inventive, rapid, energetic,
Was swift to success, though in the end he turned away to his singing …
He could advise much with his elders,
An excellent head for the problems of others,
Much sweetness and light in him, a certain harsh vigour at times, an Olympian detachment …
Is that enough to fill out the other side,
To see him in his varied humanity,
His good badness, his bad goodness,
Strength and weakness—
A spirit as protean as the weather, the sea,
A child of nature, born more for the moon than the sun,
One incapable of fixed conditions, of long endurances,
Charming, unstable, churned with too great emotions, intellectual, self-conscious—
The artist, finally, the artist?
Yet what is the artist?
Is he not also the strange hero of the people,
Something more than natural, a half-god creating half-worlds whose glory leads us to new worlds?
Is he not a whimsical mystery among us,
A zigzag skating fire that disturbs our comfort,
A sacrifice for the race, whereby vision dies for no people?
He is the mystic warrior in that dark abyss where the cosmic monsters play:
Baffled and beaten and overthrown he lies down in the belly of God,
Then rises, and strikes till the blood gushes and the music runs,
And like old Prometheus he brings the fire of the heavens as a torch to the race:
Prophecy he brings from the very matrix of the dark buried Wisdom,
Revelations out of life deeper than the eyes have ever seen,
And loves unimagined before …
America shuns him, cutting herself off from her own greatness:
But he comes nevertheless … he is Walt riding on top a bus, and Poe dreaming of stars in a cottage with his wife dying,
And Emerson, absent-minded, minded of the Oversoul, in Concord woods,
And Hawthorne moody in sad Puritanism,
And Mark Twain smoking his cigars in bed, sweating and groaning over Huckleberry Finn,
And giant-like tearful Dreiser, and Sandburg sitting in a newspaper office,
And Vachel Lindsay jazzing in Paradise (or is it Springfield, Illinois?),
And Masters among all souls in strange Spoon River,
And yes, even this struggling James with his great ambitions …
So I speak for the artist …
But also I speak for the multitude like myself, with equal struggles and the same yearnings,
The same sorrows, joys and lamentings,
But no gift: inarticulate, frustrated, America's victims.
Where was I in America?
Walt went through with eyes, hands, ears all leaping from him,
Grasping the bright facets of the crowds and the shows and sights,
Intensely, concretely aware of pilots and bus-men, lilacs and thrushes,
Bathing forever in the tumults and tastes of reality …
But I had to stop and look if I wanted to see anything,
Stop, and pinch myself, and strain to stare at the world about me …
I could see it well enough, if I tried to,
I could get drunk on it all, too …
I could be half-crazed with the teasing of a line, a colour, the glance of a face,
Trying to set it down in words …
I could exult in crowds, in the sunrise, and moon on waters …
But this came through discipline …
My natural way was to go through crowded streets blind to everything,
Lost in my worrying dream …
I remember in early manhood how I hated America with a great hate…
Hated the sordid noon-streets, ugly with brick and dirt,
Filthy with people …
How I lived in a Settlement House among the poor, and never saw the poor except by holding my nose …
Was as naturally an aristocrat as Walt was a democrat,
And only came to a passion for human causes
Through a great drenching in Lincoln, John Brown and Whitman …
Why record oneself like this?
Because the Great Society will have to come down from all to each:
Each, to be more than himself, must first be himself.
Out of what we are, and not out of slogans and manifestoes and creeds, may we truly live together …
Walt has recorded the children of the sun: they are many …
I would record the children of the moon: they are very many …
We may only reveal our kind through revealing ourselves …
America is not alone a Walt, and a Franklin, and a Lincoln,
It is also a Poe, a Hawthorne: it is also I.
Art has always revealed man to man,
But we are done with the standard man, the abstract hero …
Today the individual must reveal his own self
If he would hold the mirror up to nature …
I say to my kind: Let us dare to be what we are,
Let us cease to play we are opposites of our natures,
Let us not dream we can follow a Walt down the dust of the open road,
Let us not try to be Abraham Lincolns,
Let us not mask ourselves with the masks of the great lovers:
But let us seek height inwardly, through our natural love,
Love libraries and laboratories,
Find our true friends and true gods,
Follow the devil of our dreams,
Seek freedom in our own way,
Make our lives unique gifts of power, character, works,
Give to America, which has had the sun,
Also the moon and the cloud-daubed stars …
We must strike free of tradition'd America, however our blood sings with it,
Strike free even of our sun-gods, Walt and Abraham,
Strike free to be ourselves, lest we lose ourselves and be nothing …
An ache that I felt in my body,
A phallic pain,
As though I must unite myself like the sky with the earth …
It was unbearable …
For everything spoke of death, everything whispered in my ears, “James you will die …
Hence, the transciency, the will-o'-the-wisp evanescence of beauty,
The too brief morning, the shadow that grew with afternoon,
The coming of the fear of darkness, the menace of the night …
I lived with death and life …
I lay sweating and trembling in bed in blackness …
I moaned to myself and prayed …
What was that in the corner glimmering bulky and pale?
Did it move? Was it crouching? Would it come to the bedside and clutch me?
And the window … who was rattling the window and beginning to push it up?
Were those eyes in the blackness at the foot of the bed?
How should I live all night? how should I survive the ordeal?
Mother was in the next room: I might have called her …
I could not: I should rather die than have her know I was a coward …
Then, suddenly, I opened my eyes …
It was bright morning … sunlight flooded in …
The room was simple and sweet … shadows were gone …
The curtain was blowing in the breeze … was it Spring? Summer?
I smelt faint honeysuckle, I heard the gay sounds of carts …
My heart leaped with abandonment of joy …
So deep the terror, the very taking away of it filled me with laughter and rhapsody …
I went in bare feet on the cool floor and flung up the window …
I saw the glow and colour of earth, trees, countryside, roads and the sky;
I praised God without thinking of him;
I was mad with love; I wanted only to shout and dance;
I wanted only to kiss and clasp, and run down the road through the sunlight …
Then, after breakfast, grammar …
I sat under the maple tree and tried to look at my book …
It was meaningless …
My glance wandered over the glazed air of the tremulous fields,
Over the waving corn, over the green orchard, over the hills,
I saw the happy children playing down at the brook-side,
I saw a butterfly in sunlight fluttering about the porch-pillars of the farm-house,
I saw a chipmunk flitting along the grey stone-wall …
Phantasy possessed me … I lounged and dreamed …
I saw that beautiful white and gold lady and her soft rose cheeks and her smiling eyes …
And everything was too beautiful …
Too beautiful the blue of the sky, green of the earth,
Too poignant the gleam of wonder in butterfly wings,
Too aching lovely the summer fields, the glaze of the morning …
My throat was clutched with tears …
I wanted to weep my life out on that gentle bosom of my dreams …
The pain of sex was mine … the mystic something that pulsed between earth and sky,
Danced in a rhythm down the wayward quick-step of the brook,
Throbbed in the glaze, waved through the leaves of the maple at the caress of the winds,
Flowed sinuous through the moving body of a young girl in shadow and shine down the road,
The beating of my heart, the quickening phallic pulsation,
The dream of nakedness in nature, of a covert in the woods, and moss, and silence,
And the white and gold body that melted coolly with mine …
Till the Magic Carpet of dream bore me half-delirious, half-maddened, in a strange stupor,
Into the mystic love-gardens of the Thousand Nights and One,
Whence I returned, exhausted, dull …
And now my great friend the sun was starting down the ominous, portentous slope …
He would leave me … he would leave me to death and darkness …
He would abandon me with a last backward glory of shouting colors;
Earth would grow cold, the damp edge in, the blackness take all …
I was an outcast, an exile, abandoned … there was no help for me …
I must go again to the Terror, I must go again to the ever-present monster of darkness …
I must go to the cold sweat and the incessant shivering,
I must lie and think: “I am alive now and I am I:
Suppose something kills me? Will I see it killing me? Will I know I am dead?
Or will I stop being at all?”
And at that last thought my body would become a stone of revolt …
I would freeze with protest …
What! This “I,” this intensely vivid, defiant, aching, ecstatic self
To be cheaply trampled under heel, stamped out in the mud like a beetle?
Was I to be scattered, and cease?
O, only one who has felt this terror knows what it is to live!
It is when you look death in the face and recoil
That you live with sting and passion in every atom of your being …
I no longer know that terrible ecstasy of mere existence
When to draw a breath is a voluptuous miracle,
And such a swim of beauty pours over the brain
That only song is vent and release …
But I knew it then …
Did I say the days were happy?
They, too, held their anguish … anguish of desire and fear …
Though I loved the woods, could I venture into them alone?
Were there not chimerical beasts? Were there not snakes?
I think I was afraid of my shadow in those days …
I think the Dark Presence was always near me, whispering, “James, James, James, you are going to die” …
Always, I could love life so, because I hated death so …
I hated the abyss on which I walked …
I accused creation of treachery and malicious trickery
So to bring me to life, to offer me such a feast of beauty and joy,
To fill me with immortal delights, with loves and powers,
And then to stand back of me like a shadow tarnishing all,
Poisoning the sun and earth and the air,
Sickening my body,
Threatening to snatch me into nothingness without preparation or warning …
Every mouthful might be my last, every joy might be cut in career;
I was defenceless, hopeless, lost and alone …
And nobody bothered his head about it!
Every one else went gaily along as if he were an immortal!
My neighbours were godlike in their unconscious sufficiency!
Some of them even loved to go to bed and to go to sleep …
What was I, so unlike them, a stranger, a coward, a despicable baby?
Or did I know, and they didn't? Was it mine alone, this ghastly secret of death?
Did I say I loved life and hated death?
Ah, not so, not so …
Really, I didn't know it, but I was a lover of death …
It is the Walts who love life; who plunge like swimmers into the sea of the roaring streets,
Who transform with immediate love the shattered and squalid slums,
Who take in their arms the roughs and cripples and monsters of the world,
Who hear in noise the music of the marching race,
And in confusion see the God at work …
Not I! not I!
Somewhere midway between life and death was the garden I was seeking …
A garden wrought all of the wonder and beauty of the earth,
Wrought of the images of mountains, meadows and cities,
And images of people,
And in the heart of it the Belovèd …
And there I should wander and with a magic wand raise new civilizations,
Build and break empires, set armies a-clash in smoky battles,
Anoint the gods and set the dusk upon them …
Sit at my ease and watch the light-draped maidens dance …
I would be Aladdin …
I would be the God of the Looking-Glass World …
It was the “mirror held up to nature” … it was the world of art …
I was always the artist to my finger-tips …
Yes, I was one who hated both life and death …
I wanted to live in the safety within the mirror
Where the images of life and death blended in timeless beauty,
And there was neither the hard task, the heavy responsibility,
The sweat, the noise, the nervous tension of earth,
Nor yet the ghastly oblivion, the “nothing, nothing” of death …
What should such creatures as I do “crawling between heaven and earth”?
A widow with six children: a delicate, sensitive woman:
Americans of the middle class:
A dark and handsome family, gentle and home-loving …
Mother-hen with her chicks wandering from place to place, country and city …
But the faint stigmata of being Jews like a shadow upon them …
The Mother was the air they breathed, the doctrine they imbibed …
The quivering tentacles of her nerves were rooted in the children's hearts …
Her dark in-dwellings, her great fears, her loves and hopes,
Her passions, poignancies of experience,
Her mean health, headaches, colds, sore throats,
Those, and much else, entered the souls of her children …
Mother and I were much alike:
And yet I must be much different:
I was the eldest son, and an immense burden was laid on my shoulders …
What can I say of my father? He died when I was six …
I think of him mainly as dark and tall, with warm magnetic love,
With ringing laughter and deep-bassed singing, a vivid and brilliant person,
Passionate over his large family, a democrat and a doer;
He charms me through and through, he is strangely, lovably human,
His rough cheek rubs against mine, he smells rich of tobacco …
I am in disgrace: I am sent supperless to bed, and lie in blackness:
I am sobbing loud sobs of desolate exile, despairing guilt:
I may expect no mercy, no help, no assuagement nor healing …
My father enters softly; he lies down on the bed beside me;
He takes me in his arms …
I am soothed, quiet … I have never been so happy in all my days …
O, I love him … I have found the beloved …
Found the haven, the heaven of arms I long for …
I fall asleep on his shoulder …
Quiet and hush … it is a sunny autumn afternoon …
The four-story brown-stone house is uncannily silent …
I am a tailor: I am cutting and sewing a pair of pants for my little brother:
My aunt is there, taking my mother's place … both mother and father are sick …
My little grandmother comes in, walks softly, inaudibly by me …
She carefully pulls down the shades, making the room yellow …
I confront her: “Why do you pull down the shades, grandma?”
It is hard for her to speak: I see red around her eyes: she is crying …
She says there is too much sunlight …
Then she looks at me, hesitates, takes me by the arm,
Whispers in my ears, “James, your father is dead” …
I am proud she has told me the secret …
I go on fitting the pants on my brother: they are rather tight for him …
Two days have passed … it is morning … the house is full of miracles …
I am led down to my mother's room: she lies in bed, so pale, so thin, so poor …
Her tears flow as she kisses me …
I smell flowers—lilies, roses, violets—I shall never forget that smell …
I am taken down in the long parlour where my father always sang so darkly
“Old Black Joe,” and “Suwanee River,” and “Massa's in the Cold, Cold Ground” …
There are people there: uncles and aunts: grandpa and grandma …
There are camp-stools, and a black-cloth coffin smothered in flowers …
I am full of wonder: my aunt raises me in her arms to say good-bye to my father …
I say, “Good-bye, father” …
She says: “Promise your father you will take his place” …
I begin, “I promise,”—then I see my father …
See his dark quiet face, the eyes in sleep, the hands laid on the breast,
The black dress-suit, the stiff collar and shirt …
And now my infancy is ended …
For this is death; I have come face to face with my enemy, death …
A lightning-bolt of the inexorable truth goes slaying the babe through me and through me …
My beloved lies dead … I shall never see my father again …
Death has taken him from me …
O broken heart of a child … even now, saying this, I go blind with hot tears …
The child, held there, promising, broke in wild sobs of anguish,
And was mercifully taken away …
Servant-girls soothed me, saying, “He is an angel now,”
And religion began for me …
Like a primitive I accepted the immortality of the soul …
Thereafter, in dark hours, I shut myself in the little top-floor room,
And knelt and beseeched my father to come to me,
Poured my young love out of my heart's cup before him,
And a little found my God …
But now I must take his place: I must hurry and be a man …
Strange task for the dreamy little singer and artist!
I became immensely responsible toward my brothers and sisters,
Tried to companion my mother and share in her problems,
Grew sober, alert and grave …
And then through all the years ran this double strain:
“I must be my father,” “I must be a singer” …
The artist and man contended in me, hating each other …
Out of the conflict grew the abrupt ambition,
The dream of empire and of conquest,
Of wealth, world-power, prestige,
To be all things that my little world expected of a man …
And against it all, I wanted, not to be my father,
But to be the child encircled by my father's love …
I wanted to go from the hard weary world, the torture of existence,
The clash and dust of my brain,
Into that cell of abnegation and quiet
Where the invisible Beloved hovers,
And I should give birth to the divine child,
My inspired song, my poem, born in love …
So I wished often I could remain a child …
So I wished only to be an artist …
And so, torn as in two, at last I merged man and artist,
And out of my art made my ambitious conquering career,
Sold my love for power, converted religion into livelihood,
And gave the artist in me to be a semi-harlot of the press …
It was then I had an ancient complaint called “the dead soul,”
And knew a few brittle years of hard, bright winnings …
Had my own family, my place in the world, my appetites,
And came to the pit of cold despair …
Those were my most American days:
In those days I could celebrate America with Walt's own gusto …
But the Walts find their souls in the huge love they pour over terrible facts,
The James's only lose their souls, being more lovers of Gods, than men …
I must smile now:
I suddenly see a picture of that sober little fellow
Gravely conferring with his mother …
He is always ready to discuss things with her:
She interests him in books and pictures:
They talk practical problems together …
He is, indeed, the little father …
He compels his brothers and sisters to join his great imaginings,
His games, inventions, plays:
He bosses them around …
He begins to dream of being the father of the world …
From the very depths of his fear of the world
Springs an ardour to conquer it …
He learns about Napoleon and Lincoln and Jesus Christ …
Shall he be a soldier, a statesman, a millionaire or a saviour?
Which father shall he be?
Demosthenes the stammerer became a great orator,
Pale sickly Bonaparte held Europe in his eagle-talons,
The crude youth of Avon wrote Hamlet and King Lear,
The railsplitter sat in the White House,
The child in the manger became the redeemer of mankind …
Fearful, timorous, bossy, over-masculine, shy girlish James,
Under his weight of fears, the slave of Demon Death,
By what path should he climb to the throne of God and hurl the bearded governor from his seat?
I do not expand here:
I would sometimes stand in a dizziness and crass excitement of ambition
So great, I had rapidly to walk it off;
I could hardly at such moments live with myself …
I was already throned and crowned, high over the heads of the awe-struck multitudes,
The Earth a marble in my pocket …
And one day I was in Central Park with my mother …
(Do I dream this or is it so?)
Over the walk came swinging an old giant of pink and white,
His collar open, his flowing luminous beard blowing in the wind, his head bare,
Hat in his pendulous hand …
And she told me he had to do this because of pains in his head …
Every day he walked from one end of Central Park to the other …
He was a poet:
His name was Walt Whitman …
I see him still rounding the hill poised like a sun-god against the blue sky …
My father had an early edition of Leaves of Grass …
I looked in, shocked, repelled, attracted: a burst of health seemed to envelope me:
A sea-breeze blew from that book scattering vapours of death:
I had found my opposite—it would be years before I loved him …
For I was lulled in old sweet songs: rhymes were like lullabies in my brain …
And I remembered in adolescence away with my sister by a little wild lake
My one-volume Shakespeare, and the dream of magic that swept me away …
I could not have told what I was reading …
I could not grasp the plot, the thought, the people …
I was riding the cataracts of sheer sound, of the spheral music …
I wept, exulted, despaired over the drip of tones …
It was the same with Wagner:
My brother and I accidentally hearing Tristan and Isolde from a high gallery,
And suddenly the scarf waved and the opera house burst wide open and became the sky dense with suns,
And I rose a comet of exultant song among the audient planets …
Walt has said of himself: “Whatever that boy saw, that he became” …
It was not exactly so with me …
Whatever I saw that was great, that I seemed to become …
I had various teachers …
There was one when I was fourteen:
He taught chastity, brotherhood, social work, unselfishness …
He lived among the poor …
And he was under a relentless good man of powerful brain
Who was thinking out new religions and teaching ethics …
A Jew, this last … an intellectual Messiah …
The Messiah-dream is deep in the Jew
For he needs a Messiah …
Jesus, the Jew, out of this need was born out of Jewry:
He fulfilled the Jew in himself by overcoming the Jew …
So, through these teachers I became puritan and good,
A saint by day, a voluptuary in secret in the fearful night,
And gradually the image of Jesus came to dominate me …
Gradually I blended my Napoleon, my Lincoln, my Shakespeare, my Wagner and Jesus
Into a Messiah who should conquer and save the world through song …
Nay, more: a Messiah who should be a song …
And I? I was Mary …
No more the father of the world, but its holy mother …
The sorrowing world needing to be reborn …
It was so I became an inspired artist …
Only years later could I understand what I had been doing …
For always in the midst of failure and fear, and when I felt trampled and despairing,
I withdrew from others in violent black mood,
I withdrew into storm-cloud,
I withdrew actually from the love of mother or wife or child
Back to the love of the shadow-parent, my God,
I entered the mirror of images,
I was enclosed in the black womb of the greater self,
I lay as one dead …
And then I arose and found my courage and began to struggle,
Set up in my spirit the rhythm of love with this God,
And in a spasm of the love-act and the need of birth,
This rhythm ran with words, became the rhythm of song …
For I had made the mystic discovery:
At thirteen years, in the wood, beside a brook,
At fifteen, in longshore streets at sunset,
At nineteen, on Morningside Heights coming from college,
The mystic vision flashed open the world … I saw the God in things …
I had come over the headlands to the shore of that silver sea
Which lies in the spirit of man,
That sea which has washed the brains of all our immortals,
Whose waves, running whitely in, break songs of the ages on our human coasts,
Bring timeless wisdom and revelation. …
And I, reaching into myself in darkness of storm,
Pitiably little, a waif blown out of the world,
Became one with the Dæmon,
Became the supernatural mother,
And the terrific tide of song poured through me,
And I knew myself no mere mortal but a God,
And that my song was verily Christ …
So the defeated boy, terrified of life and of death,
The least of these, could be first;
He could in the ecstasy and agony of creation transcend mortality:
He could reach by magic the goals of ambition,
He could bring to the Earth a revelation, a religion …
How well this should have been
Had the fruit been equal to the vision and passion …
But look, here it was, the poor crude little song …
And the great world roared on unaware of the new-born Christ …
Was it then the Christ? O harrowing doubt!
Down I plunged again into the abyss of self-contempt …
I would turn from song, I would conquer the world direct,
I would be a man …
I essayed, and failed … song lured me again …
Again the storm-cloud, again the agony,
Again the triumph of music and vision …
And so I turned to song as the drunkard to whiskey …
I debauched myself with music …
I lived only for the terrible divine hours of Dionysiac madness …
Song was my comfort, my stay …
Not that there was no counter-current …
Like a drunkard, I tried to cure myself:
I was cruel in self-dicipline …
I tried ever to live the religion of my songs …
To be interested in others, to join good causes, to work among the poor,
And last, and greatest, to learn how to love …
Love? What did I love but the God with whom I became one,
The God I almost ousted like a triumphant Satan? …
I sang love, but did not love …
And yet in a way I was all love …
I was all a dream of women …
And it was because women were so beautiful, and I beauty's slave,
That I downed them, cheapened them in my heart;
I had been lost else in the whirlpool of white bodies
Where youth goes down in desire …
I saved myself, turning from love of women to love of the great God …
To the love that knows no sweat and pain of the dust in it,
No nesting, mating, breeding, drudging …
But I must love: I turned, and married …
A little boy was born. . . . I must play the father …
We were poor and penniless … I must play the man …
I warped the divine song into stories of the poor which I sold to the press …
Harsher grew the discipline, greater the need of money …
We lived, not like the poor, but comfortably and middle-class …
I must make great swollen sums from my art …
More and more I must change my writing to something bright and casual …
I must grow more popular …
And as this came about, I felt for the first time death in me …
Something was gone … some precious flame was extinguished …
I was like a hollow shell adumbrating old echoes out of a dead past …
I grew listless, sick, and turned to the comforts and sleeknesses of life …
Now I was seeking a Saviour for myself …
I that had been a Saviour, now needed one …
In death I sought for life …
New knowledge came …
My marriage broke open and showed itself for what it was,
No marriage, on either side …
I had been no husband, I had no wife …
The marriage ended … I went off to a life of lonely poverty …
And in that life, in anguish, listening, brooding,
I heard from far-off the murmur of the divine music coming like a turning tide back to me,
I heard in my depths the pure song,
The soul returned with music …
I could not question: I could only give glad tears of rejoicing and joy …
I shaped that glory as it came: I wrought my book …
You may understand it now: that book of birth …
Is this all there is to report?
Was it all abysmal weakness and monstrous egotism?
Or is there not something in the very nature of such as I that delights in exposing frailty
Where a Walt exults in himself?
Partly that:
And partly that the world wasn't made for the Hamlets, the Dantes, the Raskolnikoffs and the Poes …
Through the eyes of the world they see themselves black and base …
They must be Gods and Demons, lest they be scum among men …
But these men have also the Prince in them …
This poor James was also charming and magnetic …
A handsome lad, with face like a cherub, open and generous …
Many women and girls could yearn over him, though they felt him too much of the spirit for passionate love …
He was too modest if anything, put no one beneath him, treated all alike,
Served, waited and fetched, loved to be a teacher, romped with the children,
Read poetry aloud with a sensuous voice, very musical and rich,
Had in him some gift of soothing and cooling the fever of others …
He would lie for hours with his boys and pat them to sleep …
And he had almost a genius for friendship …
With the true friend, he was sensitive, subtle, moving on waves of understanding,
Weaving deep talk and vistas of vision …
In truth, with whomever he was at the time, he identified himself
And warmly lived inside the life of the other …
Simple people often loved him, children came running to him …
He could do excellent work also in his jobs …
Was inventive, rapid, energetic,
Was swift to success, though in the end he turned away to his singing …
He could advise much with his elders,
An excellent head for the problems of others,
Much sweetness and light in him, a certain harsh vigour at times, an Olympian detachment …
Is that enough to fill out the other side,
To see him in his varied humanity,
His good badness, his bad goodness,
Strength and weakness—
A spirit as protean as the weather, the sea,
A child of nature, born more for the moon than the sun,
One incapable of fixed conditions, of long endurances,
Charming, unstable, churned with too great emotions, intellectual, self-conscious—
The artist, finally, the artist?
Yet what is the artist?
Is he not also the strange hero of the people,
Something more than natural, a half-god creating half-worlds whose glory leads us to new worlds?
Is he not a whimsical mystery among us,
A zigzag skating fire that disturbs our comfort,
A sacrifice for the race, whereby vision dies for no people?
He is the mystic warrior in that dark abyss where the cosmic monsters play:
Baffled and beaten and overthrown he lies down in the belly of God,
Then rises, and strikes till the blood gushes and the music runs,
And like old Prometheus he brings the fire of the heavens as a torch to the race:
Prophecy he brings from the very matrix of the dark buried Wisdom,
Revelations out of life deeper than the eyes have ever seen,
And loves unimagined before …
America shuns him, cutting herself off from her own greatness:
But he comes nevertheless … he is Walt riding on top a bus, and Poe dreaming of stars in a cottage with his wife dying,
And Emerson, absent-minded, minded of the Oversoul, in Concord woods,
And Hawthorne moody in sad Puritanism,
And Mark Twain smoking his cigars in bed, sweating and groaning over Huckleberry Finn,
And giant-like tearful Dreiser, and Sandburg sitting in a newspaper office,
And Vachel Lindsay jazzing in Paradise (or is it Springfield, Illinois?),
And Masters among all souls in strange Spoon River,
And yes, even this struggling James with his great ambitions …
So I speak for the artist …
But also I speak for the multitude like myself, with equal struggles and the same yearnings,
The same sorrows, joys and lamentings,
But no gift: inarticulate, frustrated, America's victims.
Where was I in America?
Walt went through with eyes, hands, ears all leaping from him,
Grasping the bright facets of the crowds and the shows and sights,
Intensely, concretely aware of pilots and bus-men, lilacs and thrushes,
Bathing forever in the tumults and tastes of reality …
But I had to stop and look if I wanted to see anything,
Stop, and pinch myself, and strain to stare at the world about me …
I could see it well enough, if I tried to,
I could get drunk on it all, too …
I could be half-crazed with the teasing of a line, a colour, the glance of a face,
Trying to set it down in words …
I could exult in crowds, in the sunrise, and moon on waters …
But this came through discipline …
My natural way was to go through crowded streets blind to everything,
Lost in my worrying dream …
I remember in early manhood how I hated America with a great hate…
Hated the sordid noon-streets, ugly with brick and dirt,
Filthy with people …
How I lived in a Settlement House among the poor, and never saw the poor except by holding my nose …
Was as naturally an aristocrat as Walt was a democrat,
And only came to a passion for human causes
Through a great drenching in Lincoln, John Brown and Whitman …
Why record oneself like this?
Because the Great Society will have to come down from all to each:
Each, to be more than himself, must first be himself.
Out of what we are, and not out of slogans and manifestoes and creeds, may we truly live together …
Walt has recorded the children of the sun: they are many …
I would record the children of the moon: they are very many …
We may only reveal our kind through revealing ourselves …
America is not alone a Walt, and a Franklin, and a Lincoln,
It is also a Poe, a Hawthorne: it is also I.
Art has always revealed man to man,
But we are done with the standard man, the abstract hero …
Today the individual must reveal his own self
If he would hold the mirror up to nature …
I say to my kind: Let us dare to be what we are,
Let us cease to play we are opposites of our natures,
Let us not dream we can follow a Walt down the dust of the open road,
Let us not try to be Abraham Lincolns,
Let us not mask ourselves with the masks of the great lovers:
But let us seek height inwardly, through our natural love,
Love libraries and laboratories,
Find our true friends and true gods,
Follow the devil of our dreams,
Seek freedom in our own way,
Make our lives unique gifts of power, character, works,
Give to America, which has had the sun,
Also the moon and the cloud-daubed stars …
We must strike free of tradition'd America, however our blood sings with it,
Strike free even of our sun-gods, Walt and Abraham,
Strike free to be ourselves, lest we lose ourselves and be nothing …
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