Journal

This book, when I am dead, will be
A little faint perfume of me.
People who knew me well will say,
“She really used to think that way.”
I do not write it to survive
My mortal self, but, being alive
And full of curious thoughts today,
It pleases me, somehow, to say,
“This book when I am dead will be
A little faint perfume of me.”

⨝

Thoughts come so thickly to my head
These days, and will not be gainsaid,
Almost I think I am about
To end my thinking and pass out.
I have no heart to chide a thought
That with the careful blood is bought
Of one of my last moments here,
However barren it appear,—
Wherefore respectfully I write
Such dulness as I now indite.

⨝

That need is mine which comes to each:
To speak aloud in honest speech
What doubts and dogmas have confined
The shadowy acres of his mind.

⨝

If I, making my awkward way
Among my cluttered thoughts some day,
The lost and ominous key should find
To the sealed chamber of my mind,
Would I the secret room explore
And, knowing what I know, know more?

What fearful thing might not there be
Therein, to take away from me
The remnant of my little hour?—
Which, dark though it be, is not so dour
As in that chamber might be found;
Else should I now be underground.

It might be, now I think of it,
That such a key would nicely fit
The lock which Bluebeard set to prove
The patience of his ladies’ love;
In which case, ‘twould be fairly wise
To leave it lying where it lies.

⨝

Speaking of Bluebeard, might it be
The story is a pleasantry?—
What lovely fun! There in the vault
The obedient wives,—being those at fault—
While helped to half the kingdom she
Who had the sense to use the key!

(Maeterlinck had a web to weave
Across this legend, I believe;
But did not state his point so clearly
As I have done above, not nearly.
At least, that is to say, whatever
His point may be, said spicule never
Emerges far above the troubled

Face of the deep; if I have doubled
Upon him, as a consequence,
And gleaned away his general sense,
You can’t blame me,-the wrong I do ‘im
Is, as you might say, coming to ‘im:
Who can’t speak out in black and white
Deserves to lose his copyright.)
⨝
Why am I forever saying
Words I do not mean?—and laying
Ghosts of beauties that were dear,
With a laugh, or shrug, or sneer?
Does perhaps a balance stand
Between the Devil on one hand
And God on the other, which must be gained
As often as lost, and so maintained?—
And what I love as my Own soul
I spit upon—to make me whole?

See, lest you grow too big for me,
Beauty, I prune your little tree!

⨝

I think that I would rather be
Blind than deaf; for frequently,
When birds were happy in the spring,
I’ve closed my eyes to hear them sing,
And felt the sun warm on my head,
And still could see some blue and red,
And all the things I ever saw
Remembered plain enough to draw.

But when, in order not to hear,
I’ve put a finger in each ear
At moments when I was a child,
The world stood still,—and I was wild!
‘Twas like being chased in some bad dream;
Or silence following a scream.

I think that I could easily find
My way about, if I were blind.
Not in the city, it may be;
But in the woods, and by the sea.
No memory to my ear could teach

The sound of waves along the beach;
Though, hearing them, I could have guessed
The comb that curls along the crest,
And breaks and flattens and expands
Miraculously up the sands
In rapid-crawling sudsy water,
Like a white ink-stain through a blotter.

My sight, that was the activest
Of all the senses I possessed,
Would in its time have gathered most
For memory, if itself were lost.

Now, I could very easily tell
An apple-orchard by the smell,
And in my mind’s eye see again
The rough bark blackened by the rain
And glistening, and the hardy big
Red and white blossoms on the twig.

But nothing could recall the sound
Of apples falling on the ground.
Though I should see an apple fall,
The sight of it could not recall
The sound. It would be like a stone
Into a bottomless cavern thrown,
That sends up no faint shout to tell
It reached the earth, and all is well.

I think if I should lose my eyes
My other senses all would rise
And walk beside me, bending down
To catch my brow’s uncertain frown;
And when we came to something new
Or perilous to journey through,
Would lead me kindly by the hand;
And everyone would understand.

⨝

I do believe the most of me
Floats under water; and men see
Above the wave a jagged small
Mountain of ice, and that is all.
Only the depths of other peaks

May know my substance when it speaks,
And steadfast through the grinding jam
Remain aware of what I am.
Myself, I think, shall never know
How far beneath the wave I go.

⨝

What it would be like to die…
What it would be like to lie
Knowing nothing,—the keen mind
Suddenly gone deaf and blind;
Not even knowing that it knows
Nothing at all; one must suppose
That this mind, which in its day
Mused on the mysterious way
Of stars and cancers in their courses,
On heat and light and other forces,
And through its little eye could see
A section of infinity,
Is at last—and yet, not so!—
Is not everything we know.
Is not here and is not there,
Is not earth and is not air,
Is not even a keen mind
Suddenly gone deaf and blind,
Is not any possible thing
Itself could be conjecturing;
Nor cherishes in a new TO-BE
Its little self’s integrity.

Here at last the miracle!—
The hen squeezed back into the shell,
The man crushed back into the womb
Whose wall he burst,—and plenty of room!
DEATH!—how monstrously he comes—
Outside all nature’s axioms!

“Dust to dust!”—oh, happier far
The ashes of my body are,
Since all that’s mortal of me goes
The deathless way of dew and rose!
Year by year the wasted plain
Eats its death and lives again;
And the dusty body heaves
Its death aside and puts forth leaves.
The mind, that sees its errand, must
In truth desire itself were dust.

When by-which-I-came-to-be
Shall uncreate as deftly me,
Where my irrelevant ashes lie
Write only this: THAT WHICH WAS I
NO LONGER HOLDS ITS LITTLE PLACE
AGAINST THE PUSHING LEAGUES OF SPACE.

⨝

I read with varying degrees
Of bile the sage philosophies,
Since not a man has wit to purge
His pages of the Vital Urge.
At my head when I was young
Was Monad of all Monads flung;
And in my ears like any wind
Dubito Ergo Sum was dinned.
(When a chair was not a chair

Was when nobody else was there;
And Bergson’s lump of sugar awed
My soul to see how slow it thawed!)

I, too, have mused
The sun comes up
upon the way and makes the day,
The tide goes out and makes the shore,
And many, many matters more;
And coaxed till I was out of breath
My mind to take the hurdle, Death.
I, too, have writ my little book
On Things ‘Twere Best to Overlook;
And struck a match and drawn a cork
And called a spade a salad-fork.
For men that are afraid to die
Must warm their hands before a lie;
The fire that’s built of What is Known
Will chill the marrow in the bone.

Listen to a little story:
One day in a laboratory,
Where I was set to guess and grope,
I looked into a microscope.
I saw in perfect pattern sprawl
Something that was not there at all,
Something, perhaps, being utterly
Invisible to the naked eye,
By Descartes’ doubt as all untrod
As furrows in the brain of God.
If, now, the naked eye can see
So little of the chemistry
By which itself is hale or blind,—
What, then, about the naked mind?

Think you a brain like as two peas
To any chattering chimpanzee’s,
As ’twere a nut in the cheek shall nurse
The riddle of the universe?

Have we no patience, pray, to wait
Until that somewhat out-of-date,
Unwieldy instrument, the mind,
Shall be re-modeled and refined?
Or must we still abuse and vex
Our darkness with the Vital X,
Straining, with nothing given, to scan
The old equation: What is Man?

The sage philosopher at night,
When other men are breathing light,
Out of a troubled sleep I see
Start up in bed, holding the key!—
And wrap him in his dressing-gown,
And get him up and set him down,
And write enough to ease his head,
And rub his hands, and go to bed;—
And at the window, peering through,
All this time-the Bugaboo!

⨝

I know a better way to spend
An hour, than itching on its end.
‘Tis not, as peevish Omar sang,
To swill, and let the world go hang.
But tenderly and with high mirth
To hang up garlands on the earth,
Nor chide too much the generous whim
That sensed a god and honoured him.

Whether the moon be made of cheese,
Or eaten out by some disease,
And be the earth at center hot,
But cooling in, or be it not,
This fact holds true: the mind of man
Is desolate since its day began,
Divining more than it is able
To measure with its tiny table.

Oh, children, growing up to be
Adventurers into sophistry,
Forbear, forbear to be of those
That read the root to learn the rose;
Whose thoughts are like a tugging kite,
Anchored by day, drawn in at night.

Grieve not if from the mind be loosed
A wing that comes not home to roost;
There may be garnered yet of that
An olive-branch from Ararat.

⨝

I was so afraid to die,
I walked in ague under the sky.
As sure as I fared forth alone,
There fell Death’s shadow beside my own,
There hung his whisper at my ear:
“Now I’m here!—But now I’m here!”

Thus his swift and terrible ways
Were mildew on my living days,
And Death forbore to carry off
A wretch already dead enough.

I heard him in the heavy sound
Of traffic on the shaken ground;
I saw him on the girders where
Men with hammers walled in the air;

And in the awful tunnel built
Through the shifting river silt,
Where gentlemen with polished shoes
Ride at ease and read the news,
Dry and smug, dry and smug,
Far beneath a ferry and tug
That in the fog from off the sea
Pass and whistle mournfully,
There I smelled the steamy breath
Sighing from the lungs of Death.

In the evening I would sit
In my room and think of it,—
Think of fire that suddenly
Licks the wall, and none knows why,
And from the twentieth story hurls
To the pave the factory girls;
Think of ice-bergs rocking slow
Southward from the broken flow,—
Of a sailor on the deep
Roughly shaken out of sleep
By a mountain bright and dim,
Bending green eyes down on him.

⨝

When I see my netted veins
Blue and busy, while the grains
In the little glass of ME
Tumble to eternity,—
When I feel my body’s heat
Surge beneath the icy sheet,
Body that in this same place,
With the sheet across its face,
Turned to ice inscrutably,
Will be lying soon maybe,
In my ear a voice will sigh,
“Here am I—I—I—!”
Bounding up in bed I shriek,
“Who is in this room?—Speak!”
And the clock ticks on the shelf.
And I know that Death himself
Came between the curtains there,
Laid his hand upon a chair,
Caught his image fleetingly
In the glass that mirrors me.

⨝

Once upon a time I sat
Making verses, while the cat,
Half-asleep against my knee,
Clawed a cushion purringly.
As I watched the moving claws,
Musing wisely on the cause—
Early habit ruling yet
In this droll domestic pet—
Suddenly I was aware
That a Cat, as well, was there,
Through the slits in his round eyes
Watching me without surprise;
Cat, whose purring seemed to say,
“Some day—some day—”