Concealed beneath the ostensible life is the deep, silent, mysterious quality of life itself,
Never to be examin’d, never to be told,
The eternal life, which will not let a man ever entirely rest,
But one way or another arouses him to think, to wonder, to doubt, and often to despair.

It is a strange mixed business, this life,
What whirls of evil, bliss, and sorrow,
Love, joy, hope, aspiration, expectation, hauteur, rejection, shame, leer, envy, scorn, contempt—
Infinite, teeming, mocking life!
Like the parti-colored world itself.

What hurrying human tides, or day or night!
O heart-sick days! O nights of woe!
Amid crowded accumulations of ghastly morbidity,
Ignorance, vulgarity, rudeness, conceit, and dullness are the reigning gods,
The chief thought is of selfish indulgence,
Endless trains of the faithless jostle each other in selfish scramble, because unaccustomed to refined joy,
There is a damnable disposition to deny, to affront, the substance, the spirit, the life, the joy, of things.

Behold a secret silent loathing and despair, a depressed mind, melancholy,
Ennui—the blue devil that afflicts modern civilization,
Dreary, sickening, unmanly lassitude that, to so many, fills up and curses what ought to be the best years of their lives.
Each one mocks the others, and mocks himself or herself,
And of each one the core of life, namely happiness, is full of the rotten excrement of maggots;
What pity may we well feel for the flabby, lymphatic, half-grown, puny creatures called men and women,
Such morbid abortions, of whom earth is full!

All the scenes of life, and the workers homeward returning—
Inside of dresses and ornaments,
Inside of those wash’d and trimm’d faces, white, shaved, soft-fleshed, shrinking,
Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,
Through the streets of the cities fill’d with the foolish,
(For civilization, cities are also a great curse,)
Home to the houses of men and women,
To the shamed and angry stairs trod by sneaking footsteps,
To the dreariness of a home where indifference and hate are the Penates,
Where the weary partners come to pour out upon each other, or upon their children, the hoarded spleen of the day,
The enraged and treacherous dispositions,
And to aggravate, by recriminations, care and anxiety already too oppressive, from disappointment and despair in heartless marriage.

A thought haunts me every glimpse I get of our top-loftical phases of wealth and fashion in this country—
The lords and ladies of culture, they’re as abhorrent to me as the lords and ladies of titles.

In cities as the bells strike midnight together,
The unhealthy pleasures, extravagant dissipations of the few,
Banquets of the night where dancers to late music slide—
The bugle calls in the ballroom, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other,
With perfumes, heat, and wine, beneath the dazzling chandeliers,
Adulterous offers made, acceptances, rejections with convex lips.

Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping,
The processes of culture rapidly create a class of supercilious people acting a part,
Each one just like hundreds of the rest, a regular gentleman or lady, with a silver door-plate and a pew in church—Supercilious infidels, dull down-hearted doubters who believe in nothing.

Persons arrived at high positions appear gaunt and naked,
A drunkard’s breath, unwholesome eater’s face, venerealee’s flesh,
The flippant expression, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion,
Faces almost corpse-like, so ashy and listless,
Cased in too many cerements.
They are ill at ease, much too conscious, and far from happy,
Robbing one another of joy.

A pretty race, smartly attired, polite and bland in the parlors,
But let that man, young or old, never deceive himself with the folly that the sore stuff is hid by the cloth he wears,
Elegant dress frequently covers a sick soul,
(And our men set about to dress as gloomy as they can—mostly look like funerals, undertakers.)
The furniture of a handsome carriage may be but the trappings of misery,
Though the eye does not see, nor the hand touch, nor the nose smell, the rank odor strikes out.

A perpetual natural disguiser of herself,
Outside—fair costume, countenance smiling, form upright,
A mask concealing her face, concealing her form,
Changes and transformations every hour, every moment,
Falling upon her even when she sleeps.
Within—the mean and bandaged spirit is perpetually dissatisfied with itself,
Sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble.
No more a sonorous voice or springy step,
Words babble, hearing and touch callous,
No brain, no heart left, no magnetism of sex,
Scant of muscle, scant of love-power, eyes that vainly crave the light,
Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous,
Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination,
Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams, ashes and filth,
Death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones.

Such storms, such wrecks, such mysteries, fires, wrong, greed for wealth, religious problems, crosses,
All the woes and sad happenings of life and death—
Such a living death, which (to make a terrible but true confession) so many lead,
Uncomfortably realizing, through their middle age, the distresses and bleak impressions of death, stretched out year after year.
As death presses closer and closer, the soul rushes hither and thither,
Receiver of the issuing sickness and revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivete,
Chatterer of the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty.

Often to me those men and women pass unwittingly the true realities of life, and go toward false realities,
Sad, hasty, unwaked somnambules walking the dusk,
Alive after what custom has served them, but nothing more.
In best hours, the perception crystalline, what delusion, what a mockery, seem all these eager aims,
These politics, amours, ambitions, these prevalent business aims that fill us—
Our civilization is anyhow a morbid one.

Let crusted worldlings pay the tribute of a light laugh—
Light and empty as their own hollow hearts—
I hear secret convulsive sobs, deep half-stifled sobs,
A sound of men bow’d and moved to weeping.

What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls restrain’d by decorum,
Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of itself,
Speaking of anything else but never of itself,
No husband, no wife, no friend, no lover, trusted to hear the confession.

Snakes nest in that mouth, I hear the sibilant threat,
Its formless and wordless tongue gives out the unearthly cry,
That sad incessant refrain, shrill, fearful,
Appealing, shrieking, berating, to escape the general doom—
A wailing word is borne through the air for a moment,
Then blank and gone and still, and utterly lost.

I listen to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d,
At anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
How they mutter! a chorus of age’s complaints,
The doubt, suspicion, dread, of gradual, certain decadence of man.
Despairing cries float ceaselessly toward me—
A young woman’s voice appealing to me, for comfort,
(She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window,
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome,)
A young man’s voice, Shall I not escape?

Some suicide’s despairing cry—Away to the boundless waste, and never again return—
A shrill, not very loud cry, but fearful, and creeping into the blood like cold, polish’d steel.
The suicide went to a lonesome place with a pistol and killed himself,
I came that way and stumbled upon him,
I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair,
I note where the pistol has fallen.
A promising young fellow, 23 or so,
Such a result so soon—and from such a beginning!
Here you see a picture of a dream of despair,
The torch of youth and life quench’d in despair.
Do you suppose it was love and money combined—the cause? But the newspapers every month contain accounts of individuals, assuredly prosperous in all their pecuniary affairs, and some of them young and healthy, who in the very midst of what the poor think perfect bliss, have committed self-murder.

As I travel I see hundreds and hundreds of farms,
Looks as though the folks ought to be happy,
But I suppose they are just like all the rest—
Nor pardon find, nor balm of rest,
Nor hand of friend, nor loving face,
Nor favor comes, nor word of grace.

Ever the soul dissatisfied, wandering, yearning, inquiring,
Struggling today the same—battling the same,
Curious, tireless, with restless explorations,
With questionings, baffled, formless, feverish, with never-happy hearts.

Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!
Let others dispose of questions, I dispose of nothing,
My words are words of a questioning,
Not words of routine this song of mine, but abruptly to question,
With a barb’d tongue questioning everyone I meet,
I arouse inexplicable, unanswerable questions,
To leap beyond yet nearer bring.

A hand-mirror—hold it up sternly—see this it sends back:
Who is it? is it you? who are you?
What real happiness have you had one single hour through your whole life?
And what are you secretly guilty of all your life?
(It is vain to skulk—do you hear that mocking and laughter? do you hear the ironical echoes?)
Wherefore unsatisfied soul? and whither O mocking life? Do you know your destination?
These yearnings why are they, the something never still’d—never entirely gone?
These thoughts in the darkness why are they? Is the reason-why strangely hidden?
Would you sound below the restless ocean of the entire world?
Would you know the dissatisfaction? the urge and spur of every life? the invisible need of every seed?

Ever the puzzles of birth and death,
And what is reason? and what is love? and what is life?
Ever the same old mystery and problem, the curious whether and how,
And the puzzle of puzzles—that we call Being,
That great mystery, in the shadow of which we live and move and have our being.
Ever the old inexplicable query, the question, O me! so sad, recurring—
What good amid these, O me, O life?
What is a man anyhow? What am I? What are you?
How often I think neither I know, nor any man knows, aught of them.

We know not what the use O life—we know not why or what,
Nor know the aim, the end, nor really aught we know,
The ultimate human problem, never solving.
The baffling unknownness meets us at a certain point of our investigation of any and all things—
O if the whole world should prove indeed a sham, a suck and a sell!

NEXT: The Poet’s Doubt and Despair

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