Oh, ye gods, press me not too far—pour not my cup too full,
O my rapt verse, my call, mock me not!
Time, put spurs to thy leaden wings,
And bring on the period when my allotted time of torment here shall be fulfilled,
Speed, ye airy hours, lift me from this earthly purgatory,
Rouse up my slow belief, give me some vision of the future,
Give me for once its prophecy and joy.

I hate to think of myself as pensive, despondent, melancholy. I don’t want to figure anywhere as misanthropic, sour, doubtful, as a discourager. No man has any excuse for looking morose or cruel; he should do better. That is so important to me—to not look downcast.

Yet O my soul supreme! Know’st thou the joys of pensive thought?
Joys of the solemn musings day or night?
Joys of the solitary walk, the spirit bow’d yet proud, the suffering and the struggle, the agonistic throes, the ecstasies?
Joys of the free and lonesome heart, the tender, gloomy heart?
(Manure the fields of the heart, for it brings great crops.)

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fail,
Battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.
Did we think victory great?
So it is—but now it seems to me, when it cannot be help’d, that defeat is great,
And that death and dismay are great.

I play not marches for accepted victors only,
I play marches for conquer’d and slain persons,
To those who’ve fail’d, in aspiration vast, I’d rear laurel-cover’d monument,
High, high above the rest—
To all cut off before their time,
Possess’d by some strange spirit of fire,
Quench’d by an early death.

Vivas to those who have fail’d, and all overcome heroes,
E’en in defeat defeated not,
Aye in defeat most desperate, most glorious.
No life is a failure,
Old sailors, old soldiers, old farmers, travelers, workmen (no matter how crippled or bent,)
Enough that they’ve survived at all, long life’s unflinching ones!
Forth from their struggles, trials, fights, to have emerged at all—in that alone,
True conquerors o’er all the rest.

One’s life has its periods and periods—dark, light, dark again—spots, errors, damned foolishnesses. I have led an average human life, not too good, not too bad—just a so-so sort of life. I am not a saint—have never been guilty of setting up for a saint—neither do I feel that I am such an awful sinner.
I am not the average bad man or average good man, no. I am the average bad good man, like all human specimens, a compound of both good and evil. I enclose the heroic, and I enclose the mean and vicious—capable of all that is pure and heroic, and capable of all that is ugly and mean.

Sitting in dark days,
Lone, sulky, through the time’s thick murk looking in vain for light, for hope,
From unsuspected parts breaks forth a lightning flash, a fierce and momentary proof:
Ah poverties, wincings, and sulky retreats,
You degradations, you meannesses, you tussle with passions and appetites,
You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you smother’d ennuis!
Ah think not you finally triumph.

My real self has yet to come forth,
It shall yet stand up the soldier of ultimate victory,
It shall yet march forth o’ermastering, till all lies beneath me.
What is my life or any man’s life but a conflict with foes, the old, the incessant war?
Have former armies fail’d? then we send fresh armies, and fresh again,
Life, life an endless march, an endless army—
Ever the undiscouraged, resolute, struggling soul of man.

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, ceaselessly musing,
Venturing to explore the vacant vast surrounding, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

In my periods of trouble, when depress’d by some specially sad event, or tearing problem—when I am frustrated, worried, sleepless, lie awake thinking, thinking of things I ought not to think about at all—I get very impatient, am a little resentful, wonder if it’s all fair and square, whether the scheme after all is not doubtful.
Then I go out under the stars for the last voiceless satisfaction. I recover by centering all attention on the starry system—the orbs, globes, the vast spaces—I debouch to the steady and central, find my way back to my central thought again, my spinal conviction—the perpetual, perpetual, perpetual flux and flow—the method, inevitability, dependability of the cosmos. It excites wonder, reverence, composure—I am always rendered back to myself, I resent my resentment—am ashamed of my questions.

‘Mid the ruins pride colossal stands unshaken to the last, endurance, resolution to the last.
My three-score years of life summ’d up, and more, and past,
By any grand ideal tried, intentionless, the whole a nothing,
And haply yet some drop within God’s scheme’s ensemble—
Some wave, or part of wave, like one of yours, ye multitudinous ocean.

Thou! thou! the vital, universal, giant force resistless, sleepless, calm,
Holding humanity as in thy open hand, as some ephemeral toy,
How ill to e’er forget thee!
For I too have forgotten,
Wrapt in these little potencies of progress, politics, culture, wealth, inventions, civilization,
Have lost my recognition of your silent ever-swaying power, ye mighty, elemental throes,
Of law of you, your tides, your swell and ebb,
In which and upon which we float, and every one of us is buoy’d.

Twilight and burying ebb—I know, divine deceitful ones, your glamour’s seeming,
Yet duly by you, from you, the tide and light again,
Though I ebb’d with the ocean of life, the flow will return,
Through last of ebb and daylight waning—death and the ebb’s depletion—life, light, and the inbound tides, enclosing me the same.
And a hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence,
Others will enjoy the pouring-in of the scallop-edg’d waves of the flood-tide,
The falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

Down-hearted doubters dull and excluded,
Frivolous, sullen, moping, angry, affected, disheartened—
How the flukes splash!
How they contort, rapid as lightning, with spasms, and spouts of blood!
Ah who shall soothe these feverish children?
Who justify these restless explorations?

One of that centripetal and centrifugal gang, I turn and talk like a man leaving charges before a journey:
Be at peace bloody flukes of doubters and sullen mopers,
I know every one of you, I take my place among you as much as among any.
I do not know what you are for,
I do not know what I am for myself, nor what anything is for,
But I will search carefully for it even in being foil’d,
So possess your soul in patience—
In defeat, poverty, misconception, imprisonment, (for they too are great,)
Not doubt, not decease shall dare to lay finger upon you,
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

The interminable hordes of the ignorant and wicked are not nothing,
The perpetual successions of shallow people—the little plentiful manikins skipping around in collars and tail’d coats—are not nothing as they go,
They are positively not worms or fleas,
I am aware who they are, I acknowledge the duplicates of myself under all the scrape-lipped and pipe-legged concealments.

Features of my equals would you trick me with your creas’d and cadaverous march?
Well, you cannot trick me, I see ‘neath the rims of your haggard and mean disguises,
The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside,
I see your rounded never-erased flow,
Yourself I see, great as any, good as the best.
Splay and twist as you like, you’ll be unmuzzled, you certainly will,
The weakest and shallowest is deathless with me,
I shall look again in a score or two of ages,
And I shall meet the real landlord perfect and unharm’d, every inch as good as myself.

The sepulchre and the white linen have yielded me up,
What I do and say the same waits for them,
Just as much for us that sobbing dirge of nature,
Just as much whence we come that blare of the cloud-trumpets—
Me and mine, out of fathomless workings fermented and thrown,
Scattering for good the cloud that hung so long, that weigh’d so long upon the mind of man.
All these hearts as of fretted children shall be sooth’d,
All affection shall be fully responded to, the secret shall be told,
These heated, torn, distracted ages are to be compacted and made whole.

But the important thing to us now is the life here—the people here,
All there is in life for people is just to grow near together.

The uncertainty after all that we may be deluded,
That maybe reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That maybe identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only,
That maybe the real something has yet to be known—
To me these and the like of these are curiously answer’d by my lovers, my dear friends.

That shadow my likeness that goes to and fro seeking a livelihood, chattering, chaffering,
How often I find myself standing and looking at it where it flits,
How often I question and doubt whether that is really me.
But among my lovers and caroling these songs,
O I never doubt whether that is really me.

When he whom I love travels with me or sits a long while holding me by the hand,
I cannot answer the question of appearances or that of identity beyond the grave,
But then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom,
I walk or sit indifferent, I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has satisfied me completely .

NEXT: SELF AND SOCIETY

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