Colors of Life Part 6

Ice is marching down the river, Gaily out to sea!

Sunbeams o'er the snow-hills quiver, Setting torrents free!

Yellow are the water-willows, Yellow clouds are they, Rising where the laden billows Swell along their way!

Arrows of the sun are flying!

Winter flees the light, And his chilly horn is sighing All the moisty night!

Lovers of the balmy weather, Lovers of the sun!

Drifts and duty melt together-- Get your labors done!

Ice is marching down the river, Gaily out to sea!

Sing the healthy-hearted ever, Spring is liberty!

DAISIES

Daisies, daisies, all surprise!

Open wide your sunny eyes!

See the linnet on the wing; See the crimson feather!

See the life in every thing, Sun, and wind, and weather!

Shadow of the pa.s.ser-by, Bare-foot skipping over, Meadow where the heifers lie, b.u.t.ter-cup, and clover!

All is vivid, all is real, All is high surprising!

Ye are pure to see and feel; Ye the gift are prizing Men and G.o.ds would perish for-- G.o.ds with all their thunder!-- Could they have the thing ye are, Everlasting wonder!

BOBOLINK

Bright little bird with a downward wing, How many birds within you sing?

Two or three at the least it seems, Overflowing golden streams.

If I could warble on a wing so strong, Filling five acres full of song,

I'd never sit on the grey rail fence, I'd never utter a word of sense,

I'd float forever in a light blue sky, Uttering joy to the pa.s.sers-by!

DIOGENES

A hut, and a tree, And a hill for me, And a piece of a weedy meadow.

I'll ask no thing, Of G.o.d or King, But to clear away His shadow.

EARLIER POEMS

EARLIER POEMS

A PREFACE ABOUT THEIR PHILOSOPHY

Most of the friends who read the volume from which these poems are selected, wanted to ask me what I meant by one of the t.i.tles, "The Thought of Protagoras." And I meant so much--I meant to convey in that phrase the hue of the philosophic background upon which the colors of my life are drawn--that since I failed, I venture to enlarge its meaning here with a word of confession.

An att.i.tude that might be called affirmative scepticism is native to my mind, and underlies every impulse that I have to portray the universal character of life and truth. We seek among all our experiences for some absolute and steadfast value by which, or toward which, we may guide ourselves, but there is no absolute value except life itself, the having of experiences. And among all our opinions we seek for an objective and eternal truth, but nothing is eternally true except the variety of opinions. Intermittently throughout the whole history of western, and I suppose of eastern thought, this mood has arisen. It was the mood of Protagoras, and of that Protagorean vein in Plato which is the height of ancient wisdom. It arose again, after a period of bright-minded investigation and formulation of "isms," in s.e.xtus Empiricus and the little group of Alexandrian scientists--the last light to go out in the darkness of the reign of saints and theologies. Again, after those ages of sombre and oppressive faith under the roof of the cathedral, it appeared in the great Montaigne. The writings of Montaigne arrive in history with a bold and tranquil flavor of delight in free meditation, as though the too Sunday-serious world had at last made up its mind to escape from church and go fishing. It is a reverent Sabbath holiday in human thought. Almost immediately, however, the insane pa.s.sion of belief recurs. Descartes' attempt at a surgery of doubt is only the pathetic opening of s.p.a.ce for new and enormous growths of the old substance.

Spinoza follows him, the G.o.d-intoxicated man, and Leibnitz and other monumental believers. And then David Hume quietly prepares, and once more offers to mankind, in his clear, humble and n.o.ble enquiry about Human Understanding, the sceptic wisdom, the moral equilibrium, that would save its health and reason. But Kant and Hegel and those mountainous Germans, the giants of soul-vapor, overwhelming again with their rationalizations of primitive egotism, send all the world to the mad-house of metaphysical conviction. And from this we are now again issuing awakened--for the fifth time. And today the awakener is no individual. The awakener is science--empirical science turning its brave eyes upon man, its maker, to reveal the origin and destroy the excessive pretensions of his thoughts. And so once again the sanity of the world has been saved--or so at least it seems to one whose intellectual home is in these ages of sacred doubt.

Thoughts that are abstract logically, are, psychologically, concrete things. General ideas are specific occurrences. They are occurrences in an individual mind, reflecting perhaps a material disturbance in a brain. And these things and occurrences can, in the conception of science, be explained as the result of antecedent causes. They, which are the sovereign instruments of explanation, can themselves become the subject of explanation, and therein lose their impersonality and their universality which was their truth. Such, I think, is the modern counterpart of the thought of Protagoras, summarized for the ancients in his famous saying that "man is the measure of all things."

This thought used to come to my mind strongly in a seminar at Columbia University, where in a shadowy corner of the great library at sunset we gathered to read and study the writing of Spinoza. Our teacher was a scholar of philosophy with the rarest gift of sinking himself emotionally, as well as with intellect, into the metaphysical system of the philosopher he studied. He is not the one I have portrayed in my poem--that is a product of my imagination. But he seemed always so ingenuous to me, in his acceptance of the existence of realities corresponding to the vast abstractions of that philosopher of eternity, that I could not but see continually in my fancy demons of time and the concrete conspiring against him among the alleys of the book-shelves; and there came the thought of death walking straight into that chamber to annihilate the event of the individual idea--the only actual thing denoted for me by his words of portentous and childish-universal import.

In my poem I tried to make such a death portray and prove to the imagination the thought of Protagoras.

In another poem, Leif Ericson, I made the same reflection a theme of joy and a kind of pagan sermon of life. The voyage of that wonderful sailor out over the challenging blue, without knowledge and without sanction of ends, is a symbol of the adventure of individual being. It is an example to our hearts, so fond of faith and prudence, so little filled by nature with moral courage and abandon.

AT THE AQUARIUM

Serene the silver fishes glide, Stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed; As through the aged deeps of ocean, They glide with wan and wavy motion.

They have no pathway where they go, They flow like water to and fro.

They watch with never winking eyes, They watch with staring, cold surprise, The level people in the air, The people peering, peering there, Who wander also to and fro, And know not why or where they go, Yet have a wonder in their eyes, Sometimes a pale and cold surprise.

EARTH'S NIGHT

Sombre, Sombre is the night, the stars' light is dimmed With smoky exhalations of the earth, Whose ancient voice is lifted on the wind In ceaseless elegies and songs of tears.

O earth, I hear thee mourning for thy dead!

Thou art waving the long gra.s.s over thy graves; Murmuring over all thy resting children, That have run and wandered and gone down Upon thy bosom. Thou wilt mourn for him Who looketh now a moment on these stars, And in the moving boughs of this dark night Heareth the murmurous sorrow of thy heart.